Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:
MIT Sloan Management Review, September 28, 2021
by Gerald C. Kane, Rich Nanda, Anh Nguyen Phillips, and Jonathan Copulsky
On Jan. 8, 2020, when Chinese researchers announced that they had identified a new virus that had infected dozens of people across Asia, few business leaders realized that their companies were on the brink of an economic, medical, political, and cultural disruption of global magnitude. In short order, they were called upon to respond to potential illness among employees and customers, supply chain interruptions, dramatic fluctuations in demand, and extraordinarily high levels of uncertainty.
Yet, for all its grim — and ongoing — consequences, the COVID-19 pandemic is just one of many fundamental breaks in the business environment that have challenged leaders over the past 30 years or so. These disruptions come in two forms.
The COVID-19 pandemic is an acute disruption. As with an acute medical condition, the onset of such a disruption is sudden and severe, and its symptoms are obvious. Its treatment calls for a rapid and dramatic response, and its duration is relatively short. The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the U.S., the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean, the 2008 housing and financial crisis, and the 2010 volcanic eruptions in Iceland are examples of acute disruptions.
The second form of disruption is more like a chronic medical condition. Chronic disruptions build slowly. Their immediate symptoms can be subtle and easily overlooked. They require sustained treatment that must be tolerable over time. Chronic disruptions, such as China’s economic rise, climate change, and the evolutionary emergence of digital technology, tend to be persistent and long lasting.
While the two phenomena present differently, they both represent a departure from business as usual to which companies must respond. In studying corporate responses to the pandemic from March through December 2020, we found that companies with existing playbooks for responding to chronic digital disruptions were also responding more quickly and effectively to the acute pandemic disruption. The economic payoffs from digital technologies that allow for enterprise virtualization — such as remote work, e-commerce, and telehealth — increased significantly in the context of COVID-19. Moreover, in responding to the pandemic, many of these companies wound up accelerating their digital transformation efforts and their returns on those efforts.
These companies’ ability to manage the pandemic offers a dramatic illustration of what we’ve come to call the transformation myth. The myth is the idea that transformation is an event with a start and an end during which organizations migrate from one steady state to another, as opposed to a continuous process of adapting to a highly volatile, ambiguous, and uncertain environment shaped by multiple, overlapping disruptions. Read the rest here.
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