Supporting proactive recovery from recession

An economic recession provides an opportunity to: review corporate activities and their impacts; reassess corporate aims, purpose and strategies; and consider alternative operating and business models. Directors and their advisers should proactively question and challenge. Rather than return to previous practices, there might be more responsible and inclusive ways forward that do not reduce bio-diversity, contribute to global warming or damage to the environment. Alert practitioners consider insights, explore options, and investigate possibilities for helping their clients or employers, other people and organisations, communities and societies to cope. New services, relationships and/or collective responses may be required that could be offered or supported. There has sometimes been a wide gulf between rhetoric about the need for speed and agility in rapidly changing times and uncertain and sluggish corporate responses. Practitioners could reflect on how crisis, contingency, disaster recovery and virtual working arrangements might be redesigned. Risk appetites and processes might also need review. The legal, financial and practical consequences of the global pandemic and Government responses to it have given rise to conflicts of interest, defaults and disputes that will take some time to negotiate and resolve. Some arrangements will need to be unwound and others extended. Boards may need help in coping with economic cycles, crises and uncertainty, undertaking fundamental reviews and preparing for a ‘new normal’. Practitioners can help organisations to identify, capture and share what those who turn out to be most successful in new business and operating models and new ways of working do differently, and build such superior approaches into algorithms, methodologies, models, processes and tools. The right support and performance support tools and alert advisers, guides and scouts can be critical for a learning, transition or transformational journey. Experienced practitioners can help directors to ensure the people of an organisation, and those who are associated with it and dependent upon it, receive the practical and psychological support they require. Following a period of virtual operation, there may be new patterns of work to consider from the perspectives of both people and organisations. There could be different models of organisation to consider. Pragmatic and practical professionals should be open to various ways in which they could support initiatives to cope with a crisis, whether alone or in collaboration with others. Directors should encourage and enable CEOs and management teams to reboot and reinvent the enterprises for which they are responsible, and they should chart a pragmatic and inspiring course through the challenges and opportunities of a ‘new normal’ world. Practitioners should be ready to programme manage the resulting portfolios of projects. They should support responsible steps to deal with the resulting corporate, national and international indebtedness and reinvigorate the global economy