“Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.” Milton Friedman

Nobody had a novel coronavirus on their digital transformation BINGO card. And yet, it was the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting economic turmoil—rather than AI, blockchain, cloud, or the Internet of Things (or competitive pressure from Airbnb, Uber, Tesla, Lemonade or even Amazon)—that drove a host of both small and sweeping changes in how business gets done, practically overnight.

While it might be a stretch to give COVID full credit for driving so many organizations toward digital, the virus’ ability to accelerate the inevitable certainly proved more powerful than many an organization’s ability to ignore the inevitable and many leaders’ attempts to hold the inevitable at bay for just one. more. earnings. season.

After years of planning, handwringing, skepticism and drawn-out processes during which (frankly) so little actually happened, we all woke up one morning in 2020 to a world that had been radically transformed—suddenly, and in many ways, irreversibly. And while you could hardly say that everything turned out “OK”, it would be disingenuous to argue that many of the things that changed were sacred or that the changes themselves weren’t far easier done than said.

Overnight, home became the place we work. Gig workers became essential workers. Universities realized they could evaluate students on their merits without the aid of standardized testing, then educate those students without them ever arriving on campus. Financial services companies—from mortgage lenders to auto insurers—were forced to be fair(er) and even a wee bit more flexible. Hollywood suddenly (surprise!) figured out how to retool their entire distribution model to allow film fans to experience opening night from the comfort of their couch, as music’s biggest stars and your hometown’s smallest concert venue woke up to the potential of streaming events. The world learned to Zoom.

Yes, I’m deliberately focusing on the positive (assuming you view progress as positive), and I’m well aware of the darker disruptions brought about by this crisis. But are these things not examples of the workforce, customer experience, business model, organization-wide, and industry-level innovations we were talking about when we were talking about digital transformation all along? And are these the “ideas that are lying around” that economist Milton Friedman suggests we cast about for and finally act upon when crisis spurs us to change?

If so, why didn’t more organizations act sooner? Perhaps Friedman’s view that a perceived crisis is enough to produce real change was too charitable. Perhaps only a true crisis would do. After all, by failing to adapt sufficiently to technology-driven change over time, traditional industries and legacy organizations turned after-the-fact digital transformation into a crisis of their own making—and even then, largely failed to act with the urgency it implied.

It’s sad that it took a pandemic to prove once and for all that transformation talk is cheap and that the real action is in—well—action. And so, after years of pretending that they had even more years before disruption would be imminent, of fooling themselves into believing that tech-driven innovators were merely interesting edge cases, of resisting risk-taking, and persisting in the notion that digital transformation is uncertain even when its upside should have been clear, so many organizations flipped the switch on their future.

Now, I’m not saying that digital transformation is as clear-cut as this one-and-done adjustment we’ve all just gone through. That it’s as trivial as equipping our (white-collar) employees to work from home, even if today’s remote work policies plant the seeds for a more radical rethink about the nature of work and the value of human capital. Transformation is, of course, more profound than that. But I do think it’s time we admit that one big thing we got wrong about digital transformation is how easy it could be to get it more-or-less right—certainly in smaller doses, but even as a larger program as more organizations found themselves rapidly reworking their e-commerce strategy, business model, distribution channels, and supply chain. It would be fair to say that post-COVID, digital transformation as a mythology is dead while the transformative power of delivering meaningful change to better meet your constituents’ evolving needs has survived its demise.

It never should have taken a crisis of global proportions to spur so many organizations into action. The alternative would have been far more palatable for most.
What if, instead of biding their time before a rushed and radical reinvention, these same organizations had spent the last decade (or two) gradually adapting to the environment that had quite clearly been changing around them the entire time? What if seeing change led more leaders to do more than merely say their organizations might one day change? What if more traditional organizations had seen a budding digital revolution as strategic white space, and not waited until they saw the whites of their enemies’ eyes—only to ultimately realize that they were looking at their own self-imposed obsolescence in the rearview mirror?

In that scenario, I suspect we would be less breathless about total transformation. Had leaders been more serious about driving change all along, their truly adaptive organizations would have been evolving at or near the pace of the environments in which they operate. Traditional businesses would have become digital businesses (no, that bar isn’t high enough—would have become better businesses) gradually and over time. Less through the scorched earth campaign by which we ‘disrupt or die’ and more through the steady spark of a strategy through which we ‘adapt to thrive’.

Having seen that meaningful change can be less risky, more realistic, more reasonable, and even repeatable, I’m hopeful that a greater portion of business decision-makers will see the logic in making always-on adaptability a core competency for themselves, their teams, and their organizations at-large.

And that’s the good news in all of this because today’s trials are hardly the last ones we will endure during our lifetimes. The next crisis may be economic, environmental, social, political, or technological, rather than biological—but it will come (actually, it’s already here…). The best businesses will anticipate and prepare, get ahead of the changes it will precipitate, blunt its blows, and rise in its wake. They will, as the United Marines would say, improvise, adapt and overcome.

For years, I’ve been saying that the old normal no longer exists but the new normal has yet to fully present itself, leaving both people and organizations in something of a liminal state that is more “and” than “or”. Today, I would be quicker to say that we shouldn’t expect a new normal at all. In fact, the worst thing any of us can do is hope for some new normal—a new period of relative stability, relative certainty—to arrive. The truth is that we are entering a Never Normal in which the frequency and pace of disruptions to everything we know will require us all to be more adaptable than we’d ever imagined. A Never Normal in which an ability to repeatedly and reliably adjust to any new condition the world throws our way is the current state of play for modern organizations and a critical competency for the people who lead them. A Never Normal in which the only thing we can expect with any degree of certainty is that we will need to come to terms with the unexpected and the uncertain.

A Never Normal in which this much is clear: The transformation any organization should have been aiming to achieve all along was not to merely become more digital but to become truly adaptable in the face of unrelenting and never-ending cycles of change. Because if we’re being honest, rewarding the champions of the status quo was never really normal anyway.

June 10, 2020