The Bend called COVID-19 …and the straight road ahead

Every once in a while, the world is thrown a curve ball in form of a pandemonium. The turmoil can range from global pandemics like COVID-19, Influenza HIN1-1918 to global recessions like The Great Depression of 1929 and The Financial Crisis of 2007. What do these incidents have in common? And what can we glean from these historical events in relation to the behemoth of today in COVID-19?

More good than bad actually. Historically, global devastating events have birthed disruptive innovations that have furthered the advancement of life on earth. The most recent of these devastating events is The Financial Crisis of 2007 which is a great template for this observation. Some organizations founded during this recession provide products and services we can hardly live without today. Uber disrupted the taxi industry, Venmo is still shaking the banking and finance space, Airbnb is the new synonym for hospitality and WhatsApp redefined how we communicate, to mention but a few. If you think that was a fluke, let history take us further back. The Great Depression of 1929, which lasted 10 years, brought to life; United Technologies (UTX) that revolutionized the golden age of aviation, and as we know, BlueCross BlueShield (BCBS), the ubiquitous healthcare brand, was also founded in the same year. 1918 saw the world drenched in its worst war and worst epidemic – Spanish Flu (Influenza H1N1 virus) – that claimed over 50 million lives. But guess what, it created the likes of Lowe’s, Ally, AMC Theater and a host of multi-industry firms. The financial Panic of 1873 gave birth to IBM and GE, both of which are still major players today. The list is endless.

Challenging times like this have a way of forcing out the best in us and if history is anything to go by, be ready for the onset of industry-defining, life-transforming innovations and brands that will charge us into the future, post COVID-19. Since we have established that history is the best predictor of the future, let’s glance into the good things ahead of us in the wake of this current chaos.

The core fabric of the disruptive innovations to come will display these 3 characteristics

1.      A vivid disruption of the workforce and workplace: This will be characterized by two things - remoteness of workplace and micropreneur-filled workforce.

The widespread shutdown and social distancing efforts set in place to tackle the ongoing crisis has shown more than ever before that virtual/remote/ telework/work from home or wherever is possible on a permanent basis for many industries and organizations. Odds are that employers will add telework/flex/hybrid capabilities to their company culture in order to attract best talent. As corporations gravitate towards increasing the capacity of their virtual workplace post COVID-19, solutions that will help them build adaptive and connective culture without effacing the remote business framework will be highly sought after. The biggest push back to virtual work platform is that of productivity. To solve this, new Artificial Intelligence (AI) platforms that track real-time productivity will flood the market. Also, more sophisticated platforms with unbelievable interfaces and possibilities will emerge in ample time.

Organizations today are fraught with an increasing exodus of talent pool, with many of their employees leaving to launch their own small business, freelance or work independent contract jobs as micropreneurs - an entrepreneur that runs a small scale business or side gig, either alone or with less than 5 staff members – This deviation from norm has created what is termed the Gig economy. The likes of Uber, Airbnb, GrubHub, TaskRabbit and Postmates have added, in no small measure, to the gig economy. In order not to lose their best brains, employers would have to harness the entrepreneurial capital of their workforce and incorporate this asset into their daily operations. There is debate on whether having your employees perform tasks outside their main job description would be beneficial or detrimental to the firm, and, while this debate is ongoing, Google has proven its benefit with their “20% Project” a system that allowed its staff about 20% free time (approximately 1 day each week) to work on their pet projects. Such projects led to the creation of new products and services like the Gmail, AdSense, and Google News. Although Google has since tweaked that 20% free time approach, other proactive companies like 3M and Apple have adapted the style and reaped significant benefits. The future of work will be crammed with freelancers, micropreneurs and contractors, and as the world transcends towards a state where more things can be tracked and contracted, expect to see more of these short or flex-time gig solutions swarm the system.

2.      Healthcare, especially in the US, as we know it today will be a thing of the past: History is often created by big moments and this ‘Rona (as COVID-19 is described in certain quarters) pandemic, I strongly believe, will serve as that eureka moment for the US healthcare system. The system will have to rapidly adjust strategically, operationally and fiscally. From Insurance providers and Delivery systems to Health service vendors and Manufacturers (pharma, biotech, and medical equipment), we will welcome the new school of healthcare visionaries creating solutions around these two phenomena; Customization and Consumerization.

Customization of healthcare services is simply tailor-made health solution designed for each individual. Due to the fact that meeting and or exceeding patient satisfaction is a moving target in healthcare, the industry will have no choice but to cave in to the demand for increased customized care. In a digital post-COVID-19 era where telework would have been proven, telemedicine and on-demand care, which have become attractive today, will ask to also become mainstream. Services and solutions that will develop specific care experiences and mass customization models in scalable ways will rattle the healthcare space.

Consumerization of healthcare is a technology-enabled trend that helps customers drive and dictate solutions in the healthcare ecosystem. These efforts will focus on finding value-driven solutions across non-traditional avenues to bring diversified cost-effective offerings to the market as dictated by the customer. Like never before, healthcare and tech stakeholders will converge and cross-pollinate to create digital health platforms for the next century. Examples of this will include Validated Clinical Virtual Reality platforms, flexible and transparent billing models, and leveraging of AI to cure and prevent diseases as well as elevate life science. In furtherance to the earlier point, telemedicine will play a major role in delivery services. Big datasets in medicine will also advance genomics and create a new sub-field of data-driven preventive services and precision medicine.  

3.      Going forward, almost every decision will be big data-driven: This past decade, the data and analytics revolution has been gaining steam and accelerating change globally. Gone are the days of subjective leadership decision making skills like intuition, gut-feeling, “feeling”, instinct, hunch, inkling and so on. My “sixth-sense” tells me that business decisions of the future will be mostly data-driven as all other decision-making skill-set will take a back burner. To help with this, there will be a paradigm shift towards these two types of data - Predictive data and Prescriptive data analytics.

Predictive data is data that tells you what could happen in the future with a certain degree of confidence. Today’s Business Intelligence space is already riddled with different forms of predictive analytics. What we will see more of, with the onset of 5G and cloud platforms, is the permeation of predictive analytics across of all works of life. Industries like manufacturing, finance, retail and logistics have already latched on to the benefits of predictive data. Other industries like Healthcare and Education that have been passive to predictive data will need to rapidly adopt these solutions. For example the enormous amount of big data embedded in Electronic Health Records (EHR) going underutilized is like a sitting on a gold mine. Soon to come will be ventures that can run this big database through AI and create algorithms that can predict disease outcomes at early onset and drive a new wave of digitized services.

Prescriptive data is one that provides the actionable insights required to get results. This employs machine learning, artificial intelligence and advanced analytic archetypes across different industries to achieve remarkable results. From my standpoint, data and analytics has moved from a luxury to becoming a necessity. In the coming years, it will move from being a necessity to becoming a prerequisite - it will be that required factor any individual, organization, and government will “need to breath”. In not too distant future, Prescriptive Analytics as a Service start ups will springboard into relevance. Perhaps the most visible evidence of prescriptive data today is that of Google’s self driving cars and their ability to not only make real-time calculations to predict a car crash but also help the driver behind the wheel take action to navigate to safety. Future use cases of prescriptive analytics through automated systems will pose a big threat to human involvement and decision making in major industries and corporations but that would not stop its rise to prominence.

In order not to fall prey to normalcy bias, we need to understand that the above assertions are reasonable expectations. Therefore, the post COVID-19 future will be won by corporations, startups, platforms or ideas that will swiftly identify, nurture and manage this new bane of corporate ecosystem – entrepreneurship, technology and generational paradigm.

With everything happening now with this pandemic, one thing we can revel in is that the future will amaze us. After all is said and done, the truth is this. COVID-19 is not the end but only a bend that we need to navigate unto the straight path for a better future, so fear not, stay safe but brace up for an awesome future ahead.