Crisis Shifts the Curve to the Left

We were inspired by a recent post by CB Insights… they make a simple point, but it has profound implications for honing your thinking about next-normal. While it’s worth reading in its entirety, we wanted to summarize the concept and share a simple recommendation related to Agile Scenarios.

You’re probably familiar the above graph. Often referred to as The Adoption curve, it’s a visualization of how, why and at what rate new innovations spread. Understanding the phases and timing of the adoption of new technologies is core to strategy, and getting the timing right enough matters.

As we all know, COVID has radically shifted the adoption rate (timing) for some things (eg: virtual meetings / teleheath etc.)

Why?
The reason this happens is that a crisis can create a new benefit that simply did not exist before. If the new benefit is compelling enough, people jumped on board. Think about virtual meetings… before the crisis they offered the benefit of saving you the travel time. Nothing changed with the tech, but when COVID hit, people literally could not go in to work. Overnight, a new benefit got added to the value proposition… you could make a living. Here’s the new calculous:
Old way = zero income.
Use virtual meetings = make a living
(simple choice)

SO WHAT?

This insights has implications for Agile Scenarios. When thinking about whether something that may be changed by the crisis (a force / a behavior etc.) it’s useful to get more granular and think about shift to the value proposition itself:
   . what shifted with the original benefits? (temporary or permanent)
   . what new benefits emerged? (temporary or permanent)

VIDEO BRIEFING… if this catches your interest, check out this this 8min. video (it goes a bit deeper into the ‘so what’)