With so much uncertainty, we are all trying to make sense of life in a COVID-19 world and what it means for our businesses today and into the future.
I’ve been working with businesses of all kinds around the world for many years. When going through tough times, such as:
- Economic challenges
- Political turmoil
- Natural disasters, or
- Any other kind of major disruption
our burning desire is for everything to get back to the way it was.
We like the reassurance of things being the way they were with some degree of predictability. And whilst they might not get back to being exactly the way they were, they will move closer to that in coming weeks and months.
But what if we don’t learn anything about our business or ourselves during this time?
The word resilience gets thrown around a lot these days, mainly because we seem to be going from one tough time to another. But what does it really mean?
To me, resilience is all about learning from the challenging times we go through, so that we are better able to survive when we encounter the same or a similar issue again at some time in the future. For those of us who have been in business for a while, nothing really surprises us. We’ve learned to ride out the ups and downs, we’ve learned to be resilient.
Yes, this is a very tough time. It’s more challenging a time than most of us have faced in the past and it came on incredibly quickly. We’ve paid a terrible human price around the world, but what can we do in our business above and beyond the daily hustle to get business back in the door?
I look around at businesses and industries all over the world as they deal with COVID-19.
- We are seeing incredible adaption and innovation as businesses that previously never imagined themselves being able to operate virtually, taking entire workforces’ home in a matter of weeks.
- We’re seeing businesses pivoting their product offerings to take advantage of the resources and skills that make the products and services that are now in demand, whilst there is no demand for their previous product or services.
My point here is simple, with all of this going on, we have an opportunity to rethink our business. What really wasn’t working before?
- What really needed to change?
- How did your business model stand up to COVID-19 related issue?
- How adaptive are you and your team in a time of massive upheaval?
- What do you want out of your business and your life now and into the future?
In other words, sure, we want things to get back to some kind of normal, but if we don’t learn from what is going on around us, we are doomed to be back in the same place again somewhere down the line.
In my opinion the opportunity that many of us in business have is to really stop and look long and hard at our business, our people, our customers, our community and ourselves – and put some deep thought into just about everything we are doing right now.
We need to question if our plan of attack is to just keep doing the same thing. Perhaps COVID-19 is the exact catalyst to build a better business in a time of upheaval and chaos.