Fintech visionary Leda Glyptis, a true Sibos Insider, is the resident blogger for Sibos 2020, offering her unique take on this year’s event. Read her third blog, part of a series released daily throughout the week.</em> </p> Things to Hold onto in a Post Covid World</h2> Those of us who have held innovation and transformation roles over the last… ahem… twenty odd years have become accustomed to having certain formulaic conversations within and between our organisations, almost like a warm up to the real thing, the conversation we are actually trying to have.</p> Step one</strong>: you remind everyone change is a thing that cannot be stopped or controlled.</p> Step two</strong>: you acknowledge that change can be scary but, when the world changes around you, it causes disruption and that has to be managed, not barricaded against.</p> Step three</strong>: you find a way of proving or at least suggesting in a compelling way that the change you are advocating is less disruptive than doing nothing. Or at least worth the effort.</p> The thing about Covid is that it’s proven all that to be true many times over, but rather than entrenching us deeper into certain behaviours, it strangely totally changed the language we used to describe what it felt like. What we were doing. And why.</p> In a panel called managing a pandemic, the bankers said that when Covid struck, we stopped change programmes because we had to focus on stability and, to achieve stability, change was required to deal with emerging facts. Hold onto that.</p> Calling in from Paris, Sydney and Connecticut, the panellists demonstrated without even trying that remoting in works. It doesn't work as well as being in the room, in the moment. But it works.They also stated rather matter of fact that digitisation was not new.Trying to build capabilities for clients and colleagues isn’t a Covid thing.</p> We have all been at this for a while. We have been testing and building and trying to hit the ball in the same direction in a ball game that has been changing. And we knew that. Changing business model requirements.Changing client requirements.The exam question was set before Covid.</p> Covid brought urgency.We could no longer learn and experiment. We had to invest. In building internal tools and capabilities. And investment was not just about money. It was about commitment.Whether the pandemic was expected or not, the playbook of behaviours, the services and capabilities needed to cope was not brand new.</p> What was new was the urgency. The commitment needed. The focus. Hold onto that.</p> When Covid hit, the priorities were clear, said my friend Claire Calmejane.Colleague safety first and foremost.</p> Then it was looking after clients in a way that met their needs. It wasn’t about bank resilience, it was about staying client-focused when the client was not entirely sure what their emergent needs were, when the client faced their own struggles in handling the pandemic, making what they needed from you very different - from retail to SME to corporate.</p> Outcome-based leadership is how we got through, says Claire. Hold onto that. </p> If the pandemic forced us to apply the same urgent, outcome-focused mindset to our digital builds as we had for business priorities; if the pandemic forced focus upon us; if the pandemic is why decisions were made fast and with clear objectives, where we may have prevaricated before, assessing options and outcomes for ideas that previously remained optional and lacked urgency despite their merits. If the pandemic is what forced us to operationalise innovation; commit to results and execute the solutions to support them; then hold onto that.</p> The fear, uncertainty and anxiety of the pandemic is nothing to envy. Nothing to wish to repeat. Nothing to hope to expand.</p> But the ability to make decisions fast. To home in on desired outcomes, commit and execute against them. The urgency and focus. These are things to hold onto.Now we know we can. Let’s carry that learning into whatever comes next.</p> We could and did when it was hard. Hold onto that. And repeat during better days.</p>