Nothing fails like success
When Sir Arthur Helps coined this phrase in 1868, Hawaii registered the highest waves ever – a 50 foot tidal wave was observed. When reading this left me with the feeling that we are experiencing tidal waves of pain, suffering and dismay – on both a personal and professional front. And more so because we have been experiencing an explosion of success and greatness in the world from a technological perspective. The tidal wave of data, IoE and Intelligent Assistance ( or AI) have been washing over us, and yet … Covid-19, a micro-organism disrupted our well-being and derailed all the greatness we were hoping for in the year when we were suppose to have 2020 vision, and therefore not 2020 hindsight, but now-sight.
When your disaster playbook does not work anymore!
Many organizations that we worked with over the last two decades (post-9/11) have a disaster playbook (including disaster recovery and business continuity). These were neatly crafted, tested regularly and audited by the mere organizations that helped them creating it in the first place. These however were playbooks to deal with an acute disaster.
Acute (/əˈkjuːt/) – an unpleasant or unwelcome situation or phenomenon, present or experienced to a severe or intense degree. In Medicine – describing a disease as acute denotes that it is of short duration and, as a corollary of that, of recent onset.
And then arrived the Covid-19 virus with the accompanied government regulations, designed and engineered to prevent further expansion thereof. These regulations, tested our disaster playbook and proofed it to be inadequately engineered when it comes to a chronic condition like this virus.
Chronic (/ˈkrɒnɪk/) – (of an illness) persisting for a long time or constantly recurring. The term chronic is often applied when the course of the disease lasts for more than three months.
Companies are struggling to survive this sudden change in basic operating procedures, specifically with a larger than normal percentage of their workforce working from home. What they are struggling with is how do they deal with the lack of a playbook or a simple script for this type of change that seems to have taken on chronic dimensions.
At Bauhaus we have been working hard at building out a change process, which supports our purpose (and promise) – Think Forward, Move Forward, our people and our product suite. This process has been engineered to support companies with their enterprise resilience. We focus on resilience as the critical capability of an organization to get back to normal operations within the shortest time possible, after the advent of a disaster.
Through our work with various public and private sector organizations, focussing on high risk change management, like Data centre and lately Cloud Platform migrations to name but a few, we have experienced disaster, risk and incident management first hand and under the most severe operational circumstances. As the Covid-19 lock-down wave floods our businesses and social eco-systems changes to our daily business operations cannot be avoided. We believe that the experience and know-how gained in these scenarios can now be applied to help organizations charting a course through these uncharted waters to ensure survival; controlled crisis management and rapid deployment of business saving processes and tools.
Our Process
We believe in the old tried and tested model originally engineered by John Boyd – the Boyd’s Cycle also known as the OODA Loop – Observe, Orient, Decide and Act.
- Observation – is all about data.We want to help you to first observe before being observed was the all adage, by focusing on outside-in data, and how that changes your organization and your people – like watching a watching the movie. This will provide the context to set your orientation towards fast and sustainable decisions.
- Orient – Our approach tied to our experience of your organization or organization’s like yours is “to orientate” ourselves.By applying situational awareness and simple sense-making of your current environment or situation we can very quickly capture your outside-in and link that with current day experiences and overall organizational disaster positioning. Orientation, aligning yourself in the direction with the right speed to build velocity is most critical for survival during disaster ridden times.
- Decide – is to make the right situational decision rapidly, on the basis of what has been observed and from what orientation (velocity) that has been observed.
- Act – Finally take action, the most appropriate at the moment after you have decided what you are going to do.
- … and then back to Observe, because your action will have an outcome and therefore becomes a new observation.Our observation of what you have done with feedback on the way the loop was completed, with lessons learned and new insights shared.
So, “Nothing fails like Success”, the way Stephen Covey explains it –
“Are you struggling to make changes or respond to changing conditions? I know many people right now are being forced to change the way they work or live because of our turbulent environment. “Nothing fails like Success”, what does that mean exactly? Well, if you consider the challenges you’re facing, you might just be using an old approach that isn’t equal to the challenge. In other words, when we have a challenge and the response is equal to the challenge, that’s called success. But once we have a new challenge, the old, once successful response no longer works. That’s why it’s called a failure.”
If you are here because you are struggling with the current chronic situation in your organization and you need an organization to talk to, or someone to help you identify the next best plan of action, please get in contact with us. We are on the other-side of this email address – wappel@bauhaus.nl. Send us an email, containing answers the following three questions so we can assign the best suited advisor for you:
- Are you observing some or all of what we have captured in this blog?
- Are you in a position where you are task to make critical decisions, but you feel you can do with some help?
- You have disaster experience, but you need an independent sparring partner?
If you have read this blog but a chronic disaster is not your main area of focus, we have also being working hard behind the scenes to develop a program to assist organisations to migrate to a state of Data Centricity. Our Data Centricity program includes a Data Vitality barometer to show you if you have the overall fitness as an organization to make data an asset of your organization. The barometer will show you the areas that needs to mature and by applying our deep dive Data Maturity scan we can hone in on these areas and provide you with practical advice and expertise to move fast forward…
Bauhaus – we are here to help you Think Forward, so that You can Move Forward.
Senior Business Partner Bauhaus ArtITech
