Companies of all sizes are understandably desperate to get back to work. The prevailing blueprint for doing so seems to be one of adapting pre-COVID norms in the short term to account for the virus, using social distancing, masks, staff shifts or schedules, etc., on the assumption that a widely available vaccine will sooner or later herald and enable a full return to those norms.
But will the Next Normal really just be the Old Normal plus protection? And even if it’s possible to do so, should companies really aim to return to the status quo? We think not. We believe that the virus and our reaction to it have accelerated an emerging shift in our conventional ways of doing things. Companies that return to the old ways without understanding that shift are likely to fail.
The truth is that, with a few notable exceptions, our companies, indeed whole industries, have been slow to assimilate the difference that the internet and related digital technologies are making to our world. COVID shone a light on that failure, enabling us to see clearly what the Old Normal actually was, what the Next Normal will likely be, and what companies need to do to bridge the gap.
The first part of this story is simple enough:
COVID-19 is a virus.
Viruses are usually spread by physical proximity. They rarely survive for long outside of a living “host.”
One person can infect many people at the same time if they’re all in a physical group.
This means a virus can spread very quickly across a population that likes to form physical groups and where individuals move from group to group.
In that case, a particularly nasty virus could devastate the entire population.
To avoid that eventuality, in March 2020 we stopped forming physical groups.
As soon as we did, tens of millions of people lost their jobs and the economy collapsed more or less overnight,
By Vala Afshar | August 24, 2020
