Learning Fast to Survive and Thrive

To BCG’s network around the world,

Eighteen months ago, my colleagues and I laid out a leadership agenda, Winning the ’20s, aimed at this new decade. The first of our five imperatives highlighted that the nature of competition was rapidly changing and that the rate of learning would become a core source of advantage. We expected this to play out over several years, but the COVID-19 pandemic has shrunk this timeline down to months, if not weeks.

Outside of war, COVID-19 has precipitated the fastest global economic decline in history. In the 12 to 24 months ahead, we can expect the reverse, as we rebound from this epic collapse—but not to the model we had before. In the meantime, we are in a fight with a virus that will require constant vigilance, fast response, and rapid learning—from how to reopen schools and businesses to how to protect our most vulnerable populations. At the same time, we’re responding to huge changes in consumer behavior, supply chains, and ways of working.

What to do in response to these changes will vary across industries, countries, and companies. But the how question we have to ask is universal: How do we become better learners in order to act smarter and faster, and increase our adaptiveness and agility?

John Boyd—a famous fighter pilot, undefeated in simulated combat and a great military strategist—is renowned for formulating the OODA (observe-orient-decide-act) loop as a core determinant of winning air combat and other military encounters. BCG wrote about the relevance of the OODA loop for business more than 30 years ago in our work on time-based competition, but these ideas have never been more important than they are right now.

We have the potential to learn from all kinds of high-frequency data to put this strategy into practice, including first-party, online, micro- and macroeconomic, epidemiological, and consumer and employee sentiment. Yet many senior executives tell us that their organizations struggle to bring together disparate data and make sense of it all at rapid speed.

Helping our clients navigate this challenge has become one of our highest priorities. My DigitalBCG colleagues have developed an AI platform for decision support and scenario planning that we call Lighthouse by BCG. By bringing together a broad array of data and AI models, it gives companies a foundation for building simple decision-making dashboards to help them make tough choices rapidly rather than relying on gut feel—or delaying for too long altogether. A platform like this is only one component of what is required. We must also ensure that decision processes and hierarchies are adjusted for a much faster-changing world.

So in your next leadership team meeting, carve some time out from the urgent what questions (What are we seeing? What should we be doing?) to ask the how questions that are most fundamental to both fighting the virus and winning the ’20s: How do we improve our learning capacity? How can we accelerate our own OODA loops?

I’m including more of BCG’s latest thinking below, which I hope you will find helpful. I look forward to connecting with you again soon.