I’ve been reflected a lot on the current crisis that we’re living through. Nothing quite like it in modern times!

Sadly headlines are bleak, adding pressure to an already tough climate in some sectors such as hospitality & travel. Every day I seem to read about the latest company to announce closures, redundancies & pay cuts and my LinkedIn feed is filling up with people ‘available for work’. All this despite the £Bns spent by the government on trying to smooth out the economic impact of the virus.

In August 2020 the UK’s national debt rose to over £2tn for the first time since the early 1960s! To put this in context, that’s about £65,000 for each of the ~30 million tax payers in the UK. In September 2020, the National Audit Office (NAO) is forecasting a spend of £210bn for the crisis and the end is not in sight yet! I’m already exhausted!

We’ve seen big names fall into administration already despite the various schemes supported by the government to avoid this. The ‘offline’ high street businesses were already struggling and this seems to have been the last straw on wafer thin margins…

But some businesses have thrived and flourished. Some are due to the nature of COVID-19 lockdown and the timing that has coincided with one of the hottest Spring and Summers ever in the UK. Online retailers, streaming services, online supermarkets, outdoor furniture/plants/BBQs, tech equipment suppliers have all seen a significant increase in sales.

Amazon have seen their earnings for Q2 2020 increase by 40%!

Ocado has seen a 23% increase in revenue from H1 2019 to H1 2020 while Netflix has seen an increase of 25% year on year for Q2 2020. But these were expected winners during this time. They were always online and it stands to reason that with more households turning to online services they would be the go-to companies. Other service companies servicing them were winners as well. Particularly logistics companies, cardboard box manufacturers and postal companies. They all had challenges to overcome to continue to operate with a largely work from home workforce and to ensure the mobile elements of their workforce could operate safely.

There have been some other winners as well.

Zoom has won the battle of online meetings and collaboration in the home and businesses. Teams is King of education! Both relatively unheard of products outside of the corporates who have adopted/dabbled with them. Their revenues have leaped 339% in Q2. 339%!!!!!! More than triple! Zoom has even become a verb to mean a video call much like a Dyson is still referred to as a Hoover in most households! But Webex and Google Meet has been established for a lot longer. How did Zoom do it? And how did they become a household name?

They moved VERY quickly. They showed true agility in the way they scaled and addressed customer/governmental/privacy feedback and needs of the user base. They were putting new releases out weekly and managed to do all this while scaling the back-end through a new strategic partner (Oracle). And you know what, there were VERY FEW outages. A couple of blips but all were sorted quickly and with great communication from the company including the CEO at times. We had consistent service and could rely on it. As a contrast, I used Webex extensively throughout H1 and found it suffered more outages, more slow-downs, more video drop-outs than Zoom and I personally lost trust in it.

Another winner was Microsoft Teams. Again, most consumers had never heard of it. Many corporates had adopted it for collaboration/communication but many others were still in the planning phase. Schools certainly didn’t use it at scale even though their had it included in their Office 365 licenses. In this example, it was the organisations that had to rapidly adopt/deploy Teams to support their remote working. Most companies accelerated months of planning, governance and change control to deploy it. At the school I am a governor at, we went from ‘no Teams’ to ‘all Teams’ in weeks over half term! Many of these companies have shown true Resilience!

Zoom has shown Transformer Resilience! They’ve scaled quickly to adapt to the changing environment. But to be fair, they had a product/proposition that was in demand during COVID-19.

A great example of Transformer Resilience is a printers on the industrial estate where my local Ducati garage is. They saw their business die overnight. No-one needed menus, flyers, posters, etc as their own businesses were mothballed or their clients were now digitally connected. Disaster for a business like that but they reflected over 48 hours on their skillset, their tooling, their clients and the demand and realised that they could reinvent themselves as PPE manufacturers. They reconfigured their tools and restarted business and survived!

But how could they have better anticipated this outcome? Could they have saved 48 hours and perhaps got to revenue 48 hours earlier?

Yes!

If a company is able to take the scenario planning they inevitably perform for insurance, risk management, business continuity, etc and apply them to business development and strategy, they can dovetail their survival/recovery plans into high availability and then into business transformation. One scenario, one plan, multiple outcomes with transformation paths pre-defined to get there.

The more you use common data & frameworks for BAU and ‘non-BAU’ the more you are resilient by design. The more agility you can apply to the resilience of your company.

Transformer Resilience = Resilience By Design

#OperationalResilience #Resilience #ChangeManagement #Transformation #TransformerResilience #Transformers