BUSINESS | LIFE | LESSONS
COVID-19 — It’s Not Over Until It’s Over…
But that doesn’t stop you from planning for when it is!
This wasn’t how 2020 was meant to be. I didn’t plan for this. But maybe I should have done. While very few people knew anything about COVID-19 at the start of the year, contingency planning is less about the specific underlying root cause and more about the impact of an event — any event — that might stop your business from operating in the way it usually does.
It might be a train strike. It might be a burst water pipe. It might be…well, it might be anything that impacts you; your premises; your customers; your contacts; your donors; your shareholders; your systems; your working practices; your…well, your everything.
I still remember being involved in a contingency planning exercise — when working for one of the world’s largest banks — on 6 July 2005. It was an exciting day for a number of reasons. Not least because it was the day that the 2012 Olympics were awarded to London at the ceremony in Singapore. The contingency planning exercise was also interesting. As we made decisions about a fictitious incident — a major water leak in our 42-storey global headquarters, that was likely to make working there impossible for a number of weeks — so those running the planning exercise, responded by showing how the markets; our customers; our employees; and the wider community might react and how they might be impacted by the decisions we made. It certainly made us think. It certainly made us better prepared. The decision to hold this event on this day — 6 July 2005 — had been made many weeks, if not months earlier, as part of a contingency planning timetable.
The following day — 7 July 2005 — was the day of the London Bombings. Our contingency planning exercise the day before was no more than fortuitous, but that’s not to say that it didn’t help deal with this tragic — albeit completely different scenario.
If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail — Benjamin Franklin
Despite the criticism of the UK Government from the Press, it is largely with the benefit of hindsight, rather than foresight. There is little doubt that there will have been contingency planning at the highest levels, and that the possibility of a pandemic will have been amongst one of the scenarios considered. BUT…if they failed to consider or fully plan for this severe pandemic, should we be as critical as some have been? Should we have had more critical care capacity within our NHS? Should we have built a medical testing capability, on the off chance that such a situation was going to occur? Yes, if we knew it was. But we didn’t, and those that are currently being critical of a lack of planning would possibly have been equally critical of the government wasting resources if large numbers of intensive care beds remained unused or testing facilities lay idle with nothing to test.
So, even though the current lockdown will continue until at least 1 May 2020, what will you do if it is announced that your employees can, and should go back to work? Or, return to work if they can remain 2 metres from any of their colleagues?
Could you accommodate this? Or would you prefer for them to continue working from home? Do you have communication channels in place to ensure that two-way communication continues with your people, however large or small your organisation is?
And…is this now the opportunity to consider whether how we used to work in the past, is the way we want to work in the future? Do you need such a big office? Do you need an office at all?
Whilst we didn’t know that Coronavirus was coming…we do know that it will come to an end. Whilst we have time, let’s plan positively for it.
