Wind of Change

I'm on my way from Siberia to Berlin, expecting to see a very different COVID-19 picture. And I'm thinking about the online future while having my coffee. Here are some of my thoughts.

Very quickly, we got tons of experts claiming they will help you to be effective online. Forget this. Expect at least a 50% performance drop with a very slow recovery (we're talking months here). You want people to change their habits radically. And these people will not be happy and relaxed - they will be doomed with all these news channels' hysterical terrorism and things happening around. And yes, if you didn't have a culture of continuous improvement, expect much worse than that.

Many say that if you had an efficient team, they would continue to go that way. Sorry, nope. Expect even awesome teams to easily slip into the "just a group of people" mode because face2face matters (remember how hard and tricky it is to be in a remote relationship).

Analytics say the whole market will go down. Yes and no. Expect young digital nomads who already love to work remotely and who have mastered the maintenance of remote relationships, to introduce disruptive changes and to detect unique opportunities elegantly. Your business will go down because you'll try to save its status quo, while they continue to experiment and spot new gold mines.

Politics try to cheer us up saying it will end soon and things will be as they were before. So the majority of traditional companies try to hibernate and painfully keep things going as they did before. Most probably, it will not end soon (minimum half a year to test vaccine if it's proved to work tomorrow; waves of quarantines). And our world will not look like it did before - you can't even imagine and predict how the landscape of reality, people and their habits will look. So if you can't manage to survive during these troubled times, you'll most probably die afterwards anyway.

Sounds pretty terrible, doesn't it? Well, that's life. It's grizzly, non-linear and beautiful - exactly the way we were not taught it to be. So what could we do? Let me share my thoughts.

Don't massage and don't try to change your people using remote work experts' magic. You'll just make it worse. Instead, think how to provide more support and help: better digital tools and equipment; facilitators and experienced coaches; maybe even remote sports trainers and psychotherapists.

Start to support and/or invest in your teams heavily. Regular team sessions (yes, Scrum ceremonies, and XP practices help) could provide you the basics. But we need more: more slack time, more group chit-chat, more jokes, laughing and virtual lunches and pubs - and it will all be new for people so someone should introduce and maintain it for quite a while. And education - prepare your people for the upcoming new world beforehand.

Grow yourself and change your company. Yesterday management style somehow worked recently, traditional hierarchies and matrixes were enough to be profitable. No one could guarantee you that this operating system will be capable of handling the upcoming new level of complexity. So despite the turbulence, try radical change experiments and invest heavily in your education and personal evolution.

And that's exactly the moment when I get a boarding announcement, so let's finish for today.