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Yahya Engineering
Creating Pathways of Resilience: Thinking Sustainability Futures Post COVID-19
By Manishankar Prasad,
Date of Publication: 28 March, 2020
We live in unprecedented times of a pandemic, and the world is verging on a lockdown for the next few days as we grapple with fiercest challenge since the past few decades. Sustainability has been a regular in our business conversations, although verbal commitment and follow through are two different contexts altogether. Major economies are injecting capital through emergency fiscal packages such as India and Singapore so that small and medium enterprises can tide over these hard times. More businesses will collapse, and people must contend with loss in quality of life in these disruptive times, which hardly any foresights analyst saw it coming.
As the rubber meets the road, businesses may consider sustainability spends as strategic in developing resilience, for the next disruption. Sustainability is environmental, social and economic and thus the concept needs to be embraced in its entirety. In this post COVID era, digital will be a tool for ensuring resilience. ‘Work from Home’, shall be normal as it will have advantages as reduced traffic and lesser air pollution. Offline businesses such as food retail will need to ramp up safety standards and invest in PPEs for their staff. A culture of safety will envelope the everyday with renewed vigour. Businesses deeply ingrained within global supply chains would have to map their ‘degrees of freedom’ in event of disruptions (please speak to our team, if you would like to know more!).
Espousing ideas as solutions, is vacuous without the legs and feet to hit the ground running. An understanding of technology and unit economics is fundamental to building resilience. The Chinese Electronics Major Haier[1], decentralised its supply chain way back in 2012 by creating self-organising enterprises feeding into its value chain rather having a top-down approach which gets badgered by the slightest unrest.
Data is key to unpacking the fine threads of everyday mechanics of any operation. Water footprints can be captured through IoT sensors and datasets can be used to run models for emergency scenarios. Black Swan event such as COVID-19 does need a comprehensive initiative, though individual companies can prepare better through taking business continuity planning as a board level task, especially SMEs where the vulnerability quotient is significant.
Every crisis gives us a window to rethink our old ways of knowing and doing and helps us to unlearn. As you prepare for the ‘what is next post pandemic?’ answer, do factor in this simple question:
“What will make my business more resilient? or in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s words, “Antifragile””
If you need a sounding board on this question, do reach out on manishankar@yahyaengineering.net and we would be happy to speak to you on your resilience pathway.
(Information retrieved on 28/03/2020)