Current events have focused the mind on the ability for all of us to adapt to the status quo being disrupted. Many governments, companies, even freelancers have been caught short without a plan for disruption.
Disruption though, is the new normal. Digital technology has been disrupting supply-chains and value models for a while now. From democratised access to ecommerce platforms, print-on-demand services and drop-shipping to machine learning based on enormous data sets.
Up until recently, most companies that were preparing for disruption were looking at ways that business models that have been used by companies like Amazon, Uber and AirBnB to change the power balance in an industry or market. Now the Corona Virus or COVID-19 has forced organisations and consumers alike to revisit what ‘normal’ looks like.
Of Black Swans, Probability and Impact
Some people are calling the current public health crisis a black swan event. (The person who coined this term obviously didn’t grow up in southern Australia where black swans are the norm.)
A Black Swan event is characterised by being extremely rare with severe consequences. It cannot be predicted beforehand. Black swan events can cause catastrophic damage to an economy. The only preparation is to build robust systems.
Other conditions and effects are more predictable. For example – what happens when 5G mobile data becomes commonplace? What happens if the public backlash to plastic packaging keeps growing? If your company has never considered these questions – or the questions most relevant for your market, then perhaps you should!
It’s Not too Late to Have a Plan
Scenario Planning is one technique used to analyse some of these outcomes in a framework that focuses on how likely something will happen and the impact it will have.
Something that is highly likely with a high impact should be addressed first. Conditions that have a low probability and low impact should be put further down the list of priorities.
Now that COVID-19 has happened, the scenarios all need to be revisited, probabilities and impacts recalculated. For many companies, Digital Transformation is now the only strategy for survival.
As a company that delivers Training – our business could have been badly effected, however – last year, we partnered with an Online Training platform to allow students to learn using e-learning through live, instructor led courses and on-demand programs.
A large part of our business is helping companies adapt to quickly changing market conditions, so we are seeing a sudden acceleration of ecommerce projects from companies who never saw empty malls coming.