Lockdown learnings

I get it. The pandemic was four years ago. We all experienced it in our own unique way. There’s no need to play it back to you or tell you what it was like. No two experiences will be the same.

So why poke the bear and why now?

I believe we all have nuggets of wisdom that we picked up during lockdown – some of which we carry with us today and others which we left behind. And as we face uncertainty in the future, it might be useful to connect how some of those behaviours and mindsets could help us in our day-to-day and in the future.

It can't happen here

💡 When I sat down to write, I went back to the beginning and thought through the sequence of events from early 2020 onwards, as best I could remember them. That’s when I stumbled upon my first 'a-ha’ moment.

Lockdown. It was a new word for us. Something that, at first, could only happen in faraway places. We might have first heard about Coronavirus when we saw the news coming from China. It seemed such an extreme response to a virus. Something they could do there, but surely it would never happen here.

To be fair, we had little to go on. Rumours, word of mouth, anticipation, and everyone looking in their own crystal ball. Unprecedented, once-in-a-generation they said.

So, what do we do in the absence of facts? We speculate. And when we acknowledge they are facts but those facts don’t apply to us? We look for better facts.

Some might say it’s human nature, but the researchers among us would recognise it as confirmation bias – when we cherry-pick bits of information that fit with what we already believe to be true, and discard the rest.

It can be done consciously or unconsciously and, as we painfully discovered, it can happen at every level of society. Friends, family, neighbours, and even world leaders.

Careful what you wish for

Knowing what we know, no one would ever wish this upon us. However, leave it to stand-up comedian Trevor Noah to provide a fresh perspective…and yes it’s a bit of stretch…but stay with me.

In his recent Netflix special, Noah put it this way: “COVID was essentially like an asshole genie that gave us everything we asked for…you wished not to go into the office… [but] you forgot to wish that the office wouldn’t come into your house.”

One could argue this is another kind of cognitive bias known as anchoring bias. It’s when we rely so heavily on the first bit of information that it ‘anchors’ our judgement there, away from what happens later.

💡 We thought we knew, but we had no idea.

We got this

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…work had to roll on and boy did it ramp up quickly!

More meetings, more project plans. It felt like a land grab for every available moment of time. Project leaders felt they needed to overcompensate for the lack of physical time together by wanting to see each other all the time.

💡 And this is where my next ‘a-ha’ moment comes in.

Our team was responding differently than others. Of course, I didn’t appreciate it at the time because that’s just what we did.

As an agile team, this only strengthened us further.

For the six months prior to lockdown, we had already been operating as a geographically diverse team that embraced ambiguity. In this environment, we were set up for success. We had the tools and the bones of the processes we needed to keep going.

We were also very fortunate to have ‘no-fly zones’ to counter the noise. They called it our ‘happiness hour’ – no meetings weekdays between 12pm-1pm UK time, or Fridays from noon onwards. It was our time to reset and do what we needed to keep going. And yes, I still very much do that today!

Hybrid working was our norm. Yes, we learned to play with Teams backgrounds and co-created documents like never before, but this was very much in our comfort zone.

Our routines were solid. Every Monday morning we would meet virtually to talk about our ‘win’ for the previous week – which was open to personal, professional, or life-hacks we’d worked out – and our three priorities for the week ahead.

💡Again, this one was what some might call a ‘covid keeper’ for me. Still going, just a different team.

Being in the virtual place

For a team like ours, however, one of our fundamental approaches was to go to ‘gemba’. It’s a Japanese expression for ‘being in the place’ and for us it meant that we needed to stay close to consumers. Research agencies have their role (#futurepost about ‘Unsung Heroes’) but it was up to us to live and breathe consumer…in real-life…so this was probably our biggest threat.

Prior to lockdown, we had just finished an amazing round of consumer co-creation at a coffee shop. Our agile team was firing on all cylinders – creating and iterating value propositions, conducting real live, experiential interviews (buying people drinks in exchange for surveys!) and doing some sensory work to understand the right liquid for the right proposition.

💡 Allow me to pat our team on the back and those that helped us find our way, but in hindsight that ‘first aid kit’ of agile research tools and processes that people were scrambling for were already in our wheelhouse.

Yet another ‘a-ha’ moment. It’s so important to capture your learnings. In these situations, that can change on a dime, you only have what you have in the way of processes, capabilities, and tools. And it’s all you will have for the unforeseeable future, so that’s your palette. Ready as you’ll never be.

Cha-cha-change

We knew that when testing and learning, we had to let go of the notion of working in a straight line. Instead, everything we did was iterative in nature. Every time we checked in with consumers, we either moved forwards, backwards, or sideways.

We had several projects going at the same time. Some were at a later stage of testing and learning, while others were still in discovery.

For earlier stage products, we could continue to develop propositions, learn more about the jobs to be done, the personas, the unmet need. Our ability to conduct community panels and overnight quant testing made it possible to iterate on concept, target, and packaging design. However, for liquids we would need to be more creative, but nothing was impossible.

We also got lucky. Months before lockdown, we had been looking to understand the role of food and drink in gaming. In addition to going to ‘gemba’ at an amazing League of Legends esports tournament at Twickenham Stadium, we’d done something previously unthinkable… commissioned ethnographic research from mid-December to mid-January and as a result we had a preview of in-home and on-the-go behaviours during regular work/school days and holidays.

The beautiful constraint

Again, because our team had agreed some foundational innovation guardrails, we didn’t have to pivot in our scope when lock down happened.

Whilst we knew that product lines were blurring in the drinks industry, and subcategories were emerging, we had committed to only using our existing brands. As we explored different expressions of our core brands, our technical teams — who eventually started working in cycles back at the lab — created beautiful liquids and via our community panels we could get them to consumers.

No sooner were we out of lockdown, we were ready to take our propositions into commercial test market, and conduct co-creation sessions with our liquids with industry experts and consumers.

(if you know who said this first, please let me know!).

In fact, within just a month of lockdown, we had already started to work on our strategy for returning to market. I worked with our market insights teams to prepare for a commercial return, which we dubbed the “new norm” because there was a belief things would never go back to what they were.

Knowing what we knew, we rightly focused on key behaviours and themes that were emerging and using our consumer, shopper and macro insights to determine the impact of adapting or pivoting.

It is what it is

I’m one of those people that believes everything happens for a reason.

Often mistaken for false optimism, I believe we never really know why things happen. We think we know. However, as time passes — days, months or years later, something else happens, and we think “Ah, that’s why it had to happen.”

We all have our perspective. Mine was unique because I was fortunate to be in a team that thrived during lockdown. We had agile tools and practices in place before lockdown kicked in, we stayed connected as a team, we kept our consumers close and we kept that forward-thinking momentum going that put us ahead as the gates started to open.

I’d love to hear your reflections, builds, and ‘a-ha’ moments, so please drop in the comments below.