Even as they manage the immediate crisis, every board and every CEO has started looking at how to secure their organisation's future post-COVID. With social distancing the unique feature of pandemic crisis management, digital transformation will be at the heart of the future for almost everyone. But how can organisations make digital the springboard for a new — if still uncertain — future, rather than just plastering over the cracks of the present?
It makes sense to delay the rush to digital until we've begun to understand the human challenges we face. Armed with a deeper understanding, the organisation can use digital rather than being driven by it.
If we examine how countries have managed the human challenges of the crisis, we can see three principles to help organisations focus in the next phase.
First: see everyone. In the rush to lock down, governments initially overlooked some groups — from those with mental illness to those at risk of domestic violence — subsequently introducing measures to protect them. As businesses transform, boards should ask whether legacy segmentation exercises have truly captured all the groups among customers, employees and other stakeholders. This is a time to identify and understand everyone's needs in accessing the new digital organisation. Retail banks, for example, may wish to consider whether traditional market segmentation reflects their customers' actual circumstances as the pandemic reshapes employment and income.
Second: understand the interconnections. As countries emerge from lockdown, the connections we take for granted become critical. A manufacturer cannot return to full production if employees cannot use public transport to get to work, or if their children cannot go back to school. People don't just act individually — to get a real idea of behaviour, you have to understand the interactions between customer, employee and stakeholder groups. Organisations providing transport services, for instance, need to examine how working from home combined with a gradual return to school creates entirely new travel patterns.
Third: plan for iteration. As governments and businesses prepare for the new normal, we have to admit we don't know what it will look like. So ensure that the next digital transformation is flexible enough to respond to a variety of future scenarios as people's needs and behaviours evolve. This means being able to repeat the segmentation and interconnection exercises iteratively and open-mindedly as the situation develops. The balance between physical and digital shopping, for example, is likely to shift over an extended period as health concerns decline and the desire for experiential retail returns.
Identifying who is in our ecosystem, examining the interactions and planning for an iterative approach is not just segmentation by another name. Using a combination of design thinking and systems thinking can help to understand the coming new normal — and if we can do that, we can make our transformation go beyond digital toward a holistic future we can shape for the organisation, its customers, its people and for society.