Beyond Coronavirus
I’ve been writing a lot lately about the new normal. The more I read about this, and the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that things will never completely revert to the way they were in early 2020.
Eventually we’ll get through this. And some parts of our life will no doubt be indistinguishable from how they were before SARS-CoV-19. But the coronavirus will leave a swath of economic, cultural, political, technological, and financial changes that will continue on long past the end of the pandemic.
Wise business leaders must begin to plan (or at least think about) how these changes will permanently impact their organizations in the future. Admittedly, that’s tough to do right now. We’re all heads down in crisis mode. But let’s not allow the tyranny of the urgent to completely distract us from long term thinking and planning.
McKinsey & Company recently published an article that addresses this in great detail. Kevin Sneader and Shubham Singhal lay out five stages that provide a path to the next normal. In a nutshell, they are:
- Resolve: Essentially, this crisis response. This is where critical “what to do now” decisions are made.
- Resilience: Near term decisions as we begin to adapt to the pandemic fallout.
- Return: Reactivating our businesses as we return to work.
- Reimagination: Looking creatively at vulnerabilities and opportunities in an effort to come back stronger than before.
- Reform: Changing business and culture to prepare for the next pandemic.
2,500 years ago, Heraclitus said “the only constant is change.” The coronavirus has forced change upon us. We have little or no control over the pandemic. But we can control our responses to the pandemic. That’s where we must focus.
Read the full McKinsey article here: Beyond coronavirus: The path to the next normal
