THE QUEST FOR POSTPANDEMIC RESILIENCE AND RECOVERY

Business resilience is the buzzword now. After 2020, is that a surprise? Most businesses don’t have to be told that they need to do things differently – many are actively searching for a way to “build back better” as the economy recovers. But how do you do that? A good way forward is to look back.

- KRISHNA PAUPAMAH

While 2020 was a challenging year, it was also a rare opportunity for organisations to learn more about their businesses. The pandemic was a pressure cooker, exposing fissures in business models and operations, sometimes breaking them entirely. It also revealed surprising capabilities. Many organisations discovered that they could pivot quickly to remote work.

However, during the time when services were being labelled “essential” or “non-essential”, many found themselves unprepared. Systems broke down. Customers were lost to more prepared competitors. Profits disappeared. And many were not resilient enough to survive the crisis.

For those that were unprepared yet survived, these hard lessons can be used to reflect and reshape for a better future.

But first, what exactly is business resilience? It can be defined as the ability to recover from setbacks, adapt well to change, and to continuously improve despite challenges. With new technologies emerging, geopolitical and environmental disruptions, market and consumer demands evolving, this ability is fundamental for business continuity.

As a business owner myself, COVID-19 was a wake-up call to revaluate my company’s resilience, which is why we are currently undergoing a transformation exercise where we put our systems and business models under the microscope. For months, we asked ourselves:

•What are we doing badly?

•How can we do things better?

•What can we do to make the change?

•What potential crisis may we face in the future? Are we prepared for it?

These questions are confronting, but they are a necessary part of building a more resilient business. In my opinion, we should focus our efforts on revamping these three areas:

1.BUSINESS MODELS