Christine Marsan

Successful Exit from Lockdown

We are already in a major civilizational change, and with the coronavirus, we are entering a decisive phase. This is a forced, massive, major, global halt that will reshape the global landscape of both our liberal and globalized economy and our humanity and its priorities. The urgency for companies will be to resume their activities after the lockdown. For now, they must manage the current urgencies, the daily operations (run) with all the adjustments of remote work that lead for many to a slowdown in performance, to delicate situations at home, and certainly to reorganizations. The main benefit is a widespread increase in digital skills. What needs to be revisited: - Reinventing work methods, - Managing (in listening cell mode, speaking circles) the difficulties and tensions specific to confinement. How to support employees? - Accelerated skills transfer between where there are needs and where there are offers (people in under-activity...) The exit from confinement: What will be difficult is to consider the diversity of possibilities. We have just experienced with the coronavirus what a systemic situation means. The interweaving of the components of our world is now evident and particularly difficult to manage given the importance of the components to be considered. While the imperative will be to resume activity (short term), it is equally essential to consider the short, medium, and long term. For this, several actions can be carried out simultaneously: - Anticipate the recovery and how to organize the return to work with the new slowdowns related to reorganization, - Also propose a vision for the short, medium, and long term: people will need meaning, to be guided in this chaos (confinement and the aftermath, the recovery). Everyone needs to overcome fears to mobilize and co-create the future. - However, leaders are just as lost as other actors in knowing how to anticipate tomorrow; we are 'wired' for the old world to apprehend the new. Thus, we have a skills deficit, individually, to envision tomorrow. However, collectively, the exit from the crisis is possible. - We need to regain momentum, and for that, we must start from the imaginary to broaden the possibilities and find new solutions that allow for innovation. - And the essential thing is to have all managers and employees work together on the co-creation of the new version of the company: developing a true agility of posture, encouraging cooperative modalities, encouraging co-developed performance. - Practicing new change management reflexes: organic management, shared and flexible governance, sharing best practices to streamline processes, unblock energies, and learn to operate in the interstices...