Making use of the COVID-19 experience 

Businesses need to take time to learn from the crisis

By Véronique Creissels & Tim Orr

Roman poets have a reputation for being a bit impenetrable, but Ovid once said, ‘Be patient and tough; someday this pain will be useful to you’. The point is clear – learn from your experiences.

A colleague told us that she was at a meeting recently (virtual of course) with a number of business leaders and she happen to ask them ‘have you set up a system to record all your experiences from the COVID-19 crisis?’ – her question was met with a wall of silence. But perhaps this is very understandable given the scale and speed the crisis took hold.

Businesses across the globe will have (or should have) set-up crisis management/business continuity teams to deal with the current crisis. As we come out of the worst, these groups will be busier than ever trying to deal with the immediate issues facing their organisations – issues that will be key to their future and helping re-start the global economy.

Given the challenges many will only be thinking of ‘shooting the alligators closest to the boat’. But is now not the time to actively record all the experiences, good and bad, of the last few months? Crisis management and business continuity plans are only as good as when they impact with reality and that can go badly wrong. History is littered with ineffectual and incompetent responses to crises that have resulted in irrevocable loss of reputation or at worst complete failure of businesses.

Surely now is the time to use the unprecedented crisis to review, challenge, discuss and update plans. This crisis has been unprecedented in our lifetime. It has forced us to use the old proverb ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ to a point none of us thought possible. Whole swaths of populations working from home, extraordinary use of digital tools, adaptation of business models, impact of government financial assistance, radical changes to supply chains, the list is endless and much of it could rapidly become best practice. Some of these things worked well, some not so well but there cannot be a better time to face up to the challenge of collecting all these experiences and lock in the ones which will bring benefits to build the ‘new normal’. Creating a dedicated sub-group of the crisis management/business continuity team might be the answer – populated with key stakeholders and external support (objectivity would work well here). An appointed individual within the sub-group could collate the experiences, draw out the lessons and make proposals to update plans.

Things are going to be very different when we finally say good-bye to this nasty virus – use time wisely now to help your organisation become more resilient, more adaptable and ready to deal with the challenging times ahead. As Albert Einstein once said, ‘Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow’.