Last time, I provided my thoughts on the reset / re-establish / regeneration activities that businesses will need to go through to prepare themselves for life after the COVID-19 crisis passes.
I also suggested that there is a massive opportunity to reshape the future for your organisation. You might have noticed that there has been a bit of a theme throughout the past few Untypical Thoughts – that is, that you cannot afford to be constrained in your thinking by the way things used to be done within your organisation.
There are two ways to approach this re-establishment phase in my mind … one is to start with where you are (or where you were before the COVID-19 emergency started) and the other is to imagine the possibilities and design your new approach from that angle.
A couple of weeks ago, I spoke about learning to swim while still clinging on to the pool ladder. Now is not the time for that approach. If you try and re-establish your business with one eye on the past and the other towards the future, you will end up simply adjusting what you already had. This will more than likely create some change but, when all is said and done, your new world will simply be a different version of your old one. This is certainly less risky, more conservative and almost certainly going to make you feel safer than the alternative – but is now the time for low-risk, conservative safety?
If ever there was a time and a set of circumstances that enabled … if not demanded … radical, dare we say, untypical, thinking, it is now. Your staff and your customers have been forced into a mindset for transformation – the world will never be the same as it was and there’ll never be a better time to create the transformation that you have probably dreamed of.
There is an old cliche about the sky being the limit. I want to challenge that – I would like to suggest that right now, there are no limits. None. You can take your business if the direction that you need to. You can design the business to be whatever you want it to be and strive towards being that business. But, in my mind, and the words of Elvis Presley “it’s now or never”. Once you re-establish your business this time around, I suspect that you’ll be stuck with it.
Start thinking about re-establishing your business without limits. Decide what you think your business could be and set out to create it. If you don’t do it now, when will you get another chance?
