In a recent article I published, I spoke about four new driving forces in business and their implications for this third decade of this millennium. These forces are; Health and Wellness, Transformation, Uncertainty and Conscious Capitalism. These forces are behind numerous shifts in how we think, approach and act moving forward. And what we think, the mindsets we adopt, directly impact how we will act. They will define our approach to business moving forward.
These 8 shifts in mindsets, among others, can inform how we lead, participate, strategize and execute in a COVID-19 and post pandemic world.
Each shift is stated as “From – To”. The “From” statements represent the approach and thinking of recent years. The “To” statements articulate the shift that is currently occurring and will become part of our conventional wisdom over the next decade. It is important to note that because a statement is “From” does not mean that it is no longer relevant, in use, or important. Instead, its “From” designation points to it having become conventional wisdom over the last decade and although it may still apply in a variety of situations and circumstances, movement is shifting towards an evolution or change in thinking.
Here are 8 mindset shifts relevant for the present and near future.
1. From “What’s in it for me?” To “We are in this together.”
This shift highlights a move from a more selfish outlook in the conducting of business to a more selfless posture wherein purpose matches profit as a priority. Driven by a focus on health and wellness, the forces of transformation, uncertainty and conscious capitalism also are driving this shift. But the impetus of its emergence today is clearly found in the pandemic crisis. COVID-19 has sped up our awareness, consciousness and connection to conscience by at least a decade. The pandemic has exposed deficiencies in governments around the world from China to Sweden to the UK to the US. Whether it’s government’s response time, healthcare systems, inadequate testing, lack of essential items needed to fight the virus from masks to ventilators, or their questionable policies, COVID-19 requires an all hands-on deck approach. As the private sector gets involved to help fill in the gaps, people ask why it takes a crisis to change the mission of business to put social well-being on par with their profits. It has highlighted the need for the private sector to add value to society and work together with government to care for society. People still care about what’s in it for them, however, business will increasingly operate from a belief that “We are in this together.”
2. From Personal is Individual To Personal is Dangerous
Eric Klinenberg, professor of sociology and director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University, recently stated in an article that, “The coronavirus pandemic marks the end of our romance with market society and hyper-individualism.” He means that we will likely reorient our politics and policy making to invest much more in the public good and health services. This arises as COVID-19 has shown us how much more our fates are truly linked. Personal is no longer just individual. What you hold as personal can now impact the greater whole of humanity. Klinenberg says, “The cheap burger I eat from a restaurant that denies paid sick leave to it’s cashiers and kitchen staff makes me more vulnerable to illness, as does the neighbor who refuses to stay home in a pandemic because our public school failed to teach him science or critical thinking skills.” We now know from living through this pandemic that what we touch, who we are with, and breathing in enclosed spaces carries with them risk, even great risk. In time, and especially after a cure for COVID-19 is found, our sensitivity to these dangers will subside, however, they will never completely go away until new generations who will not have lived through this crisis grow up and take their place in the world. Much like we did after the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918. Life was deeply altered after that pandemic, but our collective memory faded as those who lived through it passed away.
3. From Psychology To Neuroscience
Ever since Daniel Goleman’s groundbreaking book “Emotional Intelligence” appeared on shelves in 1995, the role of psychology in helping business understand and manage workplace behavior has become an accepted social science to be leveraged. Surely it’s role will continue. Moving with the force of transformation, advances in neuroscience, and applied neuroscience in particular have been appearing at a staggering rate. Applied neuroscience, the use of neuroscience tools and insights to measure and understand human behavior, is finding its way into numerous facets of business including strategy planning, marketing, leadership, and economics. It is becoming a primary tool in understanding and driving transformation in business. Neuroscience will help us transform how we see leadership development and capabilities. It is enhancing our understanding of the brain and how it responds to stimulus including marketing campaigns, how we judgement messages, people and situations, how evaluate risk and reward, and how we adaption to change. Psychology remains as a tool in businesses arsenal to evaluate and develop human resources, but neuroscience will take the lead in measuring their efficacy.
4. From Effectiveness To Empathy
Do you remember the dotcom boom and its promise of a “new economy”? Well, the old economy ate the new economy for lunch and business returned as vigorously as ever to its pursuit of profit instead of eyeballs. In doing so, productivity and effectiveness became the sugar plumb faeries that danced in the heads of CEOs as they dreamed of conquering new markets. As consumers increasingly called for more connection to purposes that gave increased meaning to their consumption, social responsibility as a core value rose throughout the business world. As mentioned previously, societies increasingly call for business to put purpose and social well-being on par with profits. And COVID-19 is putting health and wellness combined with uncertainty as key forces driving our shift towards empathy. This will further drive an expectation for capitalism to contribute to society’s well-being and not only live off it’s consumption. The result is a shift from a focus on effectiveness to developing our empathy muscles so we can truly connect with others, more deeply understand their concerns, while more fully entering into compassion. Business leaders are experiencing this shift amidst the COVID-19 crisis wherein our effectiveness has given way to understanding and feeling the emotions of others as an authentic way to connect.
5. From Consuming To Sharing and Providing
Author Sonia Shah, stated in an article published in Politico, that “the trauma of the pandemic will force society to accept restraints on mass consumer culture as a reasonable price to pay to defend ourselves against future contagions.” She points to the fact that our industrial activities have forced humans and wildlife into much closer proximity allowing microbes such as SARS, Ebola and Zika to cross over into humans. The combination of reconsidering the level of industrial output required to satiate our consumption with a movement away from focus on self to focus on others, will lead business to focus on connecting consumers to the experience of sharing and providing for others. Instead of buying more than you need, how can you share what you have and provide for those less fortunate all at the same time. This is all part of the new values purported by the practice of conscious capitalism. Trust, compassion, collaboration, and value creation for stakeholders beyond shareholders will help to drive this shift from consumption to sharing and providing.
6. From Focus on Outcomes To Focus on Impact
The rise of Conscious Capitalism combined with an ongoing sense of uncertainty will drive business to measure their output and outcomes in terms of impact on their stakeholders including society at large. Achieving strategic outcomes such as growth and market share will continue to frame business planning, however, achievement of an objective or outcome will no longer be enough. Making a tangible and measurable impact to stakeholders will drive planning and business direction. Just as business has reframed its evaluation of leadership performance to include not only the achievement of goals but the way in which they are achieved (ethically, humanely, inclusionary), businesses will increasingly require proof of impact. This shift will be driven by all stakeholders as they too shift from “What’s in it for me”, to “We are in this together.” Show me the impact, will become the norm and in turn change the way in which business sees itself as focused on shareholders to focused on stakeholders including society-at-large.
7. From “We need to innovate.” To “We need analyze and understand.”
Since the rise of the Internet and the rapid disruption of business models via advancing technologies, innovation has been the mantra of business, a key strategy to combat inevitable disruption from the outside. Those that learned how to innovate, stayed a step ahead. Those that disrupted became the alpha beasts of the business savannah. We don’t even have to mention their names as we all know who they are. Innovation and disruption have gone hand in hand and will continue to do so. In recent decades, innovation relied on market research, technology and creative minds to develop new and more tailored solutions for different market segments. Research methods and statistics have been part of what fuels innovation. COVID-19 brings a lingering state of uncertainty. Businesses will respond by seeking refuge in transformation as a strategy to control and drive impact amidst the uncertainty. Business will innovation on a new scale that transforms the way we live our lives. This level of transformation requires an increasingly scientific approach with regards to data, large amounts of data, and its analysis. Our ability to tackle big data, analytics and artificial intelligence are leading to deeper scientifically based insights about consumer behavior. Innovation will never go away, but for the foreseeable future, business will focus on its ability to deeply analyze and understand data so as to more accurately respond to consumer needs and transform their relationship with them.
8. From Connect and Disconnect To Transcend and Integrate.
History shows us that new technologies are often met with ambivalence and even fear, as they are perceived to threaten established activities, values and institutions. For example, we no longer think about times with and without electricity, or times with and without television. But when electricity was new, society took decades to adjust until its existence was so pervasive that it stopped being recognized. It became part of life just as oxygen and water are part of life. Same goes for television. In its early age, some people declared that television would corrupt society, turn us into zombies, and inject us with damaging X-rays. Our individual and social conscience transformed over time to adapt and no longer focus on distinctions of with or without. Today’s equivalence is the Internet and social networks.
Our lives have been divided into times when we are connected and times when we are disconnected. In fact, as a species, we wrestle with how to disconnect and still belong. These are the growing pains of assimilation into a new way of life. As a species, we are transforming our individual and collective conscience again, and COVID-19 is accelerating this process.
As we continue to assimilate these technologies, we move beyond a mindset of connecting and disconnecting to transcending and integrating. We move beyond a binary view to one in which we expand our view and move beyond binary to integration wherein the difference between connecting and disconnecting are subsumed into the activities of our daily lives. Just as we no longer think about connecting or disconnecting from electricity, we are increasingly moving away from thinking about the Internet and social media as something to connect and disconnect from, to seeing them as part of a larger experience we call contemporary. Our mindsets transcend the over simplified binary belief of connected or disconnected and integrate the binary nature of connection into our seamless experience of life.
CONCLUSION
The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the evolution of key forces underlying the context of business. We are living through a shift from the previous decades driving forces to new forces including health and wellness, transformation, uncertainty and conscious capitalism. These forces are in turn driving shifts in our awareness, beliefs and behaviors. It all begins with our growing awareness and shifting beliefs. Our beliefs direct our actions and behaviors. Key beliefs all business should be aware of in order to adapt include believing we are in this together, that neuroscience can take us to the next level of understanding human behavior, that what was once personal is now potentially dangerous, that empathy is essential in business leadership, that sharing and providing matter as much as consuming, that business only matters if it provides impact to individuals and society-at-large, that in order to transform to our next selves we need to analyze and understand what big data can tell us about our behavior, and as part of becoming our next selves we must move beyond a binary experience of the Internet and social media to transcend and integrate them into our lives without conscious recognition of their presence.
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