“Let’s embrace The- New-Normal“

The Advuca Post-Pandemic Resilience Program (PPRP)

As we all have learned in the meantime, the Corona crisis has crystallised not only a number of societal, economical and ethical dysfunctions but also showed the limitations of management & leadership models of many companies and organisations.

These problems have emerged under a magnifying glass view in a forced slow motion during the Corona lock-down making them more visible and palpable than ever to our conscience. We also saw that many of our overarching business and societal challenges are often interwoven in a systematic way: the environment, social divide & inequality, public health on the one hand and sustained economic growth as well as related business governance on the other hand.

We had to learn, in the hard way, the lesson that monocultures, whatever they are and wherever they be (in supply chains & food production for ex), despite being very efficient, are very vulnerable in case of an external shock and have severe difficulties to survive or at least to recover from them. In other words, monocultures are not resilient at all, resilience being originally the science of the capacity - and the speed in doing so - of a material to get back into its original state and form after it has been hit or bent.

Most analysts and futurists predict that we will see more and more so-called black & green swans happen at an ever higher pace in our exponential VUCA world. The conclusion is that resilience is probably the new efficiency.

We also know that many businesses and sectors will be affected for a long period of time, be it in terms of changing market conditions, customer behaviours, new sanitary compliance rules, work cultures, management & leadership practices or business models, a.o.

In fact, we have never been so close to a liminal moment, or like the societal change Theory U puts it, we are close to be forced to unlearn the old and enter a so-called blindspot, where the old almost disappeared but the new is not yet there, offering the possibility to co-create the emerging future that we want. And as Einstein put it, “Problems cannot be solved with the same mind set that created them” . In that same light, many experts and futurists today predict that the 3 coming decades will probably be the most transformative ones in human history.

The conclusion is that companies can be affected in many different ways by this new reality of “The New Normal” - which has to be a better normal, as the old normal is not sustainable we all know - and here’s a non exhaustive list of challenges & playing fields identified so far :

Regional, local, and redundant supply chains vs. cheap but vulnerable, globalised just in time and non-redundant supply chains
Business model pivots and business model innovation to adapt to changing customer behaviour and needs
Growing Gig-economy
Adapting to new compliance rules
Increasing productivity by becoming a more sustained agile organisation with less hiercharchy, more remote team work, servant & distributed leadership and self-organising teams to better react to market evolutions and speed up innovation processes, as well to increase resilience towards external shocks (business continuity management).
Increasing productivity by accelerating and consolidating digital transformation: collaboration tools, process & resource planning tools, automation, AI, Big Data, IoT, blockchain, e-commerce, e-marketing, digital customer experience, VR & AR, focus on UX....etc.
Preparing for the Low Touch Economy by reducing and limiting physical contact via innovative business models and integrated technology use and limiting direct human interaction where possible, in the production process, in the supply & distribution chains and at the workplace: ‘Contactless transactions’
Adapting physical and digital work environments, internal communication and processes to the new reality and equipping HR with the necessary tools and skills.
Investing in soft skills development to prepare the workforce for dealing with complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity (VUCA), building better (remote) teams, becoming servant leaders, taking new roles next to exponential & transformative technologies and increasing individual and team resilience in general: upskilling & reskilling, agile learning, psychological safety, a.o..
Taking a “Global Cost of Ownership” (TCO++) approach towards investments
Becoming a real sustainable and regenerative organisation by adopting circular economy principles wherever possible throughout the whole value chain and beyond.
Being more ethical & inclusive at all levels: Ethics, Trust and Courage (ETC) is the new currency.

Based on our core skills and believes, we as Advucators have developed a systematic screening to diagnose a companies’ maturity level related to those new resilience requirements, taking into account its size, markets, and sectors, to identify the critical and strategic actions to be taken, including a roadmap design, in order to build strong post-pandemic resilience.