独家优惠奖金 100% 高达 1 BTC + 180 免费旋转

Reimagining for the new normal

A road map for the reinvention of your business in times of COVID-19.

For the challenges we face today the true value of innovation, strategic innovation, is not in adjusting your business, but a radical reinvention of what you conceive IS your business.

A cold and uncompromising evaluation of traditional innovation models should lead us to recognize that in terms of approach they are inadequate for what we are facing with the pandemic but that in terms of principles they may be the root that begins to shed light on what we must solve today. The focus and analysis of the fundamental principles of strategic innovation must be our starting point.

Understanding the principles of people-centered product and service innovation and understanding the methods to approach the realities that will define the elements of the “new normal” is essential to establish conditions that provide more certainty. It is not possible to anticipate uncertainty elimination scenarios, it never has been and much less possible today. What we require are new ways of framing what we are facing that provide us with a broad exploration of the space that defines the context of uncertainty in order to know how to approach it. From there we could be able to devise a strategy to experiment with different ways of solution quickly and orchestrated.

At the time of writing this note (April 16, 2020) more than 2 million confirmed cases of people with COVID-19 are reported, and more than 138 thousand people died from the disease. The levels of deaths and infections are increasing or alarmingly stable in multiple parts of the world and elsewhere, decreasing but with constant uncertainty about new outbreaks.

At the health level, reports of how the disease spreads allow us to understand that the crisis is not only global but that it is happening in apparent and characteristic time frames that move and locate in different latitudes. As an inaccurate, but a characteristic pattern, what we see now in the north of the American continent seems to repeat what was seen in Europe a few weeks ago and what we see there takes a pattern similar to what was happening in Asia. Clearly, the rates of contagion or deaths are not the same, and we cannot establish any precise predictive scheme, but if we can glimpse that the way in which the crisis is anticipated and managed has been better managed by various governments and authorities when understanding what that has happened elsewhere and re-frame it to the particular context.

Both in the scenario of assessment of health status and economic status of the world and of each country, we must recognize that any treatment and analysis must consider the patterns that characterize both the spread of the disease and the best practices to combat it, but also the adaptation that businesses are making in this complicated context.

We can identify at least three adaptation scenarios that, as patterns, have emerged around what businesses have done to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. These scenarios move from reactive to proactive and will clearly mark businesses that understand not only how to respond to the crisis at the moment of lockdowns (total or partial closures), but to whatever follows this stage.

Adaptation with an uncertain offer: Clearly the transport industry and in particular airlines have been strongly affected by the pandemic. The damages in this sector have led to the operations of most airlines stopping and many have also led them to suspend any growth or investment plan. It is palpable that the impossibility of traveling today means that this sector is at a crossroads in terms of its offer: on the one hand, it is desired to encourage future travel, but clearly this message cannot easily resonate with clients who may not be clear if the future offer is feasible and can be sustained by the business or if they will have the resources for that type of consumption as their sources of income are at risk.

The tension of offering services in a scenario of uncertainty where it is clearly not possible to define whether the offer is desirable by the client or sustainable by the company is shared by many other companies operating in the travel industry.

The pattern of adaptation with an uncertain offer generates proposals to clients that are somewhat forced and unnatural compared to what they would have offered a year ago. Furthermore, the offers seem inconsistent with the context and denote a rigid framework in terms of not wanting or not being able to get rid of the traditional solution scenario, the solution scenario that has defined their business. It is offered with uncertainty and the offer is received with skepticism. It is not a lack of empathy or ethics on the part of these companies. It is simply a lack of flexibility in a business that has no way of identifying other ways that make it viable. Many businesses in other productive sectors have the same restrictions and are obviously struggling with the current conditions imposed by the pandemic and the slowdown in the economy.

Adaptations with a hopeful offer: In many other areas the adaptation of the offer that businesses make to their clients consists of understanding the handling of the crisis from the perspective of an adapted scenario shaped by the hope that the change will come and the conditions may be as before. This type of adaptation does not try to force the offer into uncertainty. Instead, it is defined by a pause in the service and tries to strengthen the relationship with the client through emotional connection. The entertainment industry, in particular the cinema chains, seeing the impossibility of operating in a traditional format, have taken this position and expressed a “See you soon”.

Restaurants, hotels, and passenger transport lines have done the same. The messages that are sent are of approach with the clients to communicate breaks in the service and the hope to return to serve.

This adaptation to an offer of hope understands that the business is inoperable with traditional means and directs the offer to other channels when this is possible. However, the offer positions the service as a relationship and not as a transaction. The offer is marked by the long-term relationship that exists between customers and the organization, the relationship of customer support and the relationship of solidarity with the community are emphasized.

In many adaptation efforts with an offer of hope, the effort is focused on maintaining the relationship during the quarantine, not necessarily through other forms of consumption but through establishing communication of messages that connects the client’s mind with the need that attends the business offer. An offer that invites you to imagine future scenarios, build bridges that jump the sea of ​​uncertainty and preserve the essence of the business purpose by serving the customer. As an example, this is Kayak’s message: “We will stay home now, but it won’t be like this forever. Join us dreaming of where we will go next. Every week, find inspiring travel guides, activities, and more to help you explore the world from home.”

Adaptation with a reinvented offer: Facing reality and empowered by their mental and operational flexibility, many businesses are opting for reinvention scenarios focused on clearly identifying their purpose. Business leaders who understand their purpose well adjust the offer of their services and reinvent their business, reinvent the solution with which they serve their clients. Haute cuisine restaurants that today have become drive-thrus.

A reinvention focused on the purpose and not on the product or the service is what allows many businesses to establish ways of viability to sustain their activity in the midst of the pandemic. Although it could be argued that those adaptations are not optimal forms for the solution model that defined your business model until before COVID-19, they are certainly testimony to the seed that must exist for re-invention to be possible. A re-invention that starts from business leadership recognizing that there is a need for change, and that leaving the ego aside, bravely face the challenge focused on the purpose and change that its customers want.

How to move towards that re-invention is the subject of the following lines of this note.

There are no models, there are no models, only guides and clues to define the route map. Although we would like recipes and prescriptive formulas, the scenario that businesses face with the COVID-19 pandemic can only be faced with elements that create scenarios of certain certainty and that assumes that they are frameworks for situated action that must adjust to what comes, as it comes. Next, I present the framework of the 6Ps derived from the analysis of different sources and experiences that can shed light on the new normal.

Identifying and segmenting your market through models (archetypes) of your clients based on their needs, is achieved through an empathic cognitive approach. It is not simple empathy, the one that tries to “put yourself in someone’s shoes”. It is the kind of empathy where you seek to derive and understand the way of thinking of your clients, their intentions, their logic.

The effort to model your client as an empathy-based archetype, as a person with feelings and emotions lays the foundations that allow you to understand that regardless of your line of business or sector, you are in the business of creating vivencias, you are in the business of creating experiences through your products and services.

Finding your Why guides your business towards the problem space and frees you from temporary solutions, tied to current technology, regulatory restrictions, traditional models. No, your business is not defined by your solutions, your business is defined by the purposes of your customers. Understanding that reality opens your offer of solutions, diversifies your business in terms of the multiple lines that can serve the purpose of your clients, expands your network of partners, unties you from the restrictions of the hows and elevates you to the level of the whys.

Yes, your business requires sophisticated plans to operate the actions that allow the hows, but never blind and ignorant of your whys. Your purposes first, then your products.

Two sources to learn more about this item:
Notes on Marketing Myopia: What business are you in? No, really, what business are you in?
First Purposes, then Products: define the why before the how
Experiences in the context of the design of personal projects.

Given this scenario, the reinvention of the business must be established contemplating a multi-phase scenario, a scheme where the reinvention does not end but assumes continuous change and time frames (in weeks or months) that allow for adjustments and reinventing the solutions provided by the business for their clients, over and over, and over again.

The strong foundation of reinvention is the Purpose, what is reimagined and reinvented are the elements that give it a solution for this particular phase on the road of constant reinvention of the business, its feasibility (technology and operations) and its viability and profitability as a business.

Thinking in phases leads the business to adopt agile and flexible, lean and adaptive schemes. Forms of thought that, it must be said, are not strange in most organizations but have focused mainly on the development of products or services (eg. software, Scrum), not on strategy or re-imagining the business.

To think agile and lean in the new normal will be to apply those principles to serve the purpose of adjusting a business that has to re-imagine itself in a constantly turbulent environment. The north star is the purpose, but the tactical and operational will have to adapt to the solution that is being implemented at the moment.

Prototyping is above all an exercise in communication, an exercise in materializing a concept in one, two or three dimensions and putting it in the hands of stakeholders, clients, and users to understand their reactions and the potential of the solution.

Patterns — The clues to change will come from the identification of patterns that will reinvent the business. In a scenario where adaptation and constant change are pressing, looking for patterns and carrying out sufficient validation at the level of identifying those patterns can add pragmatism to our efforts.

In efforts to generate knowledge of any kind, theories, models, and frames of reference emerge as an induction effort. They emerge from empirical evidence that accumulates until conceptual models are established explaining regularities of a phenomenon; models that can eventually be validated through schemes that allow the power of those models to be generalized in terms of explaining the regularities not just of a small sample, but those of the whole universe of people experiencing the phenomenon.

When making an effort to validate and test the reinvention of a business, we must understand that there are no written and solid theories about what we face now. There are undoubtedly frames of reference, antecedents and a lot of history to put together initial exploration guides, but we cannot expect that this previous knowledge explains the new scenarios, not in the conditions that are lived and not with the lack of uniformity that defines the contexts. where we try to apply ourselves. Knowing what worked in other crises, in other recessions, are non-guiding reference points and certainly not prescriptive.

From the above, we can say that the search and identification of patterns, comes from analyzing in detail new ways in which customers behave, analyzing the evolution of events of reactivation of the economy, the strategies of social distancing, the steps of escalation, the cycles of closure and opening and many other scenarios of post-crisis management measures. The search for patterns that characterize these actions should lead us to a comparative analysis that allows us to conceptually identify what is common and derive lessons to support decision-making, re-imagination and subsequent reinvention of our business.

Schemes like the previous one point to the urgent need to create effort scenarios where various teams may be creating a divergent analysis of possibilities, widely varied, rich and exploratory. This does not point to a group, to a single force of thought. This points to a strategy that recognizes the essence of any well-made ideation process: we go by volume, we go by varied exploration with different levels of definition, implementation, maturity. And the above is impossible to achieve if we think about a strategy of just assigning a team of “gifted” for the effort. We need multiple exploration routes run by multiple teams of committed people who understand what it means to divergently explore a problem.

Based on the framework of the 6Ps, we can propose a road map for subsequent actions to reinvent the business and a series of key questions to determine direction and progress.

Action 0: Establish work teams to deal with the crisis, and planning ahead for the R-day (post-crisis). The following actions assume work teams focused on forward planning focused on re-invention efforts.

What is the clear strategy for remote work?
What is the plan for business continuity?
What is the supplier cooperation plan?
Do we have a customer service plan?
How many planning ahead teams do we have and who is part of those teams?

Action 1: Multiple and parallel explorations that allow modeling the customer and customer segments based on needs. Derived from this, the problem space is defined that specifies the purpose of the business (its Why) around the needs of the client and the transformative effect that he wishes to achieve in them. Derived from this effort, you can have a purpose (eg. create awareness and action on the need to save for retirement) and multiple customer profiles (archetypes) that under a framework of sub-needs and socio-demographic characterization are grouped into different segments.

What are the needs, pain points, wishes of my clients?
What segments of needs define my market?
What is our Why, what is our purpose as a business?
How do we currently achieve this purpose and serve the needs of our customers?

Action 2: Based on the staggering plans imposed by the authorities in the different geographies where the business operates, the business must identify and map the multiple phases expected to exist between opening times (controlled social distancing) and closing times (strict social distancing). That would lead the business and its collaborators to operate remotely while perhaps their clients might be experiencing the same conditions (if there is a coincidence in geography). The business must be aware of this reality and work under staggering unsynchronized phases which will be imposed in order to protect health.

What phases will define the staggering plan for our business?
What actions and adaptations will take place during the possible seasons of social distancing?
What operational and space-use changes can give us the flexibility to operate staggering and recurring stages of social distancing?

Action 3: Validations of multiple business re-invention models materialized through prototypes should be implemented so that redundant efforts can be established to speed up the identification of patterns at the level of response of the business re-invention model’s desirability, feasibility and viability, and these identifying patterns of good practice derived from a comparative analysis of similar contexts in other latitudes.

What validation techniques and methods will be used by the teams?
What will be the time frame and level of validation that we consider essential and sufficient?
What criteria will we use to saturate patterns that allow establishing appropriate levels of consistency in results and will facilitate decision-making?

Actions 1, 2 and 3 can be executed cyclically with the periodicity that demands the changes that are experienced. Without being prescriptive, what is assumed is that these actions could be executed at the beginning in ascending order (0,1, 2, 3) but later and depending on the conditions, they could require a different order.

For connoisseurs of frameworks such as Design Thinking, Service Design, and Agile Project Management, it will be clear that many of the elements, actions, and strategies proposed here are derived from these sources. This should not be surprising. The aim of these innovation models is focused on solving highly complex problems, and those good practices benefit the approach of reinventing business in the face of a situation of radical change such as that imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

What the 6Ps framework does (People, Purpose, Phases, Prototypes, Patterns & Paths) is to try to bring new elements that allow us to recognize the particular situation that the pandemic scenario may present for the reinvention of the business. The framework is presented as a flexible outline that can guide the efforts of work teams.

Charmaz, K., 2014. Constructing grounded theory. sage.

Dorte Nielsen, Sarah Thurbe (2018) Creative Connections: The Secret Tool of Innovative Minds

Fortino, Andres. (2008). A pattern language for innovation management. 415–419. 10.1109 / PICMET.2008.4599649.

Kolko, Jon (2017) Creative Clarity: A practical guide for bringing creative thinking into your company

Levitt, Theodore. “Marketing myopia.” Harvard business review. 82, no. 8/7 (2004): 138–149.

Osterwalder and Bland (2019) Testing Business Ideas: A Field Guide for Rapid Experimentation

Thomke, Stefan H. “Building A Culture of Experimentation.” Harvard Business Review 98, no. 2 (March — April 2020): 40–48.

Young, I. (2015). Practical empathy: For collaboration and creativity in your work. Rosenfeld Media.

I appreciate your opinions and comments. Share them or write to me
e-mail: victor.gonzalez@sperientia.com / twitter: @vmgyg

Add a comment

What is your view?

Send

Related posts:

Orange Unified School District

The Orange Unified School District serves approximately 28,000 students in grades kindergarten through 12th, and encompasses all or part of the cities of Anaheim, Garden Grove, Orange, Santa Ana, and…