In a rapidly evolving environment, like many of our business partners, we are now into our business continuity plans ensuring the well-being of our staff and a continued service to our clients.

Our role is to mitigate risk and our own analysis defines our current general situation as being defined by eight stages:

1. Inertia – where we are reluctant to accept the challenges we face, that these challenges will not affect us or be stemmed before they reach us.

2. Hysteria – at the prospect that such challenges are real; over-reaction, survival oriented behaviours, fuelled by speculation and in the modern world, social media.

3. Impact – the arrival of the threat and reality of the challenges…

Impact creates three outcomes:

4. Reaction as the effects become real for those affected.

5. Practicality as we start to develop coping mechanisms.

6. Compassion as we start to look beyond the immediate environment and personal outcomes to the broader community and vulnerable needs.

From here, given the human instinct for adaptability, we started to seek (7) solutions: practical, social and business oriented.

These involved technology and digital being at the forefront as we engage another major human strength – our ability and need to communicate on scale.

Linked to adaptability and flexibility we are now moving to the eighth stage:

8…. the new normal: where we adjust and adapt to our environment, armed with experience, pragmatism and coping mechanisms.

The flexibility and adaptability of the human psyche is remarkable and the “new normal” will also include major step-changes.

In Ancient Greece, a key principle of the Stoics, whose collective philosophy created  stoicism;  a philosophy of personal ethics informed by its system of logic and its views on the natural world –  was, “the obstacle is the way”.

This principle is as relevant now as it was over 2000 years ago.