PP

One of the stories of this pandemic runs something like this. A microscopic bug released from an animal market in Wuhan has, in a matter of weeks, brought the world to its knees. As a recent edition of The Economist had it, “planet closed.” Melodrama, perhaps, and a great magazine cover, but not too far from what at least many of us feel. But amid all the stürm und drang, a modicum of hope insists on springing. Is it possible that, as a result of our capacity to pull out all the stops, come together for the common good and work like demons in the face of a huge, shared and scary enemy, we can make changes in so many different parts of our lives that will put us onto a permanently better trajectory? I have been in conversations with NGOs, businesses large and small, government agencies and just ordinary people and their families all mesmerized by the amount of change we seem to have achieved in such a short space of time. One CEO of a large, global NGO told me, describing some of the digital reforms and related operational, structural and leadership changes the organisation has recently made, “we’ve basically made changes in 3 weeks that would normally take 3 years.” He explained that he had set up a small internal strategy team to think about which elements of the modified service delivery they had introduced in the past few weeks could be made …

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