One way that technology can become lost is through the utter inaction that resulted from the pandemic. Through the worst part of the lockdown, people were sitting home, and businesses reduced their services, hours, and delivery. Pandemic restrictions caused inaction in the general society.
Effects of Inaction
There are, of course, numerous effects from inaction. One notable effect is the reduction in communication. If a person is not active, they’re certainly not communicating, are they? The same is true for an organization—if it is inactive to a greater or lesser degree, it is to that degree not communicating to its customers, prospects, or vendors. Internal communication within that organization will also be curtailed.
If a person or a business doesn’t have to communicate, what else goes missing? Well, how does a business operate? Through collaboration, people working with one another. Therefore, one of the first things to disappear, when communication isn’t happening, is collaboration.
Even more fundamental: when communication disappears, so does imagination. If a person or organization doesn’t have to communicate, they don’t have to use their imagination to figure out what to communicate or communicate about, do they?
When imagination is reduced or disappears, so does creativity. That’s certainly a dangerous place for a person or an organization to be. Creativity is at the root of just about everything positive that happens.
Taking it one step further, when creativity is absent, so is innovation. It is innovation that results in technology—the ways in which a business is operated, and the tasks and methods with which a person does their job. Innovation also makes use of existing technology, and when innovation isn’t happening because of inaction, that technology goes out of use. And because nobody’s looking for that technology, it’s not found and disappears. “People don’t know what they don’t know.”
Back in Action
Action, on the other hand, does result in communication. An individual or group cannot be active without communication. When a business comes back to life—which is very fortunately just starting to happen now—they once again begin communicating internally, with prospects, customers, and anyone else related to the company. That communication, as it must, results in collaboration.
Action and communication also result in looking forward, and once again the use of imagination. Where should we go? What products and services should we be working on and selling? What strategies should we use?
Imagination once again opens the door to creativity, which helps forge all kinds of new and exciting paths for the organization. Too often it is only executives—and those in the marketing department and product development—utilizing creativity. Every employee should be encouraged to utilize creativity in their jobs.
Which of course brings us back to innovation, that very factor that makes technology, and the use of technology, and therefore the recovery of technology, possible.
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