Coronavirus won’t change anything
How many times in the past couple of weeks have you read an article that claimed ‘Coronavirus will forever change the way we work’; ‘Coronavirus will forever change marketing’; ‘COVID-19 will change advertising forever’? In my case, it must be hundreds of times.
Businesses do not like change.
Change within a business usually requires two things – senior leadership approval and someone passionate enough to carry it out.
What does senior leadership care about or listen to? Shareholders. What do shareholders care about? Quarterly results, sales, revenue, year-on-year change and short term gains.
Would a shareholder want a business to invest time and money now for potential returns in the distant future? Maybe.
Would a shareholder want a business to implement processes or technology that has not been adopted by others? This raises the question… ‘but how do we know it will work?’
The story changes on one occasion – when something breaks. As Tom Goodwin (a man that knows a lot more about change than me) said in a podcast “Businesses would rather wait for something to fail than to try to improve it.”
If the IT systems fail and customers leave, that gives a clear indication for change. If the local supplier had a bad year and fails to deliver the goods to your warehouse (which in turn reduces your revenue), that gives a clear need for a change.
What if we find someone that is really passionate about change or technology and make them carry out the task?
Imagine you are in your 20s or 30s, you are an unstoppable idea creation machine, you are passionate about what you do and keep learning about what you could improve in the business.
Your passion gets you to slowly climb the career ladder until you finally reach the top table. The place where you can finally present all your ideas on how to change the business for the good.
Throughout all those ladder climbing years you also got lucky and now have a spouse. You also have two kids to take care of. Your paycheck has shrunk due to the mortgage for your house and your new car is depleting your wallet faster than your kids’ university fund.
Will you put your career at risk to make your business change? Or will you make small changes to keep the company afloat and your family safe?
Now let’s say someone is brave enough to say ‘let’s do it’. They do their research, they plan the changes, what the new structure will look like, how the new systems will work, they roll up their sleeves and get to work. This work doesn’t go unnoticed by a different company and they persuade the ‘man of change’ to switch sides.
So the original company was just left neither with the new technology in place nor with the previous one. The man that could do the job just left and it might take months to find someone new. Once the new person is onboarded they might decide to take an even ‘better’ approach that will add a new process or system in place.
Then you will need to hire someone else that can map all the three technologies together and you are left with a mess. Not to mention all the costs incurred that could have been spent to boost revenue. Will they do it again?
Businesses would rather wait for something to fail than try to improve it. And if something unexpected happens, like the COVID-19 or the financial crisis, the government will simply bail the company out. Why should you change for the future when you have government insurance?
Now there is a case for an organisation to change when new inventions are introduced and adopted by society.
A couple of days ago, in a distant London borough and completely adhering to the social distancing rules, I was taking my bins out and met my neighbour at the doorstep. He is a very smart man, has over thirty years of experience in the shipping industry and constantly travels to various conventions to consult other businesses.
We got into a discussion on how things might change after all this is over. He said he experienced how quickly businesses can change: “One day the company said that they are all going paperless and the whole business switched that instance. One day they said they will no longer have secretaries for senior execs, you have to do your own work. And it changed within a couple of weeks. And the list goes on and on.”
But this pace of change has dramatically decreased in the past forty years.
We often like to say that we live in the age of transformation. Things are changing rapidly all around us and technology is developing at the speed of light.
But is it really?
If you were living in the 1950s and belonged to the ‘upper middle class’, more likely than not you were able to afford things that most of your neighbours couldn’t – a fridge, television, a car, a washing machine.
These things were unaffordable by many and they were life-changing material. Think about what your life would be like without a fridge? Or a washing machine?
Now think about all the things that were invented in the last 40 years. Faster cars, more efficient washing machines, powerful computers (some that even fit into your pocket). You can now fly from London to Sydney without transfers and your seats may be a tad comfier than decades ago.
But most things that we have now are improved versions of something invented decades ago. The pace of change has dramatically decreased and I could write a whole piece just on that (or you can just read about it from someone that puts their thoughts more eloquently, reference at the end).
And with innovation stopping a couple of decades ago, the rest of the world has followed suit.
So why do we have all these writers proclaim that ‘Coronavirus will change society forever’, ‘Forget about the way you did marketing before COVID-19’ etc.?
Partly because we like to shout about change. Things dying. Things taking over. Blockchain, AI, Voice, Chatbots, VR, AR. Marketers in particular are obsessed with the next big thing. Look up any book, podcast or video by Gary Vee and you will hear about five things dying (TV especially) from an excerpt of twenty minutes.
And partly because it pays a lot to say those things. If you went up on stage and spoke about how things are relatively ok now, not much happening but things are moving in the right direction, you would probably see numerous yawning faces in the audience and people on their phones probably checking what their neighbours dog did this time.
But as Tom Goodwin said, if you went up on stage, put some rock music on, showed a presentation with explosions and proclaimed that ‘things will never be the same’, you will likely be invited back and get paid huge sums just to do it over and over again.
Things are changing but they are not changing fast enough for us to get excited about it.
So once it is all over, the social distancing is over, the recession passes, we will go back to business as usual in most things. But I don’t want to end this opinion piece with you thinking I am the biggest cynic there is.
I do think this crisis has shown how communities get close together to help each other.
I am fortunate enough to work for a company that fosters the communal spirit within. I have witnessed teams organising virtual drinks, virtual pub quizzes, teams creating videos to uplift other colleagues, and teams organising virtual goodbyes at the end of the day. I believe this brought us closer together.
I believe there are many other companies that experienced increased sense of belonging and better collaboration because of the virus. We hear of businesses changing their product lines to provide goods that are needed. We hear of millions of volunteers signing up to help those in need. And we hear about all the sacrifices people are making just to help others.
And I do believe that this will leave an impact on our lives when we come back to normality. Business hates change and things change a lot slower than we like to think, but businesses are run by people and people have responded to this crisis with kindness.
For further reading:
Has progress in science and technology come to a halt? – Michael Hanlon in aeon
We need to invent something better than Machu Picchu – Rory Sutherland in Spectator