Discuss - Decide - Deliver
COVID-19 has changed the world as we know it and, as much as we might like to, we can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Therefore it falls on leaders to decide how best to respond and adapt in these unprecedented times. The pace of change in the world was already increasingly rapid, and that is now acutely so as we live through what is perhaps the world’s most economically impactful public health crisis in a generation. So what does this mean for the future of the charity sector? Will the impact on charity finances lead to a contraction of the volume of charities operating in the sector? Will this in turn generate opportunities for mergers, or will the existential threat posed as a result of this crisis materialise for many, with darwinian forces leading to an absolute shrinkage of the sector?
Mergers are certainly an alternative and real possibility perhaps even, for some, an opportunity?
Mergers within the charity sector, were, until recently, being posited by some as a medium-to-long term possibility, to create consolidation and efficiency within what was perceived by some as an ever-burgeoning sector. Yet perhaps this could now be more immediately likely, if not attractive, if not necessary, or, for that matter, inevitable?
The devastating impacts of COVID-19 are well documented and commentated on. But one wonders if there could be any sort of cosmic counterbalance to those negative consequences: whether any form of silver lining might even exist amidst it all? Perhaps one such positive and unexpected legacy of COVID-19 could be the catalysis of previously desired but hitherto more distant potential outcomes?
There have certainly already been other observed and unexpected catalytic effects in other contexts. Take education, for example. In a matter of weeks, there has been a rapid evolution of teaching practices and technological adoption within the education sector in response to the closure of schools: school hubs and virtual classrooms are no longer futuristic concepts, but the beating heart of the current system, and may well remain so for the foreseeable future.
A routine “hub and virtual” educational paradigm was, until only weeks ago, nothing more than a mere future possibility, a concept framed in the context of a 10-20 year horizon. In recent scenario visioning work around “future schooling and learning models” led by the education and lifelong learning think tank, the Goodison Group in Scotland, concepts such as this were being posited. But have those future concepts already been promoted to current realities in a matter of weeks? Are the new models likely to be sustained if not in full, in part? Are previously unimaginable shifts possible in much shorter timescales? COVID does indeed appear to have accelerated desirable changes in instances such as this: the 10-20 year horizon, in short, has been shortened; thrust upon us by necessity, yet we have embraced and made it work.
In the world of work, video calls were, until two weeks ago, seen as the poor relation to jumping on a plane and shaking hands with a room full of people. Today they are being viewed as an equally rich, in some respects preferable, genuinely useful, and greener alternative. Zoom, for example, gained c.2 million new subscribers during the whole of 2019 yet in the early part of 2020, owing in large part to the global crisis, this annual volume of new subscribers was surpassed in less than a quarter. Whilst the pace of acquisition may slow in the future, it is difficult to imagine the growing popularity of this technology being reversed. Momentum is shifting.
In summary, the world is changing as a result of COVID-19, but not necessarily all for the worse. Unintentional, previously implausible things have happened in unprecedentedly short timescales. Now is the time to embrace new possibilities, reimagine the future horizons, and reevaluate our sense of what is possible or implausible. Perhaps even the climate emergency could become a beneficiary of this growing realisation that change can happen quicker than generally previously realised?
In any case, now is not a time for dither. Now is a time to identify and embrace new opportunities.As we live through the crisis, there is a heightened need to discuss, collaborate, take decisive action and deliver progress in the face of social, biologic and economic adversity.