What Innovating Taught Me about Confronting COVID-19 Uncertainty

When you’re part of a team that operates like a startup to develop new business ideas, working under conditions of extreme uncertainty is familiar turf. 

Although years spent making decisions quickly without complete information didn’t fully prepare me for COVID World, many of the practices I learned from my work in innovation have helped me adapt to the pandemic’s numerous challenges. I’ve found the following innovation tenets especially useful:

• Prepare for the best and the worst
  During innovation initiatives, you often have to act on what you know at the time – while recognizing that when circumstances change, so must your actions. What does your work look like in the worst-case scenario? What can you do to prevent potential problems? If you can’t avoid these problems, what can you do to mitigate their impact? What do things look in the best case? What new opportunities does the post-COVID environment offer and how can you address those?
   
• Take it one sprint at a time
  Approach your deliverables incrementally. We use an agile methodology called Scrum to work on small batches of tasks for projects in two-week sprints. We recognize that circumstances can drastically change during these sprints. In COVID World, conditions can change even faster. Handling deliverables one piece at a time keeps us focused on tasks to be done while giving us the flexibility to course-correct and adjust as conditions change. 
   
• Be prepared to pivot
  When our offices closed in March, very few of us dreamed we’d still be working from home 10 months later. Our team, our clients and our partners adapted to remote work literally overnight. We never lost momentum.