Sporadic benchmark indices, bleeding financial markets, falling Sensex, rising unemployment, and dipping consumption yet swelling expenditure certainly validates the fact that we are not experiencing normal times.
Individuals, teams and organizations are confronting undeniable uncertainty due to the current pandemic, COVID-19. Well established organizations may call the pandemic a white swan; but in India, for many small and medium sized enterprises, the current crisis has posed an emerging threat for survival, thus marking an irrefutable ‘Black Swan’ moment.
According to Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s definition, “A black swan is an unpredictable event that is beyond what is normally expected of a situation and has potentially severe consequences. Black swan events are characterized by their extreme rarity, their severe impact, and the widespread insistence that are obvious in hindsight.”
If the Coronavirus could speak, it has already given organizational leaders a wake-up call – about reinvigorating the purpose of their organizations and their personal leadership aura. The key challenge that leaders will face in addressing the challenges posed by the current crisis is their reluctance to change and their resistance to unlearn ways of the past.
It is already evident that in many organizations, operations have decelerated temporarily; at times, financial preparedness and operational contingency plans seem doubtful to be helpful; adding on, inability of the leaders to predict the severity of the consequences is the highest posing risk. If this major disruption invites threats, it is necessary for leaders to learn new ‘Mantras’ to escape threats.
To evade the posing threat of the pandemic, here are a few mantras for the leaders –
Mantra 1: Tap into suffering to build meaning – Realize the pain hit processes and practices in the organisation and explore the new way out
Mantra 2: Retort prolifically to missteps – When the existing practices fail, become your own harshest critic and reason out
Mantra 3: Reject the paralyzing fear – Doubt not if your new initiatives will succeed; believe that you’re going to do the right thing, and you’re going to do the best you can
Mantra 4: Explore with curiosity – Curiosity in exploring unfamiliar uncertainty leads to creative solutions to a problem
Mantra 5: Act with urgency – Analysing the extent to which a situation or a problem is important and how swiftly the actions are to be taken
Mantra 6: Communicate with transparency – Be open enough to tell people what you know and admit what you do not know
Mantra 7: Provide inhouse experts with the latitude to lead – Capitalize on inhouse experts’ strengths to help organisation rise higher
Mantra 8: Reinforce agility, flexibility and adaptability – Processes that enable organizational agility, flexibility and adaptability will serve as the key strategic differentiators relative to competitors
Mantra 9: Assess periodically – Recurrent risk analysis and evaluation will bear high chances to lessen the severity of threats
Mantra 10: Play defense and offense – Being reactive as well as proactive is essential to overcome potential threats of the pandemic
As leaders of the organization, it is ideal to hypothesize the reason for threats and apply the learnings in a nuanced exploration, bearing in mind the range of causality. This exploratory testing of the leaders will provide organizations with praiseworthy practices from blameworthy deviances. A fundamental shift in addressing the threats is necessary to reduce stigma and allow effective pre (risk assessment) and post (reflection and learning) enactments to occur.
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