I'm Overreacting Maybe...

Monday March 23rd 2020

I hope I am proved wrong and in a few weeks you all tell me I was an idiot. That would actually make me immensely happy.

However...

The world is changing, and it may never be the same again. Over the last 2 weeks I have been working with many leaders and community members to make sense of what we are facing. As I met with people I started to sense that everyone was seeing this as a big inconvenience and that we just needed to shift to online working and continue business as usual. Hint: There is no business as usual. Most of the agile community are focussing on business continuity and offering many ways to deliver agile training. Just contact me if this is what you want as I'm happy to help.

But... The reality is business as usual is over, at least for a good while to come. Priorities have changed, and will change further in the very near future. The reality will soon start to dawn that business is not going to continue as it was, and that peoples priorities will soon shift to paying their home loans, feeding their families, and shifting from discretionary (frivolous) spending to essentials only. The Brits will remember the phrase "mend and make do", when we fix and repair rather than replace.

I work in a sector that teaches Weak Signal Detection, and even when those signals are screaming in your ear many of you choose to ignore them. This is how the 737 Max crisis happened, and how we were all caught on the hop when the Covid 19 crisis accelerated. We are all playing catchup now and we will pay a price for that. I was adding extra supplies to my pantry 6 weeks ago as I saw what was happening in Wuhan, not panic buying and hoarding, but ensuring I had essential food and medicines together with cleaning supplies and things like disposable gloves. Still the muppets in the UK all went out this weekend as if they were impervious to this virus. They were joined by equally idiotic and selfish people in Florida and across Australia. Now the UK PM is locking down the whole UK as I write this sentence. The time has come to recognize the threat we face.

Ask yourself this: Why are we racing to make as many N95 masks as possible. 3M announced today they are making 35 million a month! Numerous other suppliers are ramping up manufacturing, and other companies are repurposing their capabilities to shift from clothing to masks, from booze to sanitizer etc. The ramp up on ventilators is another weak signal. This is not just to supply and restock hospitals. This is to protect the population and to arrest the demise of our countries and communities. Ships and hotels are being repurposed as hospitals, and as I write this Madrid just announced it is repurposing an ice rink into a morgue (mortuary). This is truly horrific. What is coming is truly terrifying. We never did this for the Flu. This is NOT the flu. The President just said this flu season so far has killed 50 thousand people. 50K! So why are we panicking about Corvid 19 then? Why the mass testing? Do we do that for anything else? This is different.

We are also possibly facing a drastic economic collapse the likes we have not seen in living memory. Greater than the last recession and maybe The Great Depression. Unemployment could reach levels not seen since the last world war, with some models suggesting 30%. That's 100 million people out of work! It is truly mind numbing. Even if we have 10% job losses that still equates to 30 million jobless. Add the cost of bailing out all the greedy collapsing companies who failed to ensure their stability, and the impacts will last a generation.

A total rethinking of the global economy and the global supply chain is going to be needed as we emerge from the tatters of this catastrophe. We can no longer shove everything offshore, and outsource everything, and more worryingly outsource all accountability and responsibility blindly. We MUST change how we work, how we source, and how we support ourselves. There will be debt at eye watering levels that will ultimately lead to massive tax hikes, wages cuts, and an end to endless consumerism. Life will change. Even if we emerge from this in a few weeks the damage will be done. It took a decade to recover from the last recession and the exceptional fiscal measures we are seeing world leaders taking now go far beyond those taken at that time. Weak Signals!

So what should we be doing? What should we be offering our communities and those businesses that look to us as some sort of omniscient expert?

We Need to Change The Focus

How are businesses going to adapt and evolve and exapt (repurpose) in the aftermath of this contagion assuming it is a one and done event. How will our lives change if this is a reoccurring or seasonal event?

The focus needs to be on adaptation of how we work (behaviors), the work we do (task work), and the way we do it (tools). Endless webinars are popping up on using Zoom for video conferencing, and a cornucopia of tools for sharing content and suchlike. Great, that takes a couple of days so stop the endless debates, test the tools, and learn fast from others experiments and then allow these tools to be used. I posted a rant the other day about CISOs not allowing the use of new or different tools. They will be the first to fail! Once you understand the tools it's time to focus on how to adapt so move on fast.

Tangent: The massive NoX reduction in pollution has showed us we can solve that problem by adapting how we work. We do need to balance that with the extra demand for power as more people stay home and look at how we generate power, but these are opportunities that have empirical evidence now. Do we act on that?

How We Work

This is behaviors. Not just getting folks doing Scrum or following SAFe, but how we team, communicate, interact, share cognitions, enable team learning, develop team effectiveness, and I apologize to the agile world out there, but little in what we teach today addresses this, and I have delivered classes for the best. At best they are called complimentary practices. Scrum The Toyota Way went someway to address this, but it was not enough alone. Those that can work remotely will need to adapt to not only working in isolation, but in the way we work. Good luck with Big Room Planning on Zoom! The way we work has to change.

From my own short experiences these last few weeks it is not possible to sit in front of a laptop for 8 hours a day connected to my teammates and working as we used to do in the office. We can't just get up and gather around a whiteboard, or wander around chatting and grabbing a coffee as we used to do. I guess those that loved cubes will adapt better. Irony!

Some of us live in small apartments, and where both partners have to work we are going to have to adapt how we care for the kids as both of us are meant to be online, working! It is going to mean a rethink of how we do what we do. Rotating schedules to allow joint parenting where possible, frequent breaks, and working for shorter durations, and varying hours of work to suit these new constraints. If you thought this was only the 15 day period why have we canceled the rest of the school year?

The Work We Do

This will change, It is already changing. Companies will change their priorities. They will not be the same in a month from now as they were last month. As customers vanish and the needs of the citizens change so will the focus on what companies do. Those that cannot work remotely due to the nature of the work will find changes in hygiene and other behaviors will be mandatory. I hope we don't enter a world where we are all sending our kids to school wearing masks, but I would not be surprised at least in the coming months, unless of course we just give in and allow the virus to run its course and accept the inevitability and consequences.

The reality is of course if we go too long into lockdown and financial decline this may be our only option, and the President's briefing that I am listening to as I proof read this and add this text is suggesting the US is getting nervous and considering just this, letting the virus run its course. To quote the President "WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF". CAPS as he used caps. "AT THE END OF THE 15 DAY PERIOD, WE WILL MAKE A DECISION AS TO WHICH WAY WE WANT TO GO!" Remember in China it has taken between 3 and 4 months to start working in person again. They're all still wearing masks as they try to restart their economy. Its hard to imagine America mirroring that, but mirror it might have too.

Goldman Sachs are estimating that the US GDP could shrink by 24% in Q2, dwarfing the 10% suffered in 1958, the biggest ever. If this does continue our disposable income will all but evaporate, and the ability of any of us, including me, to work will be hindered as the budgets and opportunities also evaporate. There is no simple solution, and I urge all my peers to study how to adapt and how they will help industry beyond virtual training classes, and beyond agile training. Welcome to complex problems.

So What Do Companies Need?

Exaptation - An exaptation is a repurposing of something for a purpose other than which it was intended for. How can companies achieve this. We see this in the current crisis as textile makers start making masks, and car manufacturers supporting the manufacturing of ventilators. How will they adapt and exapt in the coming fiscal challenges? How can we help them do this? How can we equip them with capabilities and abilities to cope and emerge from these huge challenges.

Complexity Thinking - Knowing how to detect and spot weak signals before it's too late. If you are reading this wondering how you are going to cope without all the usual services, or are staring at your food pantry wondering how to stock it, you missed the weak signals.

Sensemaking - Another area you need to learn. Sensemaking includes the following characteristics: “interaction and conversation (social), clearer frames of reference (identity), relevant past experiences (retrospect), neglected details in the current environment (cues), updating of impressions that have changed (ongoing), plausible stories of what could be happening (plausibility), and actions that clarify thinking (enactment)”. Sensemaking is most effective when conducted in real-time.

Distributed Leadership - This is essential now, not just a nice to have or an idea you pay lip service too. We are now working in a distributed model, like it or not, and command and control leadership and micro management is not going to work. This has to change. We need to teach leaders how to function in these new operating models they are ill equipped and inexperienced in coping with. This is not something that can be done in meetings about meetings. We need bias towards action.

Psychological Safety - Psychologically safe environments are where team members or employees can freely express their opinions and ask questions without being ridiculed or reprimanded. The best descriptor is that team members and employees are free to be candid as long as their views and criticisms remain professional. Psychological safety eliminates a culture of fear.

Active Listening - Leadership involves listening as much as it consists of talking. Active listening is an essential leadership characteristic that can be developed. It refers to a pattern of listening that keeps you engaged with the conversation positively. It is the process of listening attentively while someone else speaks, paraphrasing and reflecting what was said, withholding judgment, or giving advice.

Teamwork Training - I do not apologize for this, but even in the offices when we are all present we struggle to get engagement and to operate in a culture of trust, and now we just sent everyone home and said "please work as normal". Er, am I the only one seeing the problem with this? I wrote in another post the other day that a Scrum Master had called me and said they had a team of 25 (another problem in itself) who all refused to use webcams and were all on mute. Daily Scrum/Stand up lasted 90 minutes! This is a behavioral problem. This is the focus we need. Yes teaching Scrum and other patterns like Kata or PDCA and similar will help, but this is not enough, and if it wasn't working in person in the offices, what makes you think it will suddenly work now!?

Human Factors and Behavioral Change - If you want to change a culture first change behavior. The UK lockdown and those in other countries and some US States are enforcing a behavioral change. The fact the citizens refused or just selfishly ignored the asks eludes to this problem. As we move into this new world of work and new way of living a focus on behaviors is crucial. We need much more focus now on changing behaviors, of leaders, managers, and team members.

Final Thoughts

This is not an exhaustive list, but is presented here to make you think out of the box, and to allow you to start thinking 'what can I do next to change the outcome'.

The world is changed. We must adapt to that change. We must change the narrative. A few Kumbaya's and holding hands reciting a mantra is not going to solve this. It's time for us to react now and start planning how to adapt to new business models. Recognize that doing the same thing over and over again will not lead to a different result. If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always gotten.

If it wasn't ideal condition before Covid 19, it certainly isn't going to be during or after Covid 19.

If we are to succeed in combatting the challenges ahead we have to change how we behave. This does not mean harsh rules and actions, it's just the opposite. This means education and coaching of how we interact with each other. Humans are complex creatures and need complex facilitation, not 2 day certificates.

Even if this all blows over and we all recover, and the drugs work and the rapid responses in the USA brings us all back online and back to some sense of normality quickly, will the rest of the world be as lucky, and will we then revert to type and forget what just happened, or will we prepare to be ready the next time, be that the return of the same virus in winter, or the next set of weak signals you miss?

The time to adapt is now. The time to evolve is now. The time to emerge better and stronger is now. The time to be ready for the 'next time' is now!

Nigel