Nothing will ever be the same again. The coronavirus pandemic has illustrated to businesses and brands just how flawed ‘business as usual’ thinking is.
In the UK alone, we’re witnessing the trauma businesses are facing: retailers and casual dining restaurants are collapsing or contracting; great swathes of the travel sector are on the brink. Office life is on pause and working from home has meant that all businesses have had to reimagine the future of work in the short and long term.
Many of these issues were already there, but this pandemic has forced the world to confront them.
Are we to blame for our current malaise?
We had been warned: Bill Gates, the World Health Organization and other experts have been warning about the probability of a viral pandemic for years. But neither governments nor businesses felt the need to prepare. Particularly in the West we have been hooked on business-as-usual, blindly assuming normal circumstances will continue unchanged. We’ve optimised around the idea that nothing will change. Strategies such as just-in-time manufacturing are fine when things are stable, but disrupt supply chains when a crisis occurs.
The pandemic has changed consumer behaviour beyond recognition. Some aspects of our lives today may eventually return to familiar patterns of the past, but many new behaviours, phobias and beliefs are ingrained for good. But changes in consumer needs and wants have been fast-tracking for years – thanks especially to digital and technological advances. Only now the advent of Covid-19 has catalysed those needs and wants into behaviour.
Not only will we never have business as usual again, we should never have had it in the first place.
The parallel universe
Now, more than ever, companies (and governments) should consider a ‘looking glass’ approach to strategy and business resilience, running a parallel universe to think of and develop ideas that are necessary in isolation. We must think the impossible, and develop ways of operating that will guard against both the ‘known’ and the ‘unknown’ unknowns ahead.
If we accept that we all live in our own business-as-usual bubble, then we can also accept that within those bubbles we’re probably asking the wrong questions. By creating the opportunity to think beyond our accepted thinking we can begin to prepare for the worst and hope for the best. Innovation, and encouraging properly innovative thinking, is no longer a nice-to-have but is essential for survival.
Think beyond the bubble
We were in talks with one brand that wanted to employ a direct-to-consumer strategy, but decided against it because it was worried about the cannibalising effect it might have on its pre-existing channel relationships. Think of how much more resilient it would have been when Corona-19 struck and even the most tech-phobic of shoppers were forced online. According to the Office for National Statistics, by May some 33% of retail sales were made digitally.
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There are three big innovation imperatives all businesses must consider when it comes to breaking BAU thinking.
The changing consumer
D2C-shy brands should already have known that shoppers were migrating online: in 2012 the channel accounted for just 9% of UK retail sales, and ended last year at the not inconsiderable figure of 19%. The Covid-induced boost to home delivery will be sustained going forward.
The pandemic has had, and continues to have, a profound effect on how people think about and approach their lives. It has magnified issues that were already bubbling, such as the environment and equality – big issues with profound consequences that many businesses had hardly considered.
Unconscious bias
Big businesses and individuals have to become more aware of the preconceived ideas and unconscious biases that human beings have. It becomes really important to begin to think afresh about all those things that we took for granted.
Think of how the death of George Floyd rallied black communities and their allies to protest not just police brutality under the banner of #BlackLivesMatter but question every other inequality that has on consciously or not had a detrimental effect on minority people’s lives.
The new economy
This is bigger than the financial crash of 12 years ago. Billions have been pumped into the economy in a bid to shore up entire industries – rather than just a handful of banks – and attempt to keep employment levels as high as possible. This will have an effect for generations to come.
Even so, businesses continue to fail and people continue to lose their jobs. It’s the same the world over. We need to accept that how we operated before is no longer relevant.
We suffer in the west from a reliance on straightforward capitalism. It worked for a while, but now we’ve ceded the growth agenda – something this pandemic has highlighted only too well.
It’s time for industries and nations alike to consider real, sustainable innovation – innovation that challenges everything, gets to the root of how we run our lives, our businesses and our economy. How else can we expect to achieve growth or build resilience when there is no such thing as business-as-usual?
By Ben Little, Founder and Director at Fearlessly Frank
Ben Little is co-founder of innovation consultancy Fearlessly Frank. Since 2007, Fearlessly Frank has helped to concept and bring to life new product ideas and develop innovative go to market strategies for Enterprise, start-up and investment backed businesses. Recent projects include developing a new urban mobility project for Nissan, turning millions of HTC users into philanthropists and launching the category-redefining Jimmy’s Iced Coffee and disruptive insurance start-up Sherpa (both of which Fearlessly Frank co-owns alongside the founders). Ben speaks regularly on creativity and innovation and has appeared on Sky News and at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona amongst others. Prior to Fearlessly Frank, Ben served as Head of Business Development EMEA at McCann Erickson and was the Head of Special Operations at IPG-backed Boymeetsgirl.
