Corona reset: what will you be doing in 18 months?

The world seems to be closing shop. Thanks to the corona virus, entire industries have come to a sudden and total halt, and those industries that don’t face an outright ban are frantically trying to scale down their operations and cut costs. A storm is coming. It’s time to batten down the hatches. Or is it?

No doubt, we’re in the middle of a global drama. In Europe, we’re beginning to understand the full horror of the situation. The Americas are right behind us and Africa is just waking up to the threat. Asia is showing that we can control the threat, but that there is a steep price to pay.

It is likely that we’re in this for the long term, possibly for 18 months or so until we achieve “herd immunity” or an effective vaccine is released. If the current lock down is effective it may be relaxed in a month or two, but if the infection rate rises again, the screws will be tightened anew to avoid overburdening the healthcare system. And when we eventually do beat Covid-19, we’ll be wondering when the next virus comes along. Let’s not kid ourselves, this isn’t a temporary disruption of life, it’s a new way of life. 

Which presents an interesting question: how will we (re)organise our lives in the coming weeks, months, even years, as a result of the viral threat? Thanks to the lock downs and social distancing rules, we are being forced to rearrange and largely digitise the way we socialise, play, work and learn.  That’s going to unleash a lot of innovation and a lot of enduring societal change.  A lot of that change could be positive.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m also feeling anxious. In Europe, things will likely get a lot worse before they start getting better. Like many of you, I’m concerned about my future. Everything has changed. A month ago, I was still organising innovation events and hackathons. It’s now illegal to organise events. 

In virus-free days. Not a good idea in 2020.

But it’s the longer-term perspective on the crisis that offers some guidance on how we should respond today. I don’t think this is a storm that we can ride out. Simply battening down the hatches won’t suffice. We need to step out on the deck and rebuild the ship while sailing through the storm. I don’t want to be naive; the world economy will likely go into recession. It is what economies do when they sense trouble. But after the knee-jerk reaction, when the dust settles and we realise the virus is still among us, we’ll have no option but to start working, learning, spending and investing again, just in a different way.

Here’s another analogy. If the world is a chess board, the virus has suddenly changed the rules of the game and given the board a good kick while at it. As players we must pick up the pieces and rethink the gameplay completely. 

I’m convinced the world will recover from this crisis. What’s totally unclear is when we’ll be free again to venture outside and in what shape we’ll be when we do eventually beat the virus. But I think it will be a different shape.

In height of the Italian corona lock down, Telecom Italia reported a 70% increase in internet traffic. Apparently that was due to quarantined kids playing Fortnite all day, but as the rest of the world follows Italy’s example and starts locking people up in their homes, we’ll likely see spikes in internet traffic all over the place (haltingly because remember, the economy is slowing down rapidly).

Thanks to the lock downs, families all over the world are now spending entire days at home, working, learning and playing on a connected screen. (I know, we’re the lucky ones. I can’t fathom the misery that will befall those who don’t have a home or connected screen.)

I suspect that this massive, enforced shift to digital won’t be a temporary shift. It will endure beyond the viral threat and rearrange practically everything in our lives.

In education, consider how Smartschool (a digital platform for schools) has almost overnight turned into a pivotal cog of the schooling infrastructure in Flanders. Together with video-based learning platforms, Smartschool is replacing the 1076 secondary schools in Flanders that currently stand empty. Now think about all those empty schools in the rest of the world, where similar shifts to digital are happening. That’s a lot of bricks being replaced by clicks. By the time the schools open again, a lot of new skills and habits will have been formed (think of all those schoolteachers suddenly taking crash courses in online learning tools). People aren’t suddenly going to unlearn these new skills and habits. Schools and universities aren’t going turn back the clock. Some things will stick. Especially if schools have to close repeatedly over an 18-month period.

Yesterday, Belgium approved the reimbursement of medical teleconsultations. Digital health innovators have been trying to get teleconsultations off the ground for years in this country, with little result. Just a month ago, I listened to someone from a leading startup accelerator explain that digital health has no future in Belgium, because our “system” can’t change. Wrong. It just needed a viral reset. The impact of this change will be huge in Belgium because it isn’t just a regulatory change. It’s a forced change of behaviour. We’ll figure out how to teleconsult effectively. We’ll all learn to use the tools. And the tools will get better. And when the viral threat has passed, the way we communicate and consult with our doctors will have changed forever.

Now consider all those empty office buildings in the world today. All those beautiful glass towers in hundreds of cities around the world. That is a lot of very expensive space sitting idle. In the meantime, the millions of locked down workers are trying to figure out how to keep things running without an office. We’re all still learning how, most of us are probably still in shock, but if the lock down period extends from days to weeks and eventually months, we’ll find a way. The shift to fully automated, “lights out” factories will accelerate. And as office workers, we’ll get smarter in the way we use existing collaboration tools and new, better tools will be developed. The old debate about whether to “let” people work from home has been brutally shut down. The way we work will change, and some of those changes will stick long after the virus has gone.  

It’s exciting to see initiatives like coronadenktank.be where an enthusiastic community of hackers and freelancers are trying to organise themselves using Slack and Trello, to quickly find practical solutions to urgent corona-related challenges (like creating blueprints for homemade face masks and finding ways to connect multiple patients on a single respiratory machine). It reminds me of Kevin Kelly’s futuristic musings in his book The Inevitable, where he imagines himself contributing to a hackathon in the near future. Quoting Kelly:

“I’m contributing to a hackathon that is engineering a collaboratively designed and crowdfunded boomerang probe to Mars, with the goal to be the first to return a few Mars rocks to Earth. Everyone, from geologists to graphic artists, is involved. Just about every high-tech co-op is contributing resources, even man-hours, because they long ago realized the best and newest tools are invented during massively collaborative endeavors like these.”

It seems to me that the current corona crisis might be the exact nudge we need to get such “massive collaborative endeavors” off the ground. Now that all meetups, conferences and physical hackathons are banned, what will those freelancers and budding entrepreneurs do? Get organised online, that’s what they’ll do. And instead of limiting things to a typical 2-day, 80-person hackathon to build a few apps, they can start thinking bigger, much bigger, because in a digital world there are no limits. 

Could a hackathon build a mission to Mars?

Kevin Kelly also talks a lot about “co-ops”, a more flexible, decentralized and largely digital organisational form that he thinks could become a viable alternative to traditional corporate enterprises. Again, it will be interesting to see where corona takes us in that regard. Think about it. If we’re all working from home, then it’s going to be harder to maintain organisational boundaries. All those fancy buildings with their corporate embellishments have kept us physically and mentally apart.

You’re clearly an ING person if you’re sitting in that imposing ING building with your fellow ING colleagues, surrounded by all that orange paraphernalia, navigating that unique ING “culture”. Your peers at BNP Paribas Fortis, with all their green trappings and own organizational culture, might as well be a different species. But working from home, those boundaries are going to be a lot harder to maintain, especially if it is going to last months. 

Two weeks ago, I visited my ING banker in an orange office. He sits in an orange office every day. Until last week. Now he sits at home, with only an orange fruit in sight. 

What remains orange is ING’s online platform, both the customer facing apps and the internal platforms for staff. The digital experience will remain clearly identifiable as ING. But how will the human part of the operation evolve once it isn’t packaged in an orange building? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think companies like ING are going to disappear, but if a viral threat continues for a longer term we may see some pretty fundamental changes in the way companies organise work, and in the formal and implicit ‘contract’ between companies and employees. 

Working from home, the differences between corporate employees and freelancers fade. No surprise really, that many members of the Coronadenktank are not freelancers but employees at companies. Some are contributing in an individual capacity; others are trying to convince their boss or colleagues to get involved.

Coronadenktank is still a small initiative and it was cobbled together in a hurry, but if we end up stuck at home for several months, it likely will grow, professionalise and start making a real impact.  And other similar initiatives will emerge. Some may even systematise into co-ops or spawn new companies. Over time, I hope we’ll find interesting new ways to collaborate and innovate online, across organisational boundaries, and at a bigger scale than we ever dreamed possible.

Finally, I’d like to argue that this is not the time to hunker down and shut the hatches. Stay indoors, absolutely, but step out virtually and innovate! Doing nothing is no option. “Weathering the storm” will simply prolong the storm.

No matter what your profession or business, try to imagine what you will be doing in a year or two, when the viral threat may or may not have passed. Imagine a world where social distancing and remote working is the new norm. How will you flourish and prosper in that type of world? And most importantly, don’t be alone. Reach out to your peers. We’re only a click away.

Photos @ unsplash.com

Family at home: Andrew Neel @andrewtneel

Space: Raphael Nogueira @phaelnogueira

References:

Gideon Lichfield (Mar 17, 2020) We’re not going back to normal. MIT Technology Review

Kelly, Kevin. The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future (p. 164). Penguin Publishing Group.