“What’s next” happened overnight
This rapid displacement is both a wake-up call and a dress rehearsal for future challenges.
Before the pandemic everyone wanted to go digital. We knew that it was important to have a digital transformation strategy. We knew that we needed to question everything we thought we knew about our customers, and better understand how our customers thought about us. We knew that mobile is the future of everything and that combining IOT and real time communications with mobile apps, that our lives and habits would clearly change. Yet we knew that this was only the top of the second inning, and there was still time.
And then overnight everything changed.
Behavior change typically happens slowly, but the Pandemic brought upon us a sudden communal displacement that changed our behaviors significantly because we collectively experienced a new normal.
Overnight our kids went to school online and we visited our doctors using our phones. Overnight Zoom became the social standard for workouts, concerts, and all family gatherings. But moving so quickly forced us to simply adapt traditional business frameworks to an online framework.
Putting lipstick on a pig
Now we must go further. Before this crisis, we thought that we could afford to take our time with digital transformation, and we did not fully grasp its 360-degree importance. The pandemic removed our luxury of choice and time. We went from the top of the second inning to the bottom of the seventh in the blink of an eye.
The pandemic forced our customers and employees to form new habits. These new habits will define how we do business for the next decade. This is more than a simple online movement. We know now with certainty that the recovery will be digital.
2021 is our chance to reimagine our post-pandemic companies and become a company that is prepared for any new normal.
So, where do we go from here?
We know that fast beats slow and that it is time to empower our teams at the edge of our business to make decisions and act. It is time to unleash our experiment silos and create a culture of experimentation across the entire organization. It is time to truly be agile and digital so that we can engage with our customers and embrace their new habits and new ways of doing business.
2021 is our opportunity to not simply recover but to create real business transformation that fuels new customer segments and growth.
