2020 has been a challenging year for many reasons – the personal loss and suffering resulting from the pandemic, and the economic challenges with businesses struggling to survive. My blog, The Cost of Doing Nothing, from July 2020 looked at the impact of the COVID pandemic on technology and the network. Do the five lessons highlighted then still apply?
If there’s one takeaway from 2020, it’s this: the only constant in life is change and it is the ability to adapt to change that underpins success and survival. 2020 brought change to how we work, learn, shop, watch, heal, and connect. We witnessed significant technological change, and, equally important, we changed.
Pause and think back to the start of 2020. How many times, prior to the pandemic, might you have heard or said the following?
The pandemic shifted attitudes. It forced us to confront pre-conceived ideas and attitudes; instead of focusing on why we couldn’t do something, we focused on how we could. Doing nothing was not an option, so enterprises embraced technology and did things that they previously thought impractical or impossible:
Customer loyalty and how we consume services changed:
While technology may have fueled the ‘new normal,’ it was the change in our attitude and mindset that made it happen. The technology was already there; the pandemic forced us to embrace it.
Do the five lessons highlighted in July, summarized below, still apply? Yes.
As the Royal Bank of Canada aptly summarizes in 8 Ways COVID Will Transform the Economy and Disrupt Every Business “no matter how humbling this crisis has been, it should remind us that even a massive jolt to the planet cannot change the trajectory of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. If anything, we’re emerging from this crisis with an even greater desire to harness smart technologies, artificial intelligence, and vast pools of data to transform pretty much everything we do. COVID did not crush the future. It merely brought it forward.”
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