In the past decade, Hollywood has made a mint chronicling how events like an alien invasion or the uncovering of buried sea monsters create such an existential crisis that, previously divided, acrimonious people and countries put their differences aside, join forces and unite to quell the common threat. From “Independence Day” to “Godzilla” or “Pacific Rim”, the sight of a truly global connected and cohesive Team Human really was uplifting and soul-stirring.
Sadly, that globally connected and cohesive “Team Human” appears more fiction than fact.
In fact, if your news reports echo what I’m seeing on my TV in Canada, humankind seems more intent on hoarding all the toilet paper, pushing up prices on hand sanitizer and stereotyping any person of Asian (or Iranian) heritage as a potential threat vector.
What is abundantly clear (and markedly different from a Hollywood plot line) is that in an extreme VUCA environment – like the one we’re experiencing with COVID-19 - humans typically tend to devolve rather than behave selflessly, altruistically or collaboratively,
All this, while business leaders are hastily dusting off old, or hurriedly writing new, Business Continuity Plans (BCP’s) to address the current COVID-19 threat.
I’d propose that any organization’s resilience will come down to the strength and cohesiveness of their culture, not a new list of policies and procedures spun up in the past week.
Here are five dimensions of your organization – and your organization’s culture – that seem set to be sorely challenged as this situation unfolds.
How adaptive and resilient would you say your organization is on these dimensions?
Empowerment
Remote working, either voluntarily or mandated, is a very real scenario many companies will face. Individuals working from home, possibly even tending to sick family members, while trying to keep their projects going.
How enabled and empowered are they? Do they feel they can make decisions and take initiative in the absence of management? Do they have the right tools to remain connected to their teams?
Or do they feel isolated, without the right tools and decision rights to plough on? What impact will that isolation have on workplace stress, employee burnout and employee retention?
Diversity & Inclusion
In times of crisis, mankind has historically been quick to shrink back to a tribal mentality ostracizing outsiders or “others” until the crisis passed. Some news reports suggest that tribal mentality is rearing its ugly head again.
Just as building truly diverse and inclusive organizations – starting at the C-Suite – seems to finally have begun to gather real traction, is your organization committed to accelerating the adoption of D&I? Or will you put initiatives that might upset your current leadership composition on-hold because you deem them too risky at this time?
D&I has unequivocally been shown to deepen the agility of an organization by catalyzing new thinking and new answers. In the midst of this unfolding crisis, whose impacts are yet to be fully understood, do you really want to be relying on the same old thinking to get your organization through?
Innovation
As a career marketer, I’ve seen organizations slash marketing investment at the first sign of a soft market. That, despite volumes of research showing that keeping marketing investment going actually accelerated their recovery post-recession.
I wonder if innovation initiatives will suffer the same fate as marketing budgets in the current climate.
In truth, innovation – the creation and delivery of successful new ideas, products and services – is probably one of the starkest ways to measure the cultural agility and adaptability of an organization. The ability to imagine, and then create, something new within most organizations is a herculean task and one few can manage consistently. Those that do – 3M, IDEO, Apple - typically credit their culture.
If organizations begin mothballing the parts of the organization tasked with innovation (or adapting to new market conditions) will they be able to reignite that competency in the future?
Collaboration
Organizations that run hot on meetings, volumes of Reply All emails and a daily schedule of back-2-back-2-back (to back?) meetings will find this new reality a significant challenge. If meetings are your organizations yardstick for progress and moving the peanut forward, consider what happens when those meetings because less frequent, less well-attended and significantly less face-to-face.
Again, what behaviours inside your organization will need to dramatically shift to address this reality? In particular what leadership expectations will need to be modified if your organization can’t operate beyond its current way of collaborating, meeting or making decisions.
Leadership
Not surprisingly, this dimension will be the one under the most scrutiny now – and under even more scrutiny after this current crisis dies down.
How did you act? Were you decisive or cautious? What missteps were preventable? What should you have anticipated? What bullets were you fortunate enough to dodge?
Your organization’s leadership – and that extends beyond the people deemed as leaders – face the toughest challenge in any crisis.
In this particular situation, I’d be asking:
Has your centralized command-and-control structure neutered your organization’s ability to think independently and with agility?
Is your culture defined well-enough, understood well-enough and acted on consistently enough, that it can continue to function effectively if any of the C-Suite were to fall ill?
In a previous post I recounted perhaps the most famous business leadership response to a crisis ever documented – the tainted Tylenol scandal
What I hadn’t realized was how much a role culture played in J&J’s response and how CEO James Burke’s leadership was actually an outcome of a commitment to build an adaptive (shockproof?) culture.
The lessons of that case, which are covered here, highlight that an organization may be unable to anticipate a crisis, or deftly dodge one, but their ability to weather it or even, as J&J did in 1982, emerge stronger after the crisis is a factor of the culture they’ve built, nurtured and committed to.
So, how shockproof do you believe your culture is?
And, in the spirit of uniting Team Human against this common threat, what are you willing to share with the rest of us so we too can vanquish this enemy?
NOTE - I would strongly encourage you Dear Reader to check out the excellent work that Rik Berbe and Geoff Marlow in Europe and Carolyn Swora here in Canada are doing. These are three individuals with rich expertise in culture and adaptiveness in a VUCA environment.
Stay safe.