As we cautiously emerge from beneath the shadow of COVID-19 and return to the workplace our thoughts begin to embrace the many uncertainties that confront us. More especially, how best to quickly restart our organisations in an environment where the rules are yet still mostly undefined, but likely to be very different than before and the expectations of our customers may well have changed substantially. What this pandemic has taught us is that we need to configure our organisations differently. They need to be much more agile, differentiated and yet at the same time inherently more robust. And, we need to accelerate our restart process to claim first-mover advantage in a marketplace that will very likely be much smaller, more selective, more aggressive, and very much more competitive than before. All this speaks of an organisational model that has an inherently flatter structure, distributed leadership, wider spans of individual control, devolved authorities and accountabilities, higher levels of visibility, rapid decision-making capabilities and needs to leverage its key differentiators in the eyes of its customers. Intuitively, this means the business can be continually tuned to operate at maximum effectiveness as a closely knit entity without the historical stove-pipe behaviours, tribes and process encumbrances that have existed before. It also requires a closely aligned, properly integrated people, process and technology infrastructure to help support, enable and drive it. Only through achieving this will the customer experience become truly enhanced!

Every executive running a busy organisation has, at one time or another, stared through the office window and thought “… if only I were King (or Queen) for a day and could just stop the business merry-go-round for long enough to re-shape and re-position my business it could all be so very different...” Well, probably none of us will ever be a King or a Queen. And, in any case, there is a wise old idiom we should remember which asserts that you should always “be careful what you wish for, lest it come true”. Never has this been truer than in respect of the COVID-19 pandemic. That certainly stopped the business merry-go-round for us all, in no uncertain terms. Having been on forced lock-down for several months now we have all had plenty of time to watch and reflect on the damage it has done to our industries, businesses, suppliers, customers and markets.

While there would seem to be little to thank COVID-19 for it has forced us all, as business executives, to confront an unspoken truth. Since at least the dawn of the digital era, however you want to recognise that - be it the widespread use of the internet and the development of broadband; or the creation and proliferation of connected mobile devices in our commercial and domestic lives – we have never really needed to continue working the same old way we always have. We have all succumbed to one of the most basic failings of the human condition - the unconscious bias toward the maintenance of the comfortable norm in the sense of trudging each day to the office or factory and back while comprehensively failing to rapidly grasp the competitive advantage available to us from the advances in, and convergence of, all the technologies we have invented. So, just like the Luddites[1] of the 19^th century, we must now re-consider our options lest we continue sleepwalking towards our own demise accelerated by the onset of the pandemic.

Not since the shocking events of 9/11¹ have global supply chains been so systematically and unceremoniously devastated. No one could foresee the actions that unfolded that day which, within just twenty-four hours, brought air travel to a halt, locked down countries within their own borders and brought to a virtual standstill trading in all but the most vertically integrated businesses. Fortunately, the cause was quickly identified, contained and with the ongoing acceptance of some restrictions on our personal freedoms while travelling abroad normality quickly resumed. By contrast, COVID-19 has proven itself to be a tougher enemy. It is harder to contain, has shown contempt for international boundaries, market sectors or the size of businesses it affects. To deal with its transmission the UK has been on lockdown since 23^rd March 2020. At best, for all but essential front-line workers, this has meant transferring all business operations to a “virtual world” involving aspects of self-isolation, social distancing and remote team working. In the extreme, it has meant the systematic mothballing of all business operations, temporary closure of business premises and the furloughing or in some cases complete loss of staff. Whilst devastating enough, the process of lockdown is nowhere near as complicated and difficult to navigate as that of returning a business and its supply chain to full trading status in the uncertain times of the “new normal” that now surrounds us.