Which is fine, until it’s not. We’ve all been disrupted by COVID-19, in many cases forced into new ways of working. Our old habits – individual and organizational – are rightly challenged to adapt. Traditional business models have long been the sacred cow, one that now point blank faces its shortcomings in how it has or has not promoted cross- functional phygital teamwork, customer focus, autonomy and agility. We reap what we sow.

The paradox of the crisis may be that the distance brings us closer. Closer to understanding what is critical and what is superfluous, as individual contributors, teams and organizations in service to our customers.

There are a lot of moving parts in the process of discovering, developing and delivering value to your customers. Working within a shared understanding of the guiding principles, your current systems will naturally reform and reinvent themselves to support your suppliers, teams and customers in unimaginable new ways.

If your current business model is not designed to support and sustain the impact of quarantine (if you’re experiencing disruption), use this guide and leverage this situation to reshape the way you operate phygitally.

Working ‘backward’ from the point of delivery to your customer reveals the critical path to the exchange of that value. In situations where the system is strained, you learn the difference between need to and nice to, shifting paradigms to put the customer’s needs first.

This disruption in routines we’re all experiencing will expose where your existing ways of working (processes, policies, procedures) have inserted bureaucracy and ‘waste’ (disruption in the flow costing time, money or rework), or where your organization inadvertently hasn’t put the customer first.

Rather than taking weeks to socialize and craft a declaration of principles, simply living them through your choices and actions will communicate them more impactfully than words ever could.

Decisive actions inherently communicate priorities which, when at the service of the customers, team and organization will organically cross-pollinate and permeate all aspects of the work, forming new cultural norms. Actions speak.

Current gaps between your proclaimed organizational principles and the actions of your employees can be traced directly back to the systems of work and management within the organization.