Trust will become the most important

currency
Publicado em 18 de abril, 2020

ARTIGO DE PORTO BUSINESS SCHOOL

https://www.pbs.up.pt/pt/artigos-e-eventos/artigos/with-digital-
acceleration-trust-will-become-the-most-important-currency/

Since the outbreak of COVID-19 and its rapid spreading around the world,
companies have been under pressure to reconsider ways of working and to
adapt the existing relationship between employers and employees. An
almost-instantaneous change had to happen and new ways of working that
were far beyond implementation in our day-to-day lives are now dominant.

The pandemic we now face has put unprecedented pressure on

organisations, forcing them to rethink their business model. The traditional
management model in place in the majority of companies no longer fits the
moment we are facing so acting on unpredictability is imperative.

Although digital transformation has been in every companies’ agenda for

several years, most companies have started to digitally transform their
business as they looked at automated working practices to optimize
processes and be more productive. Digital acceleration [no longer digital
transformation], achieved through this almost instantaneous change in
behaviour, both in the workplace and in our daily lives, presents itself as an
opportunity for those organisations that thought that "until now digital
transformation was an option. Now is the only solution" says Rui Coutinho,
Porto Business School’s Executive Director for Innovation and Growth.

“This is a wake-up call for organizations that put too much focus on daily
operations at the expense of investing in digital business and long-term
resilience” says Rui Coutinho. The companies that saw the digital
transformation as a hypothesis are perhaps the most affected in this whole
process, since they were exposed to the impetuous speed of events, seeing
in three months changes that could take years to unfold.

For Sílvio Meira, “this thing of digitalization/computerization has been

happening for 50 years. It started in the 80’s, with the electronic documents
in the digital private networks (…) and right now [2020’s] we are starting to
see economies or ecosystems of platforms rising. For most people that
were paying attention to what was happening, this transformation
happened in fact, in the last 5 decades. But for a number of people, they
happened all of the sudden, in 5 weeks."

“The key take away of this happening?" – a lot of companies that weren’t
prepared for digital started to adapt for digital.”. On Sílvio Meira’s
terminology, the process of digitalization goes in three steps, from
adaptation to evolution and transformation:

1. Adaptation: you adapt to digital tools that will allow your company to
survive under digital stress;

2. Evolution: you start changing the business core, digital practices,

mottos, your offer, the value you create and capture to digital.

3.Transformation: change the entire behavior of your company, your

platforms your ecosystem to digital.

“The acceleration you are seeing now is because for most people, these five
decades are happening right now, in five, ten weeks or three months. A lot
of people will feel that they’ve missed a lot. A lot of businesses are going to
fail completely. And not because of COVID -19, but because they are not
going to adapt fast enough. That’s a big problem in companies that can’t
work in a decentralized, distributed way.

Companies that are now entering digital competitiveness need to

understand that this transformation cannot only be present in the way we
sell products/services. It needs to go deeper and encompass the
organisation as a whole. However, for this to happen, digital change cannot
only impact the IT department, it needs to be present in all departments
and all employees. Digital acceleration will transform the organisation and
create: new ways of working, new KPIs, new ways of looking at the
customer, new technology/platform systems and new regulations.

Many of the changes implemented now will remain in a post Coronavirus

world. For Sílvio Meira, it is still hard to imagine how personal interactions
will unfold. Will we again have large crowds of people at conferences like
the Web Summit? Will online classes be a preference over face-to-face
classes? Only time will tell.

One thing is for sure, the virtual space will become the new normal, where
people will learn to operate and thrive. "But then, the most important
"currency" we need to have in this virtual world becomes trust. Something
that we've been seing in the last 10-15 years with the sharing
economy.", says Rui Coutinho.

But at the same time we understand that trust is also fundamental when it
comes to the technology we use leverage this new virtual world. To build a
viable system of trustful relationships, besides good security there are
other aspects of trust that need to be incorporated, including transparency
and accountability. These values have to underpin any system aiming to
foster long-term, sustainable trust in the business models.

In a world where physical contact is scarce and face-to-face business is

minimal, the most important thing is to know that we can trust each other.