Covid-19 Is Not A Time To Reinvent The Wheel

Reinventing The Wheel

Businesses face challenges all the time. Business leaders face unknowns all the time. Going fast without losing control is the name of their game.

Covid-19 has taken this to a new level. We have BIGGER unknowns. And LESS time to adapt to them.

Businesses were forced to shut down. The pandemic forced their customers and clients to stay inside. There are no dates for a vaccine and there are no dates when airports around the world will open up again. And even when the vaccine is here and airports are open again – it will NOT be business a usual. We need to adapt to the “New Normal”.

It sounds bad. And it IS bad, however, such crisis is not a time to reinvent the wheel. The fact that we have bigger unknowns and less time does NOT mean we should abandon all that we have learned so far in crisis management.

Out there there are enough experts, enough technology, and enough literature on how to deal with a crisis, how to pivot a business model, how to apply design thinking, lean startup and agile methodologies to a challenge.

We just need to be more diligent in applying what we already have. Get our teams to use their creativity. Pivot the way we use technology towards the big challenges ahead. Stop playing with design sprints, lean canvas, customer journey maps, empathy maps, prototyping and truly use them to empower our staff to be intrapreneurs.

Often we used to hear the sentence “we need to unleash the power of innovation” … well there has never been a better time to do so. We used to hear “innovation practitioners should be at the heart of solving challenges”… there has never been a better time for all the innovation practitioners out there to rise to the challenge.

Reality is harsh in certain circles – yet we need to be strong, we need to be smart, we need to collaborate, we need to co-create. Together we can get out of this – without reinventing the wheel.

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