COVID-19 has disrupted many businesses by making it hard to operate in the normal way. Most businesses have experienced a drop in income as customers reduced expenditure to the most basic needs.
What is the ‘normal way?’
May I suggest that the normal way is a way business owners are familiar with? A way that generated profits in the past. A way that the business is provisioned to service when the demand returns.
Is this a comfort zone?
What happens if the demand does not return?
What if comfort, as you know it, does not return?
- Some businesses are waiting for conditions to get back to normal.
- Some businesses are cutting back to survive.
- Some businesses are expanding based on the new conditions presented.
For some businesses a crisis is a disaster; for others it is a disaster waiting to happen; for yet others, it is an opportunity.
As we emerge from these challenging times we all have new challenges to face to get our businesses productive.
Maybe, just maybe, our old thinking needs adjustment to work well on our new challenges.
Maybe, we need to think differently.
“How do you begin to think differently?” you ask.
An example of thinking differently is referred to as Pull over Push.
Fukushima Case Study
The Pacific Plate is an oceanic tectonic plate that lies beneath the Pacific Ocean. The western edges of the Pacific Plate meet the Okhotsk Plate, which forms two underwater trenches off of the coast of Japan. The Pacific Plate moves 3.5 inches towards Japan, sliding beneath the existing plate in a process known as subduction. Eventually, about every thousand years, the plate springs back into place. The result is an earthquake, a very big earthquake.
On 11 March 2011, Tōhoku earthquake off the coast of Japan recorded a magnitude of 9.0 on the Richter Scale.
The resulting tsunami killed more than 15,000 people and caused nuclear accidents, primarily the level 7 meltdowns at three reactors in the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant complex.
The Tokyo Electric Company (TEC Co) – the company that owned and operated the nuclear power facility – had plans in place to deal with catastrophes, but not catastrophes of this scale.
The Problem
The Japanese government and TEC Co lost control of the situation. They were struggling with their own form of thinking – they both worked with a Command and Control mechanism. There were many tiers of management, so information had to find its way up through the tiers so that a decision could be made and then had to find its way back down to where the action was required. What resulted was that decision pushed resources to where they thought the resources were needed.
Do you think that this was the best approach? It may not have been the best approach but this was how the system was set up to respond. How do you prepare effectively for a set of circumstances that have never occurred before using just the methods you have proved in the past? The answer is “You can’t.” The methods have not been proven because they have only been tested in different circumstances.
The best use of resources is to pull them into a project using just what is needed when it is needed most. Timing is key. The idea would have sounded utterly foreign to the executives of TEC Co. The process would have required a two-way flow of information in and out of the company with transparency. TecCo’s culture emphasised minimum disclosure.
A group of citizens was about to give them a lesson in the push approach.
The new approach
The Problem: How much radiation had been released and where has it gone? Where was safe and where has not? There were insufficient Geiger counters to measure the contamination. There was no way of collecting and disseminating the information (50,000,000 data points) when the information was collected.
Analysis: To secure enough Geiger counters they would have to be built. To collect and distribute the information software would need to be built and then hosted on a provisioning site with online access for collection and dissemination.
Low-cost Geiger counters were designed with an integrated GPS and manufactured in mass. The software was designed by experts who understood the needs and access requirements, and this was built and provisioned.
Solution: The solution was resolved by a pull system where the expertise, capability, and logistics were pulled into the project using just what was needed when it was needed most.
Let us get down to Business
Pull draws expertise when it is needed rather than stockpiles of material and information that may or may not be fit for function when the catastrophe arises.
Let’s put the pull approach into a business context.
Applying: When this approach is applied to business it means reducing costs, increasing the ability to respond to quickly changing circumstances, most importantly stimulating the creative thinking needed to determine if the job is productively done.
Entrepreneur: For the entrepreneur, pull means the difference between success and failure. Pull reduces the cost of innovation that new methods of communication, prototyping, fundraising, and learning have made available.
There are 8 other aspects of thinking differently that can create the change needed in a time of crisis.
Collectively the 9 aspects of thinking differently facilitate business improvement, whether there is a crisis or just a challenge to solve.