Council Post: The Remote Revolution: How Our New Normal Will Give Way To Innovation

We’re living through a major humankind milestone: The remote revolution, spurred by COVID-19, has disrupted how we interact. These deep changes will reset our ways of learning, our relationships, our careers and our professions. In the midst of hardship, one silver lining is that we are highly capable of thriving during disruptive times thanks to our penchant for innovation and entrepreneurial spirit.

Humankind has seen many major events shape our existence. In the first century, water mills helped grind grains to create flour, saving time and enabling food preservation, storage and production. The bubonic plague during the 14th century caused widespread loss across Europe, but the disruption impelled people to innovate in order to navigate new challenges. The period gave way to the Renaissance, when great technological and creative advances were made. Fast forward to 1913, when Carl Bosch and Fritz Haber developed chemical fertilizers. As a result, food production accelerated drastically, allowing the population to grow to 7 billion in 100 years. All these milestones caused suffering and disrupted the ways in which humans lived, but they also created great opportunities to innovate and adapt businesses to new normals.

COVID-19 has been a disruptive agent that caught many of us off guard. This pandemic, in combination with the highly connected world, might forever reshape how we interact. For many years, we have seen businesses pushing to migrate to the cloud. And while cloud adoption has grown exponentially, I believe this could be a crystallizer that forces 100% adoption. Retailers have been trying to reinvent themselves since the rise of e-commerce, but now they must adapt to digital to survive. Universities have been introducing online classes for many years, but now they’re forced to practice mandatory distance learning.

I’ve worked with high tech companies for 14 years, and I’ve seen the rise of cloud services firsthand. So I’m no stranger to remote work, 24/7 connectivity, digital transformation and any other coined phrase about the tech industry. My initial thought was that this pandemic would mostly affect businesses, but what I failed to foresee was how it would change everything in our lives. Homeschooling, sourcing food, childcare and relationships are just some of the things that have changed drastically in the U.S. and much of the world over the last few weeks.

My daughter will be graduating this semester by taking 100% online classes, after almost four years of traditional university. She and millions of other students around the U.S. will become the first generation to graduate remotely, and perhaps the first generation to start jobs without interviewing face to face, setting up their new desks, or enjoying a welcome lunch with the peers. These changes will likely shape how her generation creates the next wave of new businesses to thrive in this new normal.

It’s certainly not as simple as everyone moving to the digital world. This remote revolution will require finding the right blend of digital and physical. Entrepreneurs will have to keep an eye out to avoid common digital transformation mistakes. The most evident of all is trying to introduce too many new applications to your business, thus hurting your team rather than helping them.

My recommendation is to consider the following things: Identify the path of least resistance. Work with your team to identify those activities that they perceive as broken and painful. Make them part of the decision. This means including your team in deciding which application or solution to build. This will increase adoption of the solution and team buy-in as you adapt to new digital processes. As well, don’t over-engineer a solution. The solution should solve for 70% of the problem. By doing this, you will be able to show progress faster and will have the flexibility to adapt the solution once your team starts using it. Finally, don’t be afraid to pull the plug. It is OK to call off an initiative when a solution is not working as intended. As a leader, you should set the right expectation that ending an initiative is not a failure as long as the team can learn from the experience.

Our new normal will force us to be creative and find that optimal combination of digital and physical. I predict that this pandemic will be followed by a creative era of innovation led by entrepreneurs around the world.