Last week we reached a small, but important milestone.

After 20 months we stopped monitoring the pandemic through an incident management process, and the remaining controls became part of our normal operations.

A small step because we’ve had confidence in our processes for a while now, had have been waiting for the right time to make this change.

Important, because it’s a recognition that the situation we’re in today is likely to last for some time to come.

It’s impossible to pass a milestone like this and not reflect a bit (it’s part of any good incident response framework after all!), so here are a few points that came to mind while looking back, and an idea of what that means for the future.

Options

I believe that you can usually find ways to cope with anything if you know, and understand, what options you have.

We had nothing in our plans that resembled the real impact of this pandemic, we hadn’t anticipated being in an ‘Amber’ state for 20 months, or the impacts a virus could have beyond direct, short term, health impacts. I don’t think many people did.

But we did have a wide range of data about ourselves, our important processes, our key people, our outsource partners, and our technology. So as the virus spread, we could use that information to adapt our plans, test them out with the people involved, and make sure that the right areas got attention first.

Our technology had also been built to give us options. Flexible ways of working, shifting towards a cloud-first approach, backed up with a secure VPN for on premise services, with bandwidth that could be rapidly scaled. The changes we had to make accelerated some of our plans and delayed others, but in all cases the change made were based on what would have the biggest immediately positive impact, while also helping us achieve longer term goals.

People

Perhaps the most important thing we did was to manage this as a People focused incident, not technology. It would have been easy to be focus on the technology, keeping the phone lines open, and holding things together with quick fixes, patches, and accepted risks.

But the recognition that this was going to be a long lasting event, and that our people would face the biggest impact, meant we could center our approach on our values and principles. Keeping those in mind meant we always tried to do the next right thing, no matter how the situation changed.

By focusing on the people, it meant we used existing internal communications tools and approaches that were familiar to everyone. We needed people to be patient sometimes, and to challenge us at others, and taking a familiar approach helped build the trust & confidence we needed.

Taking a people centered approach, and making use of the options we had, supercharged our response. We could make sure our decisions were made with the best of intentions, and were also effective for both the people and the company.

It meant we could reopen our offices when our people needed them to be open, not because ‘We’ needed them to be open.

Adapting

What’s maybe most interesting though is what is happening as a consequence of our approach.

It’s rapidly accelerated discussions about hybrid ways of working, it’s shown that everything can be questioned, and that a more human approach can achieve some great things.

There will be challenges with this. There were issues with several domestic broadband providers, affecting large numbers of people during 2020. We’ve seen the benefits of having flexible plans, and changing the baseline to hybrid or more flexible working will affect how they can be maintained. This isn’t a reason to resist the change (that’s not something that would end well), just a reminder to think about more than the immediate impacts.

We might now be starting towards something that’s more normal looking, but that’s not where it’s going to stop. We’ve learned too much, and overcome too many barriers, to simply drift back to the old ways. Big discussions are already underway and more change is coming.

We have a great opportunity to build something better (for everyone) than we had before.