2020 - We Can't Start Again From How It Was... No Way Back!

Everything will return to the way it was before, just be patient, we will soon start again and we will finally be able to return to our comfort zone. Nothing has changed, people are always the same, it will take little time for them to go back to doing the same things, buy the usual products and react to advertising campaigns as they have always done, so why get upset if everything will be the same again very quickly?

If you think so too, don't read these pages, they could cause you a slight headache ...

THREE QUESTIONS

August 2020. We are aware. We have enough stories behind us to tell each others, more or less, how the coronavirus has radically changed our way of life. We have changed the usual routines and the consolidated way of conducting and managing family relationships, those with friends and not less, those at work. It was not our choice but an imposition dictated by urgency. We weren't ready.

Today we are well aware of how the pre-established home-work balance has changed. We were used to different spaces, to moments of detachment, situations of distance and rapprochement; these family breaks were interrupted by limiting ourselves to constant confrontation with the people around us and, we can also confess, not always easy to manage. The smart working that we dreamed of and that we had imagined, is not exactly this, at least until to date and excluding those few admirable cases of enlightened companies. 

I could tell you about people who found themselves having to work from home but without having the possibility to connect with the company, others who have had to quickly learn how to use tools such as Zoom, Skype, M. Teams; how for many it was “from tomorrow you work from home” or simply a “let's make do with the best of things”. Do you want to extend the list? We act, behave and shop differently. We are aware of how our decision-making system, influenced by the context in a decisive way, has guided our preferences by directing us to different products, products that respond to our primary needs. As human beings, without distinctions of class, caste, belonging, we have all made a leap back towards the first steps of Maslow's ladder. We are aware, of course, we should be, so we can also ask ourselves:

1 - Why do some managers still not realise that the way the business operates has changed profoundly?

2 - Why don't they think about the evolution of their customers' purchasing motivations?

3 - Why don't they project forward but prefer to remain waiting for a return to their beloved comfort zone?

I don't know how much of your time you are willing to use to answer, of mine just a little. I confess you that I don't want to go on long in pressing the keys on my computer to compose words and phrases suitable to answer these three questions, you also know, better than me, that there is this "kind" of manager. They exist, survive and occasionally become extinct. For some it will be difficult, very difficult to change pace, adapting to the new course, to cross the boundaries of their limits, while others will seize the opportunity immediately to try their hand at a sort of "new normal” as many like to call it. Exactly what will be normal tomorrow we still don't know, but we know what we need to know today to do business tomorrow.

Just for consistency, I answer the three questions:

1. Lack of curiosity and attention than that happens outside their comfort area.
2. Little or weak imagination, they live on self referentiality and past successes.
3. Inability to think of new scenarios and new model of business, they fossilised like dinosaurs.

Whatever their reason, it is unforgivable that some managers do not fully understand the reality they are experiencing! But we go further, don't you agree too?

.....

In recent months we have had the opportunity to slow down our temporal dimension, giving space to the here and now, and we have finally allowed ourselves to re-evaluate the way in which we manage the passing of hours, our relationships, our priorities, the way we which our company manages, works and moves its business.

As human beings we are very attached to ours “routines”. Let's face it clearly, for many of us change is a total stress (yes of course, luckily there is no shortage of innovative minds). The important consideration, to keep in mind and I know that you will treasure it, is that normally a change to be definitively adopted requires a prolonged time unit, at least several weeks or a few months, and this in order to generate a new “routine” able to modify the previous behavioral model and the correlated thoughts (somatic markers and cognitive bias), therefore, this is definitely our case.

We have bypassed the three months and what has changed in us, has given rise to other routines, other forms of thought, other ways of interacting, other behavioral models, that's why thinking that sooner or later, everything can return as before is fundamental wrong.

So, if, as it seems, the context created by the coronavirus will prolong its duration, given that at the moment no definitive way out is seen, we will certainly have further irreversible changes, and to think about going back to the point we were in before the pandemic, impossible. It's not just me who thinks it, you're probably thinking it too. To give you an example that involves me directly, the meetings that have confirmed me for the next few months will be still held online. 

Just recently Marco, top manager of a large Italian company, during our one2one meeting, told me that he had vigorously scold one of his agents during a video call telling him: ?If you think that everything is back to the way it was before, then you just don't understand anything!?.  How can we blame him?

CHANGE OF STEP

Now, even if this is certainly not a painless condition, it is essential to seize the opportunity, that is revealed before our eyes, to recalibrate organisational systems giving rise to new paradigms because, whether we like it or not, we are now forced to change, improve and innovate, to find more creative and effective ways to approach or reconnect with our customers. Many are already doing it ...

But let's take a step back. Didn't happen to you also to think: "Oh my God, we have to do the shopping, we could run out of food" rushing, despite the queues and the inconvenience, to the supermarket? Didn't happen to you too to feel that fear of abandonment, the fear of dying isolated and far from loves and affections?

Read more, download your free copy here: No Way Back