By Charles Araujo
It’s been almost exactly one year since the COVID-19 pandemic threw everything into turmoil.
And collectively, we’ve been running in place ever since.
Despite all the talk about pandemic-induced transformation, most organizations have merely responded to a rapidly-changing reality as fast as possible. That sort of reactionary response was appropriate and even admirable, but transformation it wasn’t.
As we begin to see a light at the end of the tunnel, an opening is materializing for enterprise leaders. Most, however, will not seize it because they either fail to see it in the first place, or because they are unprepared to do so. But that doesn’t have to be you.
The Transformational Year that Wasn’t
Let’s start with a bit of truth.
We’ve all heard the trope that there’s been more transformation in the last (fill in the number of weeks or months since the start of the pandemic) than we’ve seen in (fill in some number of years — the bigger, the better!).
Unfortunately, it just isn’t true.
In reality, what we saw was organizations that were able to overcome years of inertia in a matter of a few short months. Now, as someone who spent most of my career in large enterprises, I get the miraculousness of that feat. But that doesn’t make it transformation.
And I also don’t want to imply that there weren’t herculean efforts taking place. Even if the pandemic caused barriers to fall like the walls of Jericho, that still left years of work to accomplish seemingly overnight. Many of you admirably rose to that challenge and achieved extraordinary results that saved your organization’s reputation and livelihood and, in some cases, the lives of your customers.
Still, we have to acknowledge that all of these massive responsive efforts were just that: responses. They were reactionary. They were essential and commendable, but they were not the years of transformation wrapped up into a few weeks that people claimed them to be — for two simple reasons.
The first is that authentic transformation demands a re-envisioning of almost everything to reorient the organization around delivering a differentiated customer experience. Second, real transformation takes time because it represents a fundamental shift in how people function, work, and interact.
And achieving those two aims requires one more thing that has been in short supply in most organizations.
