Back is NOT The Way Forward

Is COVID-19 just another pandemic that will pass, or is it an inflection point that can help humanity and the rest of the planet thrive together?

(Excerpted from a medium.com post. Read the post here.)

We must design our collective future.

Instead we want things to go “back to normal”. Listen to ourselves. Back and normal are both problematic at the very least, if not downright undesirable. Back is the past. Back is going in reverse. Back is clinging to comfort. Which is the reason why the word resilience bubbles to the top of leadership’s lexicon of change. Resilience is about bouncing back, meaning that there’s nothing bigger or better in store than what we’ve already seen in the past. (For you physics geniuses, coefficient of restitution can never be greater than 1.)

And back is UNSUSTAINABLE.

Normal is equilibrium. Normal is status quo. Normal is stable. Stable had disappeared long before #COVID-19. Remember VUCA? Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous. Eddie Obeng tells us, in his entertaining TED Talk, that the pace of change has long overtaken the pace of learning. He reminds us:

At the turn of the century the world freed itself from the clutches of linearity and became exponential.

While, on the one hand, these exponential times bring uncertainty, chaos, disorder and unpredictability, they are also times fraught with abundance. (#Abundance is a different discussion.)

Graphic: Singularity University

Shifting from scarcity to the mindset of abundance is a switch. The problem is that they cannot coexist.

>> Scarcity starts with constraints, abundance with opportunities.

>> Scarcity encourages zero-sum thinking: if I win, you lose. Abundance is about plenitude, not surplus.

>> Scarcity markets secrecy as competitive advantage, abundance champions collaboration for the greater good.

>> Licensing is scarcity thinking, open source is abundance in action.

@Salim Ismail asserts, “We know from tracking innovation across thousands of companies that disruptive innovation must be managed at the edge of the organization. As Buckminster Fuller said, “in order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete”. That means we cannot fix our societal systems from the inside. We must create new opportunities (in education, journalism, governance etc) at the edges and let those become the new gravity centre.”

“At the edges” is easier said than done. Much of the innovation in the last decade has been by companies coming at incumbents laterally—AirBNB, Uber, Netflix, GitHub are prime examples of disruption, not only of competition but also of the industry/domain itself. Airbnb’s marginal cost of adding a hotel room is almost zero, whereas a hotel chain has to build a whole new hotel. This happens similarly with Uber or Wikipedia or thousands of other such Exponential Organizations that have learnt the art of exploiting abundance.

Heal the World, Make It a Better Place …

So if back is not the way forward, what is?

Leandro Herrero explains Viral Change — “you don’t fight a behavioural epidemic from within. You create a counter-epidemic that takes over.”

It reminds us of the popular quote attributed to Einstein,

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

Perhaps it’s the combination of tools and methodologies (which is the easier part), driven by a completely new mindset that will help to create a desirable future. But more importantly, it’s using the lessons we have learnt from the #COVID-19 lockdown. Unlike the Spanish Flu, this pandemic has affected the urban middle class, largely comprising those who feed consumerism. The lockdown has allowed everybody to experience the joys of simple living and a much cleaner environment, thereby exposing our unsustainable lifestyles just preceding the pandemic. Oddly enough, it has equalised the higher echelons of society, meaning that it doesn’t matter which car you drive— all cars are standing in parking lots. Or for that matter, what luxury brands you own—you are stuck at home all the time. Or even which destination vacation you chose to go holidaying this summer—all airlines are grounded.

Whole industries have been disrupted—automotive, luxury retail, real estate, transportation, …— in turn completely destroying global supply chains which were propping up the economy till just a few months ago. The lessons are all there. Live simpler lives, don’t take from the earth what you don’t really need, move from a competitive to a collaborative style of work, work from home when you can, and a host of others. Why to go back to a normal that makes little sense to anybody except the vested interests that were feeding off our baser instincts.

How do we take control of our own destinies? In the few years preceding the pandemic, exponential technologies accelerated digital transformation initiatives against the backdrop of the 4th Industrial revolution. These technologies have been powering organisations, institutions and governments, while simultaneously disrupting them and reshaping them. “When breakthroughs become democratized and available to everyone, entrepreneurs and organizations [and governments] globally are able to use the new exponential technologies and make a difference in the world. A recent example of this was put into action in a Vietnamese fishing village. To save rising diesel fuel costs, some villagers got together and literally created a solar powered boat by laying solar panels on their boat roofs,” wrote Salim Ismail over a year back.

In 2018, Jeff Smith, co-founder of LUNAR Design (now part of McKinsey Design), and I outlined an Integral Design framework to help leaders manage change and navigate uncertainty. Combining an approach like we advocated, with the Exponential Transformation methodology, can help individuals and organisations to tide over the current crisis and go beyond. Accordingly, for organisations to evolve to next level of sustainable success, not only must leaders leverage more ‘feeling’ and ‘thinking’ dimensions of humanness, but also pay more attention to the ‘being’ dimension.

Image: ? Randy Glasbergen

Yogi Berra famously said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” That’s exactly where today’s world leaders are standing. And whichever way they go is a path of uncertainty. At the business end, everything of value is quantified. But things like #Empathy, #Creativity, #Aesthetics, #Experience…everything #Design, defy conventional metrics and measurements.

For now, it’s anybody’s guess which fork we’ll take.

We, as world citizens, have an even bigger role in making sure that the lessons we have learnt are not forgotten. The way we have collaborated and the ways in which we have come forward to help the less fortunate, are refreshing and unprecedented. We must keep the new behaviours. “New role models have risen, teaching us empathy and citizenship. In India, Sikh groups have opened langars for all, NGOs are feeding hundreds, the alumni of two elite law universities — NLSUI and Nalsar — organised transport for migrants at their own cost, and countless others are pitching in too. This new generation of young citizens that is emerging is anxious to build bridges.”?

The future is ours to see.