Covid crisis - makes sense to thrive rather than just survive

It goes without saying that the present Covid crisis is one of the most ominous and unprecedented onslaughts on human life in general and business at large in the past nearly 100 years.

As it invariably happens in disasters of such a huge scale, mankind is caught baffled and unprepared in the initial stage and then we all instinctively switch on to the ‘survival’ mode.

Our ability to survive

As some evolutionary psychology experts would say, you can take the person out of the Stone Age but you can never take the Stone Age out of a person. Survival instinct is considered to be the biggest carry forward instinct in human beings from that age.

Thanks to the harsh realities faced by mankind in that tough era, we are supposed to fight vigorously when threatened and also trade info, share secrets, to resolve a crisis. But there is another contradicting angle to the survival instinct which is playing it safe or an aversion to losing anything except when threatened.

Going by this theory, I would like to define the way we human beings have responded to the Covid crisis as the ‘Fight and Flight approach’. 

Fight and Flight approach

When faced with a harmful attack on our survival, all living beings are supposed to either fight or flee. But the human race threatened by Covid seems to be doing virtually both simultaneously.

Let me start with the flight aspect. The majority of the people have reacted by fleeing/flying away initially from the dangers posed by this virus in multiple ways:

• Looking at every human being we face except for our immediate family as a potential virus threat
• Distancing and isolating ourselves instead of socializing
• Restricting movement and traveling
• Working from home as much as possible
• Sticking to basics instead of luxuries when it comes to consumption
• Surge in internet usage for multiple purposes viz. Information, Entertainment, Shopping online, etc., to avoid the risk of offline options

        and a few more.

As far as the fighting aspect is concerned, it took a little while but the mature populace in our country, as well as people across the world, has started putting up a brave front. They are responding in many effective ways:

• Covid warriors from various strata of the society namely Health, Police, Govt & Civic Authorities, Media, Essential services & businesses, Volunteers, etc., got into positive action quickly.
• As the lockdown restrictions came down gradually, a whole lot of people have stepped forward to bring in a semblance of normalcy to overall life around us and to business.
• The most aggressive and symbolic fight that mankind is putting up is on the vaccine front. The fact that a vaccine from Pfizer has already been cleared for usage shows how a five to nine-year scientific discovery process has been cut short to less than one year which is nothing short of a miracle.

Though creating infrastructure to administer the multiple vaccines in the pipeline to the anxiously awaiting people in the nook and corner of the world is still a massive challenge.

Strategy shift: Thrive rather than just Survive

Once Indians had realised after the initial 2-3 months that the Covid threat is here to stay and the ‘flight’ approach to resolving the crisis has to be synergistically clubbed with the ‘fight’ approach to saving potential loss of lives both through health and economic impact, we got into a ‘Survival’ mode and are staying in it ever since.

As far as India is concerned, there are still a lot of question marks w.r.t our access to vaccines, infrastructure for distribution (including storage facility with temperatures ranging from -20 to -70 degrees required to protect mRNA vaccines), affordability, etc. After all, mRNA vaccines are amongst the first ones getting clearance from credible medical bodies in the developed world based on their high success rate and completion of phase 3 trials. Unfortunately, other vaccines that are still in the clearance pipeline are the ones more suitable for India, given the constraints.

Given this particular situation we are in, where the vaccine is looking like a bird in the bush instead of being in our hands right now, the case I want to take up is for a change of mindset from ‘Survive mode to Thrive mode’ is critical even before an effective vaccine is launched in India, here’s why:

While ‘being in survival mode’ made sense even around three months back, our personal and professional experiences in the present financial year helped us realize that this mindset comes with a lot of baggage. When we are facing problems and are thinking of survival over a stretched period of time, the tendency to think conservatively and at times even negatively crops in. While the need of the hour is to think just in the opposite way i.e. smartly, positively, and innovatively if we want to take your business & life forward and not get unnecessarily bogged down.

In Red FM network, our conscious effort to shift to the ‘Thrive mode’ in the last three months has resulted in a changed mindset particularly when it comes to appreciating the undercurrents of the present situation and in persuasively finding new, innovative ways to succeed on our revenue front even in adverse conditions. But this of course doesn’t mean any compromise on precautions we need to take to keep this evil virus away.

While the smart and innovative solutions that need to be found to ‘thrive in our business’ under crisis may vary from industry to industry the willpower, vision, and positive mindset that is required to achieve this is common to all industries.

Wanted to share this thought and the initial encouraging results of trying to move ‘from survive to the thrive mode’ at our end which in turn seems to be also helping us improve our top and bottom line somewhat, overcome our own underlying fears, and hit the future with a lot more hope & optimism!

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not in any way represent the views of exchange4media.com