„If the house is on fire, it‘s too late to start building the fire brigade.“
As I share in my classes preparation and quantitative forecasting are needed for successful crisis communication and transformational management in the digital age. Furthermore we do know from research that successful teams and change management in organisations are based on three key factors:
preparing with data-based forecasting.
sharing explicit value-sets and clear workflows.
communicating in a consistent flow, including all stakeholders and team members.
Here I sum-up a few more of my learnings for digital transformation and change management amid the #Covid19 crisis. Take a look and let me know what you think. 🙌🏼
I feel extremely sorry for people like my mother who experienced as a kid bomber nights and evacuation during the Second World War and experiences now during Corona again isolation and fear for her loved ones.
However, what I learned over the years from my conversations with war survivors is to gain strength from positive thinking backed by anticipation and preparation. This mix of mindfulness enables us to absolutely make the best out of a crisis situation.
Crisis communication will work better and more credible, if we prepare and up-skill our communication and storytelling skills in peaceful times. This includes research into who and where our audiences are and what will benefit them and serve them best.
It was only back in November 2015 during the Paris attacks that more journalists in Europe and Germany started to understand the positive impact of digital skills and social media storytelling in real-time and live. But the transition to radical new digital methods, workflows and a new visual grammar in media and education kept moving slowly and was often met with reluctance.
The reluctance was an underestimated threshold, not taking into account that digital change can sustainably only happen in an organisation, if all levels from blue collars to blue ties commit themselves to it. This commitment demands that innovation leaders assign about 80% of their time to communication and storytelling.
Now during the current crisis, it seems that many organisations and really everybody in their personal lives positively embrace digital methods and speed up the transit into the new ecosystem - while at the same time rethinking values, social communities and political institutions. That’s great news for digital native minds as we know true innovation emerges always in a combination of the old and new.
For me it’s a positive pattern that citizens, professionals, leaders recognize more widely the effective power of digital skills and methods enabling us to professionally connect and collaborate online as well as combining it with offline. This transformation is as much about skills and methods as about more mobile mind-sets and mindful values.
Media and educators must play a leading role in transforming our societies into more solidary, sharing and caring bodies through digital literacy - blurring the lines between online and offline, in other words between brain-computer-interfaces and nature for the benefit of people, communities, organizations - and the well-being of our planet.
For sure, I’ll keep investing my knowledge and skills into helping others to successfully reach their transitional goals and unlock their potential. And why not, as a member of the second generation of war survivors, positive thinking belongs to my DNA.
