Two Years and Two Days – Urgent Demand for Technology Solutions in Education and Training
Think about those key initiatives you started in the last two years, has disruption put a stop to them, or did you simplify and allow swift progress with outcomes like this:
“Today we are rolling out video conferencing (VC) to thousands of employees, having spent the past two years failing to agree on a common VC system for our organisation. It took only two days of lockdown for the past two years of noise to be pushed aside – and suddenly we have a working VC system for our entire organisation. We [IT] knew all along the tool worked and is exactly what our business needed.”
I have seen some businesses respond to rapid disruption by taking a step back into old practices, they stop forward-looking activity to focus heavily on the short-term. Their strategy is to ride out a difficult period in the hope they can rush back to the way things where before.
Many of these businesses will survive and some may even be rewarded by shareholders for their prudence. On taking a deeper look inside the business we can find hard earned talent and moral has been lost, and the all-important rhythm of the business has taken a bashing.
Consider though, as a leader, is that the smartest strategy we have in our toolbox and is it still relevant to the disruption of today? The new normal has smashed the usual barriers to embracing technology, affording you a new strategy enabled by technology – a strategy your own people have shown to support and continue to pull towards them!
“We rolled out Microsoft Teams group-wide in a single day! I do hope we can hold on to this entrepreneurial spirit that is driving change in our business”
Countless businesses are running near identical but separate projects to prove the same technology will do what it has been designed to do. What would it feel like to take a different approach, rather than expend energy proving why ‘we should use technology’ what if we asked the C-suite to explain ‘why are we not using this technology?’
These past months we have seen colleagues demonstrate great patience and better than presumed IT skills when the need for change is immediate, and all without the added complexity of debating customisation for extended periods.
The old view of home working is gone forever; we have the choice not to return entirely to the way we worked before. We have been given permission to move fast and partner with the C-Suite, surely now is the time to design the future of work across your organisation. Begin by leading and promoting a sense of urgency for internal change, maximise the ‘pull’ for technology solutions you find all around you, manage not fear risk, and don’t forget to market the hell out of the outcomes!
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In my next post I expand a tad on my conversations with leaders in Education and Training. Working Remotely, is Working shares real-world observations from making the rapid move to working remotely.
