Change can often be seen as a choice businesses make, setting them on a planned path of transformation. This process can take years, so what happens when the path of change is forced – how should businesses react?
To gain an insight, Digital Journal caught up with Philip Atherton, Co-Founder at Solverboard. Atherton says “My experience as an entrepreneur and founder leads me to seize the opportunities, become agile, and innovate. Here’s four reasons why I think every business should take this approach during COVID-19.”
Based on this he shares four areas where companies need to place focus and resource.
Digital Journal: The first area of focus is culture shift. What does this entail?
Philip Atherton: Leaders of innovation and transformation programmes can champion change, but for innovation to really flourish the entire organisation needs to be on board. Changing the organisational culture is one of the biggest challenges for innovators because success requires people from every department to be ready to embrace experimentation and new ideas.
Under normal circumstances changing people’s behaviour in order to begin working in new ways is tough. “Every enterprise culture has an in-built inertia (direction and speed) which is both the reason it has succeeded and a potentially powerful constraint,” Enterprise Innovation Consultant Chris Potts wrote in our recent report on innovation blockers.
Organisations that have experienced some success can become tied to the strategies that led them to succeed. Inertia stops them from responding to changes or opportunities in their industry – until they are forced to.
A crisis – such as a recession, pandemic, or natural disaster – is not a normal circumstance. Those who respond quickly can survive, and even thrive. Just look around: the coronavirus crisis has led some of the world’s largest and most successful technology and engineering companies to down tools on their usual programmes and create products such as ventilators and face masks. Others are looking for ways to take all their face-to-face activities and events online.
This quick shift in culture is an opportunity to bring your organisation on board with change by promoting a less rigid and more agile approach to new challenges.
DJ: With the second aspect, what is meant by new challenges?
Atherton: ‘Business as usual’ may calm your customers’ fears, but it won’t help you meet their rapidly changing needs. The coronavirus crisis has led to lockdowns across the world and online shopping has surged as a result. Yet not all ecommerce products are benefitting.
Econsultancy recently reported that while health and beauty businesses saw a 31.6% increase in year-on-year sales for week commencing 15 March, clothing businesses saw a 26.7% sales drop, with many retailers closing their ecommerce sites altogether.
These circumstances may seem extreme, but every business is facing new and unforeseen challenges. New challenges need new responses – and it’s here where the opportunity lies, especially for innovators and entrepreneurs who have not yet created a proven innovation process.
Lack of structure around the process is one of the key blockers to innovation. Rob Sheffield, Director at innovation consultancy Bluegreen Learning, says: “Most organisations don’t have a process for innovation. Often people just give up – this lost goodwill is the invisible cost of failure and it has a huge demoralising effect. The key is to balance structure, empowerment and support with agility and learning.”
By redefining innovation in your organisation you can quickly create a strategy to respond to the new challenges you’re facing and demonstrate that innovation is integral to your business. But what can you change?
DJ: For the third aspect, how can businesses generate new ideas?
Atherton:Mike Vitale, a business transformation consultant and writer, shared the 15 common business changes you can make when your business environment changes in an article for mdm.
His list includes the products or services you offer your customers, the markets that you serve, the experience you offer your customers, and the technology you use to operate your business.
What you change will depend on the shift in your environment. Clothing and beauty brands responding to the coronavirus crisis might branch out into new products, while pubs and restaurants might use new technology to change how they reach their customers.
For leaders of change and innovation there may never be a better time to engage your employees in the process. Once you have framed the problem/s you are trying to solve (e.g. reaching consumers who are in lockdown) you could run virtual ideation sessions with different teams to find out how they think you should respond.
Once you have clustered the ideas into projects, get senior management and programme managers involved. The nature of a crisis means that senior teams are more likely open to new ideas so employees will feel heard, meaning they are less likely to become disillusioned with the innovation process.
As Jane Ginnever of Shift Consultancy explains, “Share the outcomes you’re looking for and involve people in developing the new ways of working that will enable them. I have never come across a company where the employees couldn’t see ways to make the business work better for the customer, but their ideas can often be ignored and they can feel unable or unwilling to initiate the change.”
Leading this process will highlight the important role of innovation in your organisation and could have a further reaching impact than you think.
DJ: With the fourth and final area, you speak of ‘changing perceptions of your brand’. What does this involve?
Atherton:For every brand there’s a set of brand values. A mission that goes beyond ‘selling as much as possible’. A crisis will test these values. There will be brands who will be forgiven because the changes to the environment meant their business couldn’t survive, they had to stop trading, their premises got destroyed, or their staff got sick.
For organisations big enough to weather most storms, people will be looking to them to see how they respond. The World Economic Forum reported on how organisations ‘are coming together and finding innovative ways to minimize the impact on public health and to limit disruptions to economies and supply chains’ during the coronavirus crisis.
Their report praises the quick response from Unilever to deliver free soap, sanitizer, bleach and food to areas in need, and includes a call from AstraZeneca for companies to give practical support rather than just money in the fight against Covid-19.
Brands will be remembered for their response to the crisis, but responding quickly requires an organisation to be ready to pivot its business goals, live its values and to invest in innovation.
