Economic Recovery – Swan Island Networks

5 Ways to Improve Your Economic Recovery Results Quickly

Pete O'Dell — Fri, 01 May 2020 00:01:24 +0000

5 Ways to Improve Your Economic Recovery Results Quickly

Pete O'Dell
May 1, 2020

As the global pandemic caused by COVID-19 (coronavirus) becomes more controllable, we face a unique problem.

How to start the discretionary economy back up?

Economic recovery is complex

Restarting the economy entails consumer activities like church, sporting events, and trips to the beach. We expect to see all these things this summer and fall.

For industries that rely on social interaction, the business implications are serious. Tourism, retail, and entertainment are a few of the industries most affected by the lockdown. International business travel has all but stopped. Global consulting firms are confronting an industry-wide contraction even while they adapt to meet shifting client needs. That is to say, the number of different factors involved in the economic recovery will be large.

So, here are five ways you can prepare your teams for the economic recovery. Realize there may be external factors that suddenly cause you to retreat (recurrence), rethink (new legal liabilities), or reorganize (someone’s found a better way).

1. Organize a corporate nerve center

Put together the corporate never center described in the recent McKenzie article Decision Making in Uncertain Times. Unify your efforts. Have a 24/7 schedule with rotating resources. Get strategic direction from the C-Suite and set up a recurring briefing with the board of director. Share all relevant issues and information with the cross-company effort.

2. Monitor trusted sources for situational intelligence

A unified monitoring effort will save you time. And it’s more effective than random browsing. So, stay aware of best practices. Know the laws and regulations. Follow changes to industry policies. Track virus recurrences and changes to your supply chain. Follow external sources that impact your organization, like open-source intelligence (OSINT), social media, and government alerts. The rate of change to your business will be very high. And missing key elements may slow your entire recovery effort.

3. Share and collaborate

Sharing best practices with your peer group will serve you well long after the recovery. Realize that companies like yours are dealing with almost identical issues. Similarly, companies in your geographic region are also dealing with parallel problems. Don’t worry, there are many ways to share without revealing proprietary information.

4. Everyone, keep watch

Establish a “see something/say something” process. Empower your teams to report issues via phone, text, and email. Whatever it takes. Have a rapid response capability set up to take advantage of the information bullets you receive.

5. Get real-time feedback

Contingency planning will be key to getting knocked down, getting up, and trying another way to get on track. Expect there to be confusion and failures along the way, and instill a sense of urgency to solve the issues.

Follow these steps and you will be more able to craft an effective response plan and execute it quickly. It’s important to your organization and very important to the world at large.

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Why timely information sharing can help your recovery now!

Pete O'Dell — Sun, 05 Apr 2020 02:00:32 +0000

Why timely information sharing can help your recovery now!

Pete O'Dell
April 5, 2020

Restarting the world economy after the COVID-19 crisis is going to be hard. We’ve never turned the world off like this before. (And kudos to every worker in health care, power, public safety, security, trucking, and everyone else who can’t work from home. We’re all relying on you!)

Connect The Dots With Information Sharing

An almost-forgotten lesson from 9/11 is the need to share information (connect the dots). And the world is still bad at it. It seems we can’t define what a COVID-19 death is. So, even the numbers we’re likely all watching are in question. If everyone goes a different way during the economic restart, two things will happen. First, we will add months to the timeline. And second, we will collectively waste billions of pick-your-favorite-currency. A little sharing and coordination up front might help everyone.

"The key to a successful restart is communicating and sharing all the best ideas and information ahead of time."

Pete Odell Tweet

Example: The Food Industry

We’re all going to face challenges getting back to the ‘normal’ we took for granted a couple of months ago. One example shared with me was whether food workers should be required to test virus-free before returning to work. Sounds relatively benign until you think about the number of government and private sector decision makers who would have to deal with this.

For example, if you have 2,000 restaurants in 17 countries, it’s likely going to be a very complicated period. Repeat that scenario with 10,000 other problems, and you start to get a sense of the complexity. Disclaimer: I know nothing about the restaurant industry except for two very impactful years working for McDonald’s in the ‘70s. But I’m not going back into anyone’s restaurant as a consumer until this gets figured out.

Example: NYC Metropolitan Resilience Network

The NYC Metropolitan Resilience Network (MRN) started with information sharing in mind. One of its action items after Superstorm Sandy was to easily share situational awareness information across the network. Today, over 400 organizations in the MRN use the automated situational awareness dashboards. Analysts can augment the dashboards in the event of a crisis.

Start Collaborating Now

Information sharing on a broad scale now can help sort out some of these issues later. Industries can collaborate with each other. Governments at the local, regional, and national levels can coordinate. There can be communication between all parties. Information sharing can prevent random decisions that result from a lack of planning.

You don’t have to do all the work. There are many people out there that will have kick-ass solutions to many of the problems we’re going to face. The key is communicating and sharing all the best ideas and information ahead of time. You don’t have to share your proprietary data. You can track other’s efforts, and gain some time while saving some money. It could mean a lot to the world at large.

This is something you can do from the couch, home office, or wherever you are sheltering in place. Imagine if everyone helped solve one small issue. We could impact the economic restart the way Wikipedia has impacted historical knowledge.

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How To Prepare For A Strong Recovery From COVID-19

Pete O'Dell — Sun, 29 Mar 2020 00:29:39 +0000

How To Prepare For A Strong Recovery From COVID-19

Pete O'Dell
March 29, 2020

The world is in free fall and people are confused.

The Covid-19 pandemic has caused many to speculate when the infection will peak. And when the world can begin to recover from this major event.

Early predictions of a pandemic were ignored, but things will recover, and you need to be ready.

How To Prepare For A Strong Recovery From COVID-19

Start preparing now for a strong recovery from COVID-19 while the majority of your critical assets (your people) are at home. Likely you were caught short on the pandemic. Don’t make the same mistake on the recovery. Your business depends on it.

The recovery is going to affect every business differently. A small-town bed and breakfast will re-enter the commercial economy much differently than a multi-national financial institution. But, many of the underlying thought processes are the same.

Here’s how to prepare for a strong recovery from COVID-19.

Intelligence Filtering

The news has great insights. But, you need to filter the information. Find the areas that are relevant to your specific issues and problems. Then, analyze them. After that, share selectively and on a targeted basis across your organization.

Situational Awareness

You need to maintain full situational awareness. It’s likely to be a rapidly-changing landscape. For example, you may plan to reopen a factory in Washington State as cases ebb only to have a flareup in a nearby town.

Information Sharing

You can’t do it all alone, and you shouldn’t want to. You need to work with customers and suppliers in a tightly coordinated fashion. But, regional organizations, critical infrastructure providers, and government agencies are also critical.

Systematic Response

Take a disciplined approach toward preparedness. You likely have the time now to do a great planning job. Get the tools and processes you need set up and integrated into your organization while its still raining outside.

Preparedness always takes a back seat to other activities except in the most thoughtful of organizations. While there is little to no activity, it’s a great time to get organized for the recovery cycle. I hope these fundamentals help you prepare for a strong recovery from COVID-19 and also lay the groundwork for responding to your next emergency situation. (You know its coming!)

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