CAN DO Innovation Summit | Evolving your business for future threats
This year’s CAN DO Innovation Summit was a platform for business change; discussing how we can fuel an economic recovery in the wake of Covid-19 and its impact.
CAN DO was an exploration of resilience in the face of a pandemic, and a look at how to wield the tools to boost sustainable economic growth over the next year.
What the future holds post-pandemic was also high on the agenda, including Chloe Demrovsky’s talk covering how a business can ‘future-proof’ itself from potential problems.
Covid-19 reality
She began with a poignant statement to the question of what we have learned from the pandemic and our ongoing response to it: “We learned that we were all underprepared,” she said.
“The sad news is that we really should have been much more prepared. The truth is that we know better. People have been warning about pandemics for a long time.
“We’ve had recent scares that could have very easily turned into global pandemics even in the last 20 years, like SARS and MERS, so we have had ample warning that this was coming.”
And this appears to be true. Talk of the virus was already beginning to surface in December 2019, but it took the UK Government until mid-March to organise a national lockdown. By this time, the virus had taken hold.
The World Health Organisation published guidance for countries on how to manage an outbreak of a new disease in early January 2020, but Demrovsky said the virus was “one of those risks that kept being pushed to the side,” by world governments.
And now, a year on, businesses are having to deal with the fallout of mass unemployment and the prospect of economic disaster.
She believes the pandemic “shows us some of the human risk psychology, which is we are always thinking, ‘I’ll do that tomorrow, I’ll put it off’.”
As well as this, there is a tendency for organisations to believe that they would be forgiven for being unprepared as the pandemic affects the community, competitors, and customers as much as it affects them. Demrovsky said this is “dangerous thinking”.
“Not only was this a massive risk that derailed the global economy, our communities and our livelihoods, it’s also something that is going to reshape how we work, how we communicate, and what we prioritise moving forward into the future,” she commented.
Rethinking your strategy
So, businesses need to start thinking about the bigger picture. There are models that predict what a pandemic impact might be, as well as decision-makers that can implement and put a strategy in place.
Research carried out by the Disaster Recovery Institute showed that only 6% of organisations had a ‘ready to go’ pandemic specific plan before Covid-19 hit, with close to 50% saying they felt like they ‘performed very well’ when executing their plan.
However, Demrovksy believed that more can be done to come out the other side stronger and more resilient to future problems.
“First of all, you need to get the right people to the table,” she said. “It’s not always the most senior person who really understands the daily operations of your organisation.”
As well as this, a leader must name somebody as a ‘planner’. “It might not be what they do every day, you might not have a full business continuity or resilience team in house, but you can still name someone who is in charge of implementing the plan,” she said.
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It is also important to carry out risk assessments, considering the different kinds of risks that could occur that may negatively impact your business.
“Technology is also really important. I don’t know what organisation can possibly function without huge reliance on technology these days, so paying enough attention to your systems and backing up your information is really key to building a resilient organisation as well,” she said.
An important step, Demrovsky said, is that we do not fall back into the same inflexible routine we were in before the pandemic: “It is about going back and looking at your core values and thinking about whether we were really living up to those.
“What can we change? Or what could we tweak so that when we come out of this stronger, more ethical and with greater leadership moving forward into the future?”
What will happen next?
Demrovsky predicted that the pandemic is not going anywhere time soon: “We might get some degree of normalcy later in the year, but really, it’s going to be 2022 before it gets to be safer in a lot of the world. It’s going to be 2023 before it really feels normal and safe again. So bad news, but it’s a fact that we’re living with these days.”
There was concern from Demrovsky about the rising inequality that is likely to occur due to technology and other kinds of issues leading to ‘haves and have nots’. She said that is something “you really have to pay attention to within organisations”.
She said: “We used to think of pandemics as a great equaliser. What we’ve seen from this one is that the effects are not easily borne at all. Inequality is only going to get worse, and that leads to more social unrest, which we’ve already seen. And that has been very predictable.”
It is important going forward that we think about what the pandemic has shown us and what we have learned from it.
“I think, as we move into the 20s, we really do have to constantly think that the best-case scenario would be great,” Demrovsky said. “But that’s probably not the way it’s going to work out, there’s going to be something unpredictable, that happens.
“There’s going to be a shock every decade at a minimum and then we build that into our planning and into our scenarios so that we can be prepared, face the crisis with courage, and then seize the moment of opportunity that it presents.”
She continued: “Unless there’s an impetus for change, human nature is that we don’t like change, right? The practice has forced us all to change our habits.
“Now, there is an opportunity to make some of those much-needed changes. So that’s something that we can focus on that is future thinking and a little bit more optimistic.”