Precious Learnings...

This week, I had the opportunity to keynote on a great panel - “How Ministries of Finance can be a leading agent for Economies in times of crisis” - together with the Area Vice President for Microsoft Central and Eastern Europe and many great guests including Ministers of Finance who shared their experience. A lot of interesting insights and best practices were discussed: from reforms of Ministries’ operating procedures to digitalization projects such as platforms for compensation measures for households and enterprises during the crisis or platforms for full electronic books for companies and full transactions accessible by citizens remotely.

The preparation for the keynote made me reflect about the situation our Governments find themselves into, as most of us are entering a "second wave". A lot of digitalization has happened over the past 6-8 months in our governments to tackle the health and social emergencies. Despite varying degrees of reach, impact and adoption, we have seen Governments everywhere make real progress in leveraging technology to serve their citizens and businesses including rapid reforms taking place, enhanced citizens engagement and the ability to adopt an ecosystem approach to best serve citizens and businesses (public, private, academia, citizens).

During these difficult months, our Governments have gained precious learnings on how technology could best serve their interests and where the key challenges really were. The intensity and risk level of the situation have removed many "dogmas" and provided each government with a huge knowledge base - as they delivered projects in days/weeks with the impact visible to all practically in real time (vs months to years in the past) ! This is a crucial foundation for them to draft their future strategies: What projects worked? What was a recurring challenge? What processes did we/ do we need to adapt? What regulations are needed to facilitate progress? What skills are we short of? Did we have issues in data quality, accuracy, completeness or timeliness? Where did we have security gaps? Were we able to scale our services appropriately? What were the biggest risk areas? Were we able to direct our resources swiftly on the best areas of needs? Were we able to facilitate the engagement of the full country’s ecosystem? ….

Each government need now to draw on this unique, tangible experience to derive their own set of new operating principles which they need to enforce as early as possible for future decisions, implementations and procurement choices.

Our Governments now have at their disposal tools that were not necessarily available during previous pandemics such as the infrastructure to collect and process data at the necessary scale or the tools to collaborate and communicate widely, real-time. In addition, stimulus packages offer our governments additional means to make sure that these learnings are adopted and executed upon to profoundly impact for the better our countries, our citizen’s wellbeing and our business competitiveness moving forward.

I can’t help but conclude with a quote from Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO on the need to implement a learning culture, foundational pillar of a growth mindset. After such an intense an painful experience, it feels that there is no better time for this to happen with all our Government agencies throughout the world. 

Pandemics have been a catalyst for profound change throughout history and this pandemic is no different: adopting now the precious learnings obtained through troubled and painful times will set our governments in a better position to face possible future crisis and their overall missions moving forward.