Covid 19, Can/If Thinking and Creating Abundance
BY JULIAN ALDRIDGE
Hollywood loves disaster movies. In the typical script a massive man-made or natural disaster threatens to wipe out the planet (or our presence on it), until a few brilliant and courageous individuals intervene to save us all. In this script, the bigger the crisis, the bigger the hero or solution needs to be. Real life has a habit of mimicking the movies, as all Challengers know. In business, it’s an old adage that you should never let a good crisis go to waste.
Why? Because radically changing times require radically new solutions. Path dependency, the tried and trusted old way of doing things, goes out the window. In the face of unprecedented challenges, minds open, and people, businesses and communities look for Can/If solutions.
‘We can’t because…’ has to be replaced with ‘we can, if ..’. Suddenly, we have no other choice.
As I stood in line at London’s Heathrow airport on Sunday morning, waiting to return to the US last week, I listened as one of my few fellow travelers led a remote conference call with his peers from around the world. The topic? Crisis management and activating something they’d been planning for in the event of a situation like the current pandemic.
He, and his team, were practicing, in real time, Can/If thinking.
It’s tempting to argue that the past decade has lulled many of us into a false sense of security. An ever-climbing stock market. Declining unemployment. A slow, but steady, rise in wage growth. Then, suddenly, everything changed. Business as usual became anything but. Abundance became scarcity.
Looking back to the last major global crisis in 2008, I remember thinking that the fallout from the economic catastrophe that Lehman Brothers and Wall Street created would lead to a new golden-age of invention as people had to think differently about their careers, their families, and the world.
Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention. With the benefit of hindsight I don’t think I was too wrong.
So, what about today? Already we are seeing a few silver linings in these dark and gloomy times.
The air above China’s cities during the quarantine in January and February was the cleanest it’d been in decades. Doubtless the drastic reduction in air and ground travel will reap similar dividends in the west, albeit only temporarily
In Venice, dolphins, fish and swans have returned to the canals as tourists and the supporting infrastructure like the ubiquitous river taxis, have halted
On Facebook we see numerous examples of families actually spending time together and reconnecting with board games, puzzles, painting and family dinner