Leveraging the Global Reset: Ideas From Leading Thinkers

October 4, 2021 Hamish Forsyth

COVID has brought entrepreneurs, business leaders and innovators from across the world together in New Zealand. In April 2021, OneLeap hosted the first of its global Reset Forums in Auckland.

We used the unique privilege of New Zealand’s COVID-free shores to think about how to build better business and society as we emerge from the pandemic. What rules should stay broken as the world resets? What should we fundamentally redesign?

1. Maintain our green momentum with Sustainability Passports.

Reward the environmentally conscious with freedom of movement to ecological hotspots.

In 2020, the pandemic forced us to massively scale back carbon emitting activities such as international travel.
This resulted in the largest ever decline in global emissions — and demonstrated the potential of our collective impact.

Pre-COVID, we were already incentivising more sustainable business practices by scoring businesses and rewarding high performers with public “trust marks”, for example, Diana Verte Nieto’s Positive Luxury. Post-COVID, could we bring similar accountability to individuals?

Real-time trackers like CoGo score our carbon footprints, and health insurance companies already reward us for healthy behaviours. A ‘Sustainability Passport’ could combine behavioural scoring and rewards, using your sustainability profile to determine your access to places of environmental significance.

2. Go supply-side on the screen epidemic.

Drug dealers don’t take their own drugs. Silicon Valley mavens don’t let their children near screens. Suppliers must step up and create products they themselves would consume.

COVID led us to rack up more screen time than ever before, and we’ve experienced the health impacts first hand. We’ve been told it’s our responsibility to avoid overuse; in extreme cases, some have sent their children to “addiction bootcamps”. But this approach downplays the suppliers’ responsibility for the sophisticated methods used to keep us glued to our devices.

Like dealing with drugs, we either deal with the user, or deal with the economics behind the supply. We must reinvent business models that rely on screen addiction, and devise ways to make money without harming customers. Businesses seeking to minimise friction to purchase have already found ways to decrease required screen time — take Amazon, Hey Google and Dash.

3. Time is the new distance for ambitious service providers.

Burn the belief that physical distance prevents service providers from doing international business.

Prior to COVID, there was a powerful psychological barrier which caused many smaller services businesses to dismiss geographically distant opportunities.

COVID revealed that this coupling of distance and possibility was merely a mindset. Internally, many businesses thrived despite their employees being globally distributed.

Why then is distance a barrier to service delivery between businesses, if time zones are largely compatible or delivery can be substantially asynchronous? Look at longitude: Cape Town and Paris are 6000 miles apart, yet they share the same time zone, as do New York and Santiago.

Coming out of COVID, leveraging the reset means holding onto this new perception of distance, time and possibility.

4. Constraint has proved itself a super-power for corporate innovation.

Constraint used to mean recording your first album in your basement. In 2020, it meant making a ventilator from a vacuum cleaner in 10 days.

There was always a silver lining to constraint for the under-resourced innovator. Entrepreneurs know this best: when you can’t buy a way, you have to make a way. Now, it can be a superpower for the world’s largest companies.

For certain problems during COVID, nobody could buy a way. There was money to buy ventilators, but supply chain disruptions meant they couldn’t be produced. Health providers resorted to contracting local car and household appliance manufacturers to repurpose their components and produce ventilators within days.

In responding to constraint, firms like Rolls Royce and Dyson proved their agility, discovered their own “unmined gold” and found new needs they could potentially meet beyond their traditional industries.

5. If you value innovation, don’t run back to the water cooler.

Our interactions need rehydrating. Businesses that want to stay ahead must pay attention to who gets heard, and devise ways to bring out the full range of voices.

Pre-COVID, the watercooler was frequently a place for creative interaction. It also played to the strengths of the most socially comfortable. If we’re brutally honest, this forum favors big personalities and social clout — drowning out the introverts along with their ideas. This threatens innovation, as well as equity.

Former Legal Counsel at Google, Shana Simmons, noticed an interesting phenomenon over the past year within her team: soft-spoken team members who may not have felt comfortable contributing during in-person meetings were speaking up more in Zooms. A fully remote environment has leveled the playing field, offering other ways for people to voice their ideas.

By de-emphasizing the role of the watercooler with its social dance, and dialing up a virtual platform which promoted turn-taking and allowed non-spoken contributions, COVID gave more voice to those quieter or less confident contributors.

If we care about diversity and innovation, we actively need to promote inclusiveness in our work conversations through more neutral platforms.

6. Could privacy reform improve innovation?

Privacy reform is an opportunity to expand our understanding of each other, benefiting social cohesion and therefore innovation.

We face historically high levels of polarisation in the US, UK, and increasingly Europe. This has been exacerbated by the online “filter bubbles” we inhabit: the highly personalized, agreeable spaces that search and social media personalization have constructed for us.

COVID reinforced our bubbles by reducing the possibility of spontaneous real-life interactions. It also increased our general sense of living in a threatening environment, deepening hostility and fear towards the Other.

Part of the solution may lie in privacy reform, which is gaining new momentum. Social media’s access to our personal data is what enables it to serve us exactly what we want — and exactly what we want to hear. Limiting this access might expose us to some much needed friction: ideas and people that challenge our thinking.

Breaking out of our bubbles might gradually help to chip away at social polarization, and it might increase the diversity of perspectives we hear when we innovate for our customers.

7. We transliterated work. Now it’s time to redesign it.

We must retire the cut-and-paste approach we’ve taken to remote work, and radically redesign work to fit the way in which it is now done.

A degree of ongoing remote or hybrid work seems inevitable in many industries. However, we should not base this on the model we applied to get through COVID, which focused on continuing work as normally as possible, just by remote means.

What is now needed is a first principles redesign of work based on the ways it has irreversibly changed. In some industries, this might mean radically embracing management-by-outcomes, with greater (bounded) employee autonomy or embracing asynchronous work. As well as being motivating, these are necessary responses to the new costs of micro-managing in a remote or hybrid environment.

In other industries, it might mean hard conversations about underlying issues of trust and motivation, before we create a digital equivalent of the supervisor over your shoulder.

8. Is big government back?

In some countries, COVID has generated the recognition of and political will for a larger role for government.

Before COVID, the comfortable and well-off felt, for the most part, economically stable. The prevailing narrative was that government should get out of the way when it came to execution.

But COVID exposed a far greater group of people to the precipice. The US reached its highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression. And governments did things that only governments can do. The conservative UK Government, for example, effectively nationalised a huge chunk of private sector payroll at the cost of £52Bn.

Upheavals like COVID have created the support for bold government action before: the US interstate system was birthed after WW2. Biden’s multi-trillion dollar infrastructure package demonstrates a similarly expansive vision for government’s role including systemic challenges like the environment and inequality.

COVID taught us that our lives depend on coordinated government. The common precariousness of COVID generated shared empathy for others, and a recognition of government’s unique abilities. Bigger investments may lie ahead.

9. A call to arms for urban resilience.

COVID is a call to arms for urban resilience. COVID demonstrated how vulnerable modern cities are in times of crisis. There will be others; the time to invest in their resilience is now.

We could start with stronger supply chains for essentials like food. Cities need to ramp up local, sustainable production; the tech-enabled food ecosystem and urban farming point the way. Second, we need healthier environments. COVID mortality rates have been tied to poor air quality: air pollution contributed to 27% of deaths in China, 18% in the United States and 14% in the United Kingdom. Third, through greater social cohesion. COVID showed that in crisis conditions, neighbourhoods want to come together; can we make design decisions to support this spirit of community, like taking out highways that divide communities?

COVID has provided a pause button on the rapid urbanization that has outpaced planners. As Vishaan Chakrabarti and others have argued, better cities call for resilience-by-design.

10. Leaders broke through the experimentation barrier. Keep it broken.

Leaders must proactively craft an experimental culture out of the forced moves that COVID required of them.

COVID was a burning platform that forced many executives to take risks that their cultures would not normally have sanctioned, because there was no other option. An example was allowing wholesale remote working.

But emergency situations do not drive sustainable innovation. The crisis will end, and before that, crisis fatigue will kick in. There is a temporary window of permissiveness now. We must use the muscles we’ve developed while adapting to COVID to create a lasting culture that supports experimentation. This will include establishing clear rules of engagement to promote creative risk-taking.

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