Peter Hinssen, your book is SHIT *in times of COVID-19

* Showing How Innovation Thrives

Disclaimer: I have no intention to offend Peter, nor have a commercial intrest to boost the sale of a particular book, the title is just a trigger to get your attention with some truth in it…and a request for your help (see below)

Today

Since the start of the confinement due to COVID-19, management spends hours in videocalls discussing (and unfortunately re-discussing) the impact of, and how to re-act to this context no one has been confronted with before.

The obvious topics populate the agenda and are tackled with the best intentions: cash flow, customer retention, operational scale down, impact on (un-)employment, government measures, employee protection, ... It's natural, in a crisis we live in the moment for survival. Luckily some companies even look beyond their belly button and also think about what they can do for society and re-orient some of their resources for a good cause. While some may lean towards opportunistically exploiting the situation for attention or profit, others really are genuine (some examples shared earlier by Herman Toch).

Quickly every management team realizes this situation is not going to go away overnight and are moving away from re-active crisis mode into a more repeatable modus operandi for the coming weeks.

For managers that get paralyzed by the challenge at hand, no worries, there are some leaders like Stijn Vander Plaetse sharing their guidelines for all to profit from, just search for similar best practices on LinkedIN or the social network of your preference. Please, share the best in the comments.

Tomorrow

Slowly these videocalls start to tackle the question on how the company will get back to BAU (business as usual) and what the sequence of operational steps are to go live again. Let me spoil the plot: There is no BAU, or at least not as you have known it. 

Society will have moved on after a crisis like COVID-19. Consumer behaviour will have changed, companies/customers may simply have disappeared, … How many of your team are discussing "the changed tomorrow"? And how confident do they feel to predict that outcome? No one has a fortune teller right? It rather becomes a scenario planning exercise where the IF…THEN…, WHILE…. formula’s remind me more of my early days as java developer then providing comfort. The number of scenario’s a team can come up with can be quite overwhelming.

So is it useless to think about tomorrow? NO.

Let it be a trigger to review how you will operate in the future. Have (at least part of) your team define how you will create a company:

1.    that measures the change in society/market/...,

2.    that has the procedures in place to react to it and

3.   that follows up quickly on whether the actions taken are having effect and therefore should scale up or be dropped.

The good news: plenty of service companies provide free webinars introducing you to all kinds of techniques to become more Agile or Growth Hack the Future.

If you were wondering how you can keep your team occupied and motivated: suggest them to enrol to one of these free webinars of e.g. upthrust, grow-force, …and start defining your companies' approach right from home, be it surrounded by tiktok'ing teenagers. Don't hesitate to share other sources in the comments.

Small advice: don’t forget to get your IT team involved, often they are already juggling with some of these principles and they will be instrumental in making it happen.

Just stating the obvious: don’t forget today, there is no tomorrow if you can’t make it through today.

The Day After Tomorrow

Making your company ready for tomorrow may increase its chances of survival in a changed tomorrow. I’m however convinced (just like Steven Van Belleghem) that this will not be enough to guarantee success with the customers the day after tomorrow. The companies that will come out of this crisis as true winners will be those that grasp this moment, where operations may be slowing down (I know for some, the opposite is happening) to invest time and brainpower on how they will innovate. In times like these it may feel as a luxury you cannot afford, but reality is that it is a necessity you cannot deny. 

And that is why SHIT (Showing How Innovation Thrives) like Peter Hinssen’s book can give you inspiration with the many examples and the frame to start and get things moving for your organisation.

It reminds me of what Peter VYNCKE once shared on a Vlerick Marketing alumni night: “’t woa in de moment’n dat we diepst in de shit zoaten, dat we de beste idee?n an” or loosly translated: “ It’s the moments of crisis that generate the best ideas ”

 Let's agree on one thing COVID-19 is a crisis. Which books, webinars or influencers would you suggest to your team? Please share in the comments.

PS: If you are an influencer, marketing company,… check out Iris Geudens request

# Let’s make the best of this crisis.