NEW NORMAL = Optimization of Interconnected Systems
I have been thinking about “New Normal” these days and was wondering how it is going to shape up our new world. Everyone is talking about technology, innovation, sustainability etc.
But after watching “Inside Bill’s brain”, a netflix series on Bill Gates; he said a word “OPTIMIZATION” and it stayed with me for some days, I realised that the New Normal we are talking about is all about “OPTIMIZATION” of our “INTERCONNECTED SYSTEMS”.
If we look at the theoretical definition of “OPTIMIZATION”, it is “the action of making the best or most effective use of a situation or resource.”
We made effective use of video conferencing tools to maintain business continuity, to be able to connect, to reach out to employees, families, friends in the given unprecedented times even though we were physically distant to maintain our social distancing norms and lockdown policies.
Marketwatch mentions Zoom, a video conferencing company, added 2.22 million monthly active users till late February 2020. Also, the company reported that it has witnessed an upsurge of 21% users since the end of the year 2019. Moreover, as per the research analyst from Report Ocean, an analysis through various secondary researches, the video conferencing market witnessed a spike in the month March of this year by recording 62 million downloads of video conferencing applications on the smart devices globally.
These numbers show us that the market has adopted video conferencing tools really really fast. Now if we just time travel and go back to the history of video conferencing tools. It was around 150 years ago that the concepts of video conferencing were laid down. AT&T began using video conferencing for its Picturephone service in the early 1970s. The first commercial webcam, was introduced in the market in August 1994. Skype was launched in 2003 and businesses began to adopt video conferencing for the first time in 2004 when broadband technology became more widespread and affordable.
Today in 2020 with 4G, 5G and our very friend “Corona”, I want to be gender agnostic here :-) (who has the power of transformation) has increased adoption of video conferencing technology massively worldwide.
It is not restricted to business meetings to connect with people globally, it has also become a household tool to communicate. My kids nanny who is in her 50s is now using video conferencing to talk to my children while she is sitting at her home during lockdown, shows the magical power of how technology has adopted and penetrated into our country’s different economic tiers with just pandemic.
It is no more, nice to have technology for businesses. It has now become a cost efficient tool for business to run in an optimized way. Adopting video conferencing tools has not only impacted businesses but also people within that businesses and support system outside it. For e.g a We have reduced movement of people travelling to the workplace, their fuel consumption, their pollutants, reduced carbon footprints overall by giving more time in their hand for creative tasks at home and by that helping in their social wellbeing. WIN-WIN.
So with this Covid19, with just video conferencing tool adoption we have not only optimized businesses but people’s lives and their consumptions at every level.
This example itself reflects that New Normal is not about optimizing one process, unit, organization, it is about “OPTIMIZATION of INTERCONNECTED SYSTEMS”.
Similarly when we look at Globalization, it has 2 sides, one good for the world’s economic activity, movement of trade, money & economical progress and on the other side is that it has impacted our Earth’s system which has caused Climate Change, Pandemics. Pandemic like Covid 19, is an opportunity for us to “Optimize Globalization” and its “Interconnected systems for Globalization”.
What does “Globalization mean?
The simplest definition I found for Globalization is it refers to the widening, deepening and speeding up of global interconnectedness.
Now, let’s consider our public healthcare systems which are widened across different states & countries, deepened to the remotest villages and the question is to bring about interconnectedness in these systems by bringing “Transparency” from bottom up approach.
WHO has tried to establish and place a framework for GLOBALIZED PUBLIC HEALTHCARE SYSTEMS by releasing country wise details about infection, its spread, its mortality etc. With public health care data crossing borders now, we now know that we are not looking at healthcare in silos anymore, we are looking at more globalized and connected healthcare systems to be running across the world. A death of few and or infections can be ignored any more irrespective of the countries or the strata it belongs to. We have set a foothold in a globalized healthcare system and we can only bring “speed” or “optimize” the interconnected systems by getting data from bottom up. Governing bodies will have to implement new technology, new systems and adapt innovative governance models to increase “Globalization of Public Health care systems” by reducing carbon footprints.
Now, I will give an example here about my Father in Law who is a Cardiologist and Diabetologist and works in Rajasthan Hospital, a trust based hospital, where most of the patients come from Rajasthan in hope of getting better healthcare facilities. Before Covid 19, he saw daily about 40–50 patients on an average and now that number is reduced to a single digit number in the lockdown scenario and this make me really wonder about our healthcare systems in our country that a patient has to travel about 500- 600km in search of better healthcare facility at an optimized cost.
The government of India, only recently allowed Telehealth consulting In India. Did we require a Pandemic like Covid19 to allow Telehealth consulting in India, or online deliveries of medicine or for that matter online delivery of liquor? Are our governing bodies and systems so weak that we can only react with speed to a Pandemic and adopt transformation?
Why can’t this speed and transformation become the center of how governing bodies and businesses function on their NORMAL days?
Why can’t we design our governing systems, our interconnectedness, our new world, our businesses with “Speed” “Optimization” “Transparency” and “Reduced Carbon Footprint”.
So in my perspective “New Normal is Optimization of Interconnected Systems” by having speed, transparency and reduced carbon footprint.
