For a considerable part of my professional career, I worked for an organisation that aimed to help clients unlock growth. A large part of this involved thinking about being dealing with change: anticipating it, responding to it and shaping it. In those projects, a lot of energy would focus on the ‘what’ (how should we innovate; what new direction should we take to survive or thrive in the future environment; what new products or services will best meet these new needs?). In the current pandemic, there is a lot of change going on but it is not really quite the same as those snazzy and exciting consultancy projects. Now it is all too clear what is needed (more hand sanitiser, more PPE, more testing kits, more resource to get things where they should be when freedom of movement is compromised, ways to keep people happy and secure at home etc).
There are endless stories appearing of how brands and businesses are responding to the need to support the Covid 19 effort. I don’t want to list them all here but it’s interesting to see the nitty gritty details behind these glowing stories of corporate resourcefulness. Beer producer Brewdog was one of the first to ‘pivot’ (note also the new vocab we are deploying in these testing times) its operations from drinks to hand sanitiser. A blog post provides a revealing insight into what’s actually involved. ‘Due to demand, there is a real shortage of suitable types of packaging so you will need to get creative here. So far we have filled 50ml glass bottles, 100ml glass bottles, 100ml plastic bottles, 200ml plastic bottles and larger containers too. We have even filled some 110ml mini beer bottles when no other type of packaging was available.’
And here is an example of a more straightforward ‘I see a gap in the market – ‘let’s go for it’ response. Supplydrop was ‘created to supply you with everything you might want/need to thrive under lockdown.’ It has a growing range of packages, from the pamper kit, the germ killer kit, the birthday kit and the survival kit.
In my household, we have our example of flexible thinking and making do. We were due to go on holiday to Cyprus. Instead, we went there ‘at home’. For two days, we drew and cut out local birds, dotted them around the house in various locations representing different habitats, and then rounded it off with a local meal, complete with Greek salad, fresh hummus, pitta bread and halloumi, all serenaded by Greek music and under a blue sky. Almost as good as the real thing – at least we didn’t have to negotiate Stansted airport to get there!