Breaking good
What does crisis management teach us about project management?
As IT teams in retailers up and down the land scramble to protect their systems from the current wave of ransom-ware attacks, I’m reminded of one of the most interesting business lessons from the pandemic.
And the most visible sign of that lesson was a plastic screen.
As consumers, we all remember the screens that went up in supermarkets and other essential retailers to protect customers and store colleagues from infecting each other. They arrived at about the same time as a lot of other emergency measures - one-way signage stuck on floors, endless bottles of hand-sanitiser and all.
The remarkable thing about these responses to the pandemic was how quickly they were implemented, at scale across the country. Anyone who has existed in any kind of corporate environment will recognise with a wince that if you’d tried to have a conventional Project Initiation meeting about putting plastic screens up in stores endless debate would have ensued. Where will we get the screens from? Who is going to fit them. Have we done an assessment of whether they can be attached to till points securely? Does drilling a hole to fit them create an electrical risk? Who will be doing the fitting and are they qualified? Which stores will we do in which order?
In end, the project would have taken months.
But instead, in response to an external crisis, businesses somehow just ‘got on with it’ and made the change happen in days instead.
And it wasn’t just physical changes like these which seemed to happen at lightning speed. Process changes in store, for example to manage and restrict the number of customers allowed in at one time, were also put in as a matter of urgency, and many of the ‘core’ processes that a store operates like deciding staff rosters and organising delivery schedules also had to change beyond recognition.
Even retailers which were deemed non-essential and therefore closed had to find this same change-energy as they rescheduled deliveries from suppliers, figured out how to furlough colleagues and started to manage their finances differently.
Why this reminiscing about what happened 5 years ago?
There is a powerful lesson in those incredibly fleet-of-foot responses to the pandemic, and it is that when faced with a truly existential crisis we can make change happen in our businesses much faster than sometimes feels possible.
That is a lesson being relived by many businesses today, not only those worried about cyber-security but those having to re-tool supply chains in response to tariffs and other global factors too.
There is, though, a delicate balance for a leadership team to strike. I often test businesses by asking “this thing that we think will take 6 months - if the business’s existence absolutely depended on us doing it in 6 weeks, could we do it?”.
The answer is usually (after a bit of pushing) that it is indeed possible to make change happen quickly - that is, after all, the lesson from all that pandemic work. But doing so often means taking more risks, and also means deploying lots of people very quickly in a way that can be very disruptive to everything else that is happening in the business.
And there is the dilemma. The seemly frustrating change-management processes that feel like they are slowing everything down are really structures designed to allow lots of different changes to happen at once without everything falling apart.
You can bypass those processes and get an individual change to happen much faster. And sometimes that is the right choice to make, such as when that change really is of existential importance. But it is tempting to play the “just get on with it” card too often, and doing so can be a recipe for dangerous chaos.
The lesson - be aware that you have the power to make rapid change happen in your business, but have the discipline to know what that is a choice you should make.
Thank you, Ian. A fascinating read. I remember reading that businesses were like most organisms and ecosystems, in that you need enough innovation and evolution to thrive, but not so little that you are vulnerable to change around you, or you die off. Equally, too much change too fast means the system becomes unstable in unintended ways. More chaos!
Pivoting tons of resource to a change was certainly easier in Covid, especially where the day job largely disappeared. I think Grocery retailers impressed me most as they stayed open but still found a way to grow online capacity massively in days and weeks whilst serving customers in more challenging store environments, and managing more sick leave plus the 2m rule throughout the supply chain.
Company culture and change capability is key here. Smaller companies and start-up types generally pivot more quickly and more effectively. You might argue that keeping that start-up culture is one of the central reasons for Amazon’s incredible success, despite its size.
This also reminded me of a few examples from my career:
1. Sir Peter Davis (CEO of J Sainsbury) taking the 7-year network plan from the Supply Chain & Logistics team and challenging the timeline and deliverables. ‘7 in 3’ was born! Unfortunately, two of the 700,000 square foot automated warehouses didn’t work properly, and it had to be unwound manually. That hit availability, hitting sales and losing JS market share and customers.
2. When I started at Odeon Cinemas in a European role, I met the CEO (Paul Donovan) and said, ‘As an outsider, what are the watchouts for me making changes in 7 countries?’. He said, ‘Tread carefully, or you’ll create chaos out there.’ That told me that executional muscle and capability needed evaluating in each market before I pressed go on initiatives to sell more F&B.
3. Collaborating with a client on post-merger integration. They wanted it to take 3 years, and I persuaded them to do the bulk of it in 6 months, with a longer time to complete the IT integration. 3 years would have been death by a thousand cuts and stopped us getting to the synergies fast enough to materially improve EBITDA.