Hi, I'm Simon Mulcahy, Chief Innovation Officer at Salesforce.
And today I'm here with my colleague and friend Peter Schwartz,
whose Salesforce's Chief Futurist
and the world's leading expert on scenario planning.
And together we'd like to share with you two really
powerful tools to help you as you
work your way through your company's response to the crisis.
We have our 1-3 year scenarios
and our COVID-19 response
framework and the playbook recommendations
that come with it.
Now, Salesforce has been hard at work with some of the best
experts on the planet,
as well as with customers and partners in
in every geography to prepare these
tools for you.
So, Peter, why don't you start by walking us through
the future scenarios?
Thanks, Simon.
I began doing scenario planning back in 1972
at Stanford Research Institute, working
on mission planning for the space shuttle.
But today we are experiencing greater
uncertainty than I have seen in nearly
50 years of doing this kind of work.
Now most people want to know how deep is
it going to go? And how long are the twin health
and economic crises gonna last?
When do we move from the crisis mode to
back to work, building the next normal?
And what will it be like as we get back to work
in these new realities?
The scenarios we will cover today will
address those questions.
But in short,
the pandemic may lead to one of three
potential outcomes in our scenarios,
which creates both the need for and
the opportunity to reimagine and
then re-invent the future.
To answer our questions about the future,
we need to look at three things. First,
how will the virus behave?
That's the blue line in the graph.
Will there be a second wave? Will people who
have had it be immune? Will it mutate
and critically - When will there be
a vaccine?
That's especially important for people my
age. Second, how will our economies
behave, given the various policies being
pursued around the world?
The green line in the graph.
Now, stopping the virus creates an immediate
economic crisis as huge swathes
of the economy hit the brakes.
How deep and how long the economic crisis
lasts will also be shaped by the third
factor: the social response.
Do people actually maintain the discipline
needed to stop the spread
and avoid recurrences?
Do they support each other?
Is this a moment for social renewal
or social conflict?
To avoid the worst, we need to do what my friend
Martin Wolf says: Think Big.
Act fast together.
Now, the crisis is unfolding in three phases,
nearly everyone has moved beyond
losing control and begun to respond
in a crisis mode,
hammering down the virus.
The third phase, going back to work,
will give shape to the next normal.
So, working with a small team from
inside Salesforce and a few outside advisors,
we looked at how these three forces could interact
to create several quite different paths into
the future.
They vary by different assumptions for how the virus,
the economy and society behave.
The results are crises of varying
depth and duration,
and the outcomes will be different in every geography
in the world.
So think about how these stories will play
out in your state or your country to judge
how the timing might be different, where you
work and live.
You will need to think through how each of
the eight uncertainties of this chart
play out locally.
Now, on to the scenarios.
The first scenario, which may be a bit
optimistic, assumes everything
goes right.
People do maintain social distancing.
The virus does not come back later in the year.
Immunity persists. Economic
policy is effective.
All these add up to the crisis beginning
to unwind by midsummer
and getting back to work by, say, the third
or fourth quarter of this year,
with the next normal beginning to merge
early in the new year.
Because the crisis is short lived, this
new reality is perhaps the most familiar.
Perhaps a bit more realistically, some
places will get it right, while others will
lag, meaning the crisis might
persist, leading to a deeper and longer
recession.
It could take us until near the end of 2020
to get the virus under control.
That means the economic recovery
and getting back to work,
will take into the first and second quarter
next year,
and the next normal, quite different from
our recent past, begins to get take shape
by mid year.
The experience of the crisis will lead to major
changes in how we work, shop,
learn, travel and much more.
Much of what we have done out of necessity
during the crisis, we will now do by
choice in the next normal.
While it may not be likely, we
need to be prepared just in case
the crisis lasts longer than we think.
If the virus has multiple waves
or immunity is weak, or a vaccine
takes longer to develop,
the impact on society and the
economy could be longer lasting.
The economic crisis may become a depression
that last several years as the waves
of the pandemic wash through the society
over the next few years.
The new normal may not be apparent until
well into 2022.
So the old adage that 'necessity
is the mother of invention' will shape our
response to the pandemic.
We are already reinventing how we work, shop,
learn, do medicine and even govern
because we've had to.
As we begin to return to work in the next
normal, there is a unique opportunity
to learn from our experience and to reimagine
and reinvent nearly everything.
What can we do remotely so we don't
have to commute or travel halfway around
the world for an hour meeting?
How can we rethink our supply chain
to make it more resilient in the face of
discontinuities like this pandemic?
And that may help us to see how we can
be more sustainable
in how we operate.
And all of these depend upon
the enabling foundation of a necessary
digital transformation.
There is no scenario for going backwards.
We can intentionally design
a better future.
As the French poet and essayist Paul
Valery said,
"the future is no longer what
it used to be."
Now over to my colleague Simon Mulcahy,
who will help you figure out what to actually
do in the face of all these possibilities.
Thanks, Peter.
Well, we all left behind the old normal
when we went into lock down. And now
here we are, in this new normal, the new
COVID-19 normal.
And the big question is, what will the
next normal look like?
Well, one thing we do know is that next
normal will not be a copy of the old.
The crisis has just accelerated change
in too many areas.
And all of that means that business leaders
really need to be asking themselves well,
what decisions can I make now, that
will keep options open for me later?
And how can I make sure that
I can see the signs for change early enough
so I can act quickly when the time is right?
And we found taking a structured approach
broken out across three distinct
but concurrent tracks
helps to guide this decision making process.
The first track is what we call: Stabilize.
This is about mitigating short term
risks and pivoting to customer
and employee needs.
The second
is: Reopen.
This is the planning and reorchestration
of the return to the workplace to scale
operations.
And the third track is: Grow.
Now you're navigating economic recovery
and asking questions like,
How do I be more relevant to my customers?
or
I need to be more digital - how do I
do that?
Of course, there are many decisions that need
to be made at each phase,
but customers have found it helpful
to break them down into what we call four
key focus areas.
And these naturally align to where Salesforce
could best help you as well.
The first is: How You Make Decisions.
Well, this is about connecting data,
making it easy to access the right information
at the right time.
Visualize customer and employee
data and then collaborate around it.
How You Work is the second area,
and this is all about improving employee productivity
and collaboration. And,
about enabling employees to learn new
skills.
The third, then, is How You Engage
with customers, partners, and suppliers.
It's how you market, sell, and service
from anywhere. From home, through
always-on storefronts, with omni
channel service.
And it's about delivering better,
more personalized experiences
and leveraging your whole ecosystem in
service of the customer.
And the fourth is How You Serve Society.
This is about how you mobilize your employees
and operationalize serving society
not just in times of need,
but as a platform for change more generally.
So there you go!
This framework allows you to explore where
you're strong,
and perhaps where you need to make some progress.
Behind it there is a much more detailed set
of tactical recommendations that you
can use to double check against your
own planning.
Regardless of where you are on your journey,
Salesforce is here to really help you navigate
your path back to growth
in the next normal.
And if you'd like to get hold of the scenarios or
the Response Framework Playbook,
please just ask your account rep.
You can also join one of the many webinars
on advisory sessions that we're also holding.
Thank you.