Scott Anthony

Senior Partner, Innosight and author; ranked #9 most influential management thinker by Thinkers50

UNDERSTANDABLY, people everywhere are asking, ‘How is this going to affect my organization and my industry?’ The way I try to answer that is to go back to one of Innosight’s core tools, created by the late Clayton Christensen: the ‘jobs-to-be-done’ framework. A job to be done is the fundamental problem that a customer is trying to solve in a particular circumstance. One of our beliefs is that the things we’re trying to get done in our lives actually change relatively slowly. However, jobs to be done can change quickly in the midst of a big disruptive event like the global pandemic. To figure out how, you can look at four specific ‘job specs’ to see whether temporary changes will stick.

The first is the circumstance. How do the new circumstances affect available solutions? For example, being in a situation where we’re all working from home has led to mass scale communication over virtual platforms like Zoom. As people experiment with this, they are seeing that it actually works pretty well. As a result, this behaviour is very likely to persist and it will have knock-on effects for meetings and conferences that last for years, if not decades.

The next thing to look at are the barriers that stand in the way of getting the job done. Maybe people don’t have skills, maybe they don’t have access, maybe certain things are too expensive. As new barriers get imposed after a big event, how does that change the way people make decisions? How does it change their priorities? In our view, the pandemic will be a big boon to telemedicine. If healthcare does get reformed and hospitals move from being places where contagion can spread to places that are more focused and potentially more isolated, telemedicine is very well positioned to grow dramatically.

The third thing to look at is, how are customers re-framing how they define quality? How do some of the things they are experimenting with change the way they determine what a ‘good solution’ looks like? For instance, the pandemic will be a continued boon to contactless payments around the globe, as people will have persistent nagging concerns about physicality and about touching anything. This is likely to persist well after COVID-19 recedes into the rearview mirror.

Finally, what new solutions can get the job done in a sustainably better way? This is the big unknown in many circumstances right now. I have four children, and in my view there is a golden opportunity for anyone who comes up with a truly fantastic way to provide online education for three-to eight-year-olds. This is the innovator’s opportunity in the midst of a moment like this.

Companies that embrace the new normal with their offerings will win. When oil prices rose to new heights in the 1970s, Toyota prospered because its small car was perfectly positioned for the new environment of people worrying about something they never worried about before. The Walt Disney Company was formed after World War I and the Spanish flu, as a way to divert, distract and entertain the world. If you go back to the global financial crisis, there were almost 100 unicorns born during that period — including sharing platforms like Airbnb and Uber, which echoed off the financial crisis. The same opportunities clearly exist today.

In the midst of a crisis it’s also a great time for innovators to ‘love the low end’. The Mcdonald’s speedy service system which created the fast food world we know and love today came in the middle of a downturn, providing good quality and low prices.

Finally, for companies knocking on the door of disruption who haven’t yet crossed US$1 billion in sales, this can be their moment. Back in 2009, we named some companies that you might have heard of: Alibaba, Facebook and Linkedin. You might say those are obvious, but that’s in hindsight. In 2009 there were legitimate questions about all of these companies. If you had invested in the portfolio we named back then, you would have gotten 3.2x times the returns in the marketplace.