Strategising innovation during a world-wide pandemic
By Mattia Vettorello and Boris Eisenbart
How to be innovative and support sharp decision making in unchartered territories for a sustainable future?
Acknowledging the need for creativity
The entire world is united in fighting the Covid-19 virus which comes just after a series of horrific events related to climate change that had already heavily impacted nations across the globe. Nowadays, humanity is extremely closely connected, clearly demonstrated as this virus manifests, making it easy for a pandemic to spread at an unprecedented rate. The high density of individuals living in urban communities exacerbates the chance of contagion. Moreover, convenient transcontinental travel enormously extends the reach for pathogens to spread in even the shortest amount of time, revisiting the definition of distance. Societies across the entire world are facing lockdown and draconian restrictions to complete simple daily activities. This in turn has required us to change the way we work and live.
Organisations and their respective leaders are fast-reflecting on how to move work online and adapt to the ‘new’ normal where old static systems are unlikely to cope with the high-speed demand that is required to shift to a new working paradigm. This situation is not only asking us to find a new way to work but it is also pushing us to identify new needs to live and work and radically innovate as we adapt to an unprecedented situation. There is not one clear winning solution as to how to best adapt as volatility and transformation are embracing technology, society, markets, policies, and wider systems like healthcare and education.
The ability to navigate ambiguity and define long-term developments are incredibly difficult as there are many uncertainties embedded within this context. The situation seems unsurmountable.
Organisations can act now to foster innovation through radical thoughts in order to shape what the future might be, which, in spite of being often seen by board meetings as highly uncertain and ambiguous, can provide benefit to people exactly when times are uncertain.
Scanning the landscape to explore ‘pockets of the future’
Indeed, radical innovation is risky by definition. Yet, people, organisations and governments are unclear of what is laying ahead, which emphasises the need to be creative in ever-evolving circumstances. For this, leaders across the worlds have to be proactive and see opportunities in these extreme challenges, because once we cross the line, we will need to start to live again and do business again too. Surely, for one reason or another, the global society will not be the same as this pandemic has touched us deeply.
New needs are surfacing, and more will arise amidst this global economic and humanitarian crisis. In order to understand what may await us across the line, leaders could listen and observe weak signals or what in foresight studies is called “pockets of the future”.
These ‘pockets’ can be leveraged to nurture the next innovation. This is why we need a future-thinking and forecasting approach, i.e. we need to make hypotheses about what that future market might require and develop ideas for it right now. For example, some weak signals could relate to community building, goods delivery, telehealth, innovation policies (specifically, reduced bureaucracy), climate change or governmental surveillance. We already see community centres and other civil services significantly reduce face to face contact and moving central services online, cutting back on bureaucracy at the same time, as the crisis forces them to become more efficient. These gains once made are here to stay. A good starting point to understand these pockets of the future is for leaders to conduct a STEEPLE analysis to discover at high-level how external forces are likely to shape the future, recognise new value opportunity areas and discuss it within a multidisciplinary cohort showcasing different perspectives and needs.
The acronym STEEPLE stands for Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental, Political, Legal and Ethical. Each factor can be intertwined with one another and can further influence and spark a trajectory for innovation. There are many alternative futures, not just one. We should envisage the extremes, and the ones in between. This is the best time to rationalise about what we want our society to look like when those draconian measures are revised. Looking at current circumstances, we might be delivering everything by drone — seriously — or self-driving mini grocery carts, or as a controversial example, human contact being reduced only to the family circle.
Hence, questioning how we will go about our day to day life, any significant change in the way we communicate, shop, dine, entertain, or the possibility there will be a layer of social distancing staying in our subconscious could facilitate the generation of alternative scenarios. Centrally, at present, we cannot answer all these questions as there are many unknown outcomes and uncertainties, but what we can do is indeed hypothesise different futures and how these may play out. Using the “Futures Cone” developed by Joe Voros we can place and categories different types of alternative futures as Potential, Preposterous, Possible, Plausible, Probable, Preferable, Projected and Predicted (Figure 1).
Future Thinking to support long-term vision
Future thinking is already applied in other disciplines such disaster management which shows a common thread to hypothesising what the future may be. When a disaster happens, people in disaster management start quickly with generating conceivable alternatives how the crisis and its aftermath could play out and iterate on them as uncertainties become more certain and try to proactively respond and design flexible strategies to navigate ambiguity and those intrinsic unknowns that sometime can result in an unforeseen event. Hence, a need to be dynamically adaptive is key to manage the situation. Innovation, in many ways, follows analogous patterns as new ideas have to be translated in tangible and useful solutions which requires a degree of flexibility as investments are significant, customer needs may change very quickly and perhaps new policies may further impact that very idea.
In unison with scanning and mapping the current system and interrelated elements, future thinking can support this need of generating hypotheses of what an idea may be and to envision a desirable scenario to articulate the concept within.
In supporting the generation of futures, we suggest to use the OODA Loop, schematised in Figure 2. The acronym stays for: Observe, Orient, Decide and Act and was originally designed by John Boyd in the latter half of the 20th Century for military purposes (air-to-air combat). The OODA Loop is a decision-making framework that is now more and more permeating into the business world in the context of decision-making under uncertainties, and fascinating are the disciplines that constrained and guided Boyd on the development of it: Complex Adaptive Systems, Cognitive Science, Epistemology, Evolutionary Theory, Thermodynamics, Chaos Theory, Cybernetics, and Systems Thinking. If we look at the scale of this pandemic, it is visible how several of the above-mentioned sciences are strictly relevant in the context of today.
This is a tool to quickly develop hypotheses starting from an observation of the surrounding — this supports and is also enhanced by the STEEPLE analysis — and then nose dive into future thinking and diverging ideas in order to develop solutions for those prior-articulated future scenarios. The need of developing hypotheses is not common, only in the context where the OODA loop was developed from, but it is necessary across different circumstances.
By developing alternative futures, we can make decisions now to lead differently. For example, Bill Gates advised in his 2015 TED Talk that a new pandemic would extensively impact human society. Clearly, we were not ready for it. We have a vast amount of knowledge, yet we have made some crucial errors that metaphorically drove us here. Undoubtedly, we are still tremendously vulnerable to pandemics. Our future values as a global society, our future behaviours with each other and with nature and our future ways of doing things must be different. It must be different as no one wants to experience another crisis like this one. Leaders could ask themselves the following questions to facilitate the generation of preferable futures and the new value creation:
• What are the weak signals laying there at the horizon that can shape positively our future?
• How will our behaviour change to accommodate a more sustainable life?
• How can organisations and governments lead the change?
Organisations and their design leaders could consider the use of future thinking to foster innovation through radical thoughts to shape what the future might be and ultimately to design solutions in order to remain competitive, or open new markets in this unprecedented and very volatile society. We don’t know what and how long it will take to get back to something we can call ‘normality’. We can plan for it and get ready for.
Future thinking and the ability to flexibly change trajectories are proving to be effective in the innovation realms and can support organisations navigating ambiguous and unchartered territories.
Indeed, thinking systemically and radically can help us redesign the way we work and act within our societies and assist in making effective decisions now to support the new world when the worst is over.
