To understand what’s next, look to our ‘deep structures’
By Mikkel B. Rasmussen
Be careful not to focus too much on the immediate changes when planning for a post-COVID world. This crisis might lead to deeper, more disruptive shifts in our societal structure — shifts that should be at the core of any business strategy.
“The severity of the COVID-19 crisis has put our business and community in completely uncharted territory. As of today, Momofuku's restaurants are closed until further notice.” This was the text posted on the website of David Chang’s world-famous Momofuku Noodle Bar on March 14th, 2020, three days after the WHO declared COVID a global pandemic. Chang, who also runs restaurants in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Washington, Sydney, and Toronto, is widely known as one of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs in food. But COVID knows no exceptions.
Two months after closing his restaurants, David Chang is among millions of restaurant owners still stuck in uncharted territory, with no indication as to when Momofuku Group can reopen its restaurants again or under what circumstances. The year on year decline in Opentable bookings at the start of May 2020 was a staggering 100 percent — which is to say, all bookings were lost. Worldwide, more than 75 million jobs will be lost in the restaurant industry in 2020. "It's as if aliens came from outer space and decided to totally destroy restaurants," Chang recently said in an interview in The New York Times.
Restaurants are far from alone in experiencing this abrupt disruption of life and business — the crisis has delivered a dramatic blow to the air travel, art, automotive, hotel, and oil and gas industries, to name just a few. The IMF predicts that the global lockdown will shrink the global economy by 3 percent in 2020, making this economic crisis significantly worse than the 2008 financial crisis. More than 30 million people in the US to date have lost their jobs, and one out of four Americans say that they aren’t sure they’ll have the money to pay next month's rent.
The bad news is that — yes — our world feels like it has been taken over by aliens. The good news is that human societies have endured similar crises many times before. We’ve been through the black death, yellow fever, cholera, the Spanish flu, HIV/AIDS, Ebola, and SARS; the Great Depression, 9/11, and the 2008 financial crisis. And we can learn from them.
Is COVID-19 a punctuated equilibrium?
Historians and social scientists have concluded that while each of these global crises had its own personality, they share a particular pattern. All were a sudden break with normality, and led to reactions that had lasting effects on society. In social science, these sudden shifts in normality have been described as a "punctuated equilibrium."
The term comes from evolutionary biology, where natural historians have proposed that even though nature mostly evolves through long stable periods of small adaptations, sometimes new species evolve abruptly, leading to sudden punctuations of the ecosystem.
A good way to think about the difference between a punctuated equilibrium and ‘regular’ change is to imagine a game of basketball. A ‘regular’ change in basketball would be to raise the hoops higher — a pain if you’ve spent years perfecting your jump shot, but ultimately the structure of the game is untouched. A punctuated equilibrium would be to remove the hoops altogether. This would dismantle the structure of the game entirely, raising fundamental questions about how to proceed. How do you play now?
I sit on the board of a non-profit focused on the food and hospitality industry, along with a number of high profile chefs and restaurateurs like David Chang. In recent weeks, our conversations have made it clear that COVID bears close resemblance to a punctuated equilibrium for restaurant owners. For years, they’ve been able to grow and develop their businesses step-by-step, gradually adapting to changes in food culture, the food system, technology, and consumer expectations and needs. They’ve been able to rely on a shared baseline understanding of what a restaurant is and what a good meal means; and work closely with a rich ecosystem of partners and suppliers to gradually advance new ideas. COVID-19 has knocked this system completely out of balance, forcing owners to rethink, all at once, what a restaurant should be and how it can be financially viable for both restaurant owners and their broader ecosystem. What does a noodle bar look like in a post-COVID world? What will be the next Momofuku?
This punctuation of the norm extends to countless other industries and aspects of society. To start, almost all sports events have been canceled. If you’re one of the 3 billion people who regularly watches sports, you’re likely experiencing a notable void not just in how you spend your time or entertain yourself, but in how you connect with others. If you work in the sports or sportswear industry, you’re likely down one of your biggest drivers of demand — sports events. In fashion, the norm has long been to create styles for a small elite that then trickle down to the mass market through social imitation. What happens to social imitation when there is no social stage? The performing arts are based on a close interaction between performers and their audiences. How do you perform without a crowd? Without fellow actors?
The big question on everybody's mind is: Will these changes stick? Will we see new social norms and behaviors when society opens up again, or will things snap back to the way they were before?
A large societal crisis can change deep social structures
It's not as simple to answer these questions as it might seem. No data can tell you how people will act in the future. You can look at trends in current behaviors — the acceleration of virtual meetings, online education, and e-commerce, for example. But trends offer no guarantee that a trajectory will stick. You can ask consumers to share their feelings and predictions for the future, but people are notoriously bad at getting this right. You can observe the total collapse of air travel during COVID, but it doesn’t mean that people won’t return to flying when they can. If there’s one thing we do know from the vast existing literature on human behavior, it is that people are extraordinarily good at adapting momentarily to changes in their environment, only to slip back into old habits when it’s possible and convenient.
In a time like this, it’s tempting to react fast and act on signals we can directly observe:
Consumers are spending less and are less optimistic about the future
Consumer sentiment is driven by fear and safety
Work is becoming more flexible as people get used to videoconferencing
Digital solutions like telemedicine are being adopted at record speed
People are traveling less and have stopped buying cars
New altruistic behaviors are emerging in many societies
All of these are interesting behaviors that might stick. But if COVID-19 truly is an instance of punctuated equilibrium, it will reshape our behavior at a much more fundamental level. In social science, we would call this reshaping changes in the deep structure. The idea is that an equilibrium is made up of deep structures — agreed-upon ‘parts’ and ‘activity patterns’ (for humans, things like beliefs, values, norms) that hold a system together. These deep structures are strong enough to resist and adapt to most external changes and threats. But every once in a while, they break down, and a new set of deep structures evolve.
History has shown that big societal crises like pandemics can change our deep structures, laying the foundation for entirely new consumer needs, ideas, values, and behaviors (including adoption of new technologies). The black death in the 14th century paved the way for ending feudalism and introducing Enlightenment. Some historians give credit to the yellow fever for having paved the way for revolts against slavery in the Caribbean Islands, which in turn inspired the fight to end slavery in other parts of the world. The second world war led to women joining the workforce. 9/11 reshaped transportation and air travel worldwide.
The best business bets coming out of COVID will be those that come from an understanding of how the crisis is and is not changing our ‘deep structures’ — and thus, which new needs, ideas, values, and behaviors are here to stay. Monitoring COVID’s effect on deep structures can help companies to draft the right strategy, invest wisely, prioritize offerings that will empower customers — and most importantly, find their place in a post-COVID world.
Five deep structures to observe
There are many ‘deep structures’ shaping human behavior, but past social science research on how society evolves during a crisis helps point us to those that may be worth a closer look. We’d suggest starting with these five.
#1
FINDING BELONGING
How we feel connected to one another
Humans are social animals. Our cultures and economies were built to reflect an instinct to gather in close physical proximity to others in order to connect and belong. Now, COVID has put this instinct in conflict with personal and communal safety, imposing a strict moratorium on many of the gatherings humans have come to reply upon for connection with others — sports games, offices, concerts, dates, festivals, conferences, shared meals, and parties, to name just a few.
We are already seeing a surge in relatively new forms of ‘togetherness’ in their absence — Zoom calls, video games, virtual concerts and fashion festivals, e-sports spectatorship — as well as changes in the way people make use of existing forms, like dating apps. But it’s not yet clear how well these replacements for physical proximity and contact will deliver on people’s needs for connection and belonging, or what evolutions they might prompt. What might terms like connection or community mean — and how will they be built — if social distance remains the norm? What will it look like to feel alive and part of a group if people are hesitant to gather? And what have people learned about connection during quarantine that they might carry beyond its end?
Shifts in this deep structure could redefine what it means for brands to build loyalty and ‘community;’ challenge industries that rely heavily on fandom and crowded physical events to reimagine what high-value branded experience and their audiences can look like; and prompt both brands and workplaces to respond to an entirely new set of consumer and employee aspirations and challenges. What sort of help might people need to embrace and show off newfound forms of belonging in a more socially distant world, or to fill unmet social needs?
#2
RITUALS & ROUTINES
How we structure, mark, and make time meaningful
The way humans structure, mark, and make sense of time is fundamental to who we are and how we operate — including how we establish a sense of control and stability. Think: morning rituals, exercise routines, commutes; the five day work week, weekends, seasons; birthdays, vacations, holidays, engagements, marriages, funerals. Our relationship to time matters for businesses, too: The travel and mobility industries, for example, are as impacted by when people move as they are by how or where.
Under lockdown, we’ve seen an unprecedented disruption of people’s relationship to time. What are work hours, when the workday isn’t delineated by a commute? What is summer, if urban dwellers are stuck inside and farmers can’t go to work? What makes life moments significant, when fundamental shared rituals and celebrations must go remote or be canceled altogether?
New, micro rituals have no doubt sprung up during this time — things like periodic hand-washing — and more may be on their way. Other rituals (especially those we don’t miss, like commuting; or can’t afford, like weddings) may become far less prevalent. Others, still, may come back with a vengeance.
For brands that rely heavily on occasion-based marketing and sales (e.g. gift giving), shifts in this deep structure may beg the question of how they can show up for a potential new set of customer rituals and routines post-COVID, as well as what needs a revised sense of time might eliminate or create for people. Across businesses, such shifts could also necessitate a fresh look at the routines and rituals of the workplace. What will be the new moments and occasions that help build and bind corporate culture?
#3
SENSE OF SCALE
How we experience proximity, distance, and relevance
There is a well-known theory known as "human scale theory" about how our spatial horizon guides our mental horizon. If buildings are too tall and the roads too broad, we feel small. If streets are busy and packed, we feel connected and human. If houses have low ceilings and small windows, we feel close and suspicious of the outside. This matters primarily because it helps humans determine what is relevant to us — what is worthy of our attention, and what is not.
COVID has dramatically changed the distance people can travel, introducing a hyperlocal way of living and reducing people’s everyday field of vision in the short term. It has also changed the distance between people. It’s possible that we will bounce back to a world that feels just as globalized and interconnected as ever. But it’s also possible that people’s perception of proximity, distance, scale, and relevance will be shifted in lasting ways. How might these new perceptions change the forms of influence customers are susceptible to? Their definition of small or local, and its significance in deciding what brands they will buy from? Does this new sense of distance change what it means for a brand to feel close and relevant to its customers?
As more brands embrace and rely more heavily in digital marketing channels and e-commerce, shifts in this deep structure may require them to rethink what it means to meaningfully engage customers and create a sense of place. How might they use rich digital experiences to approximate a sense of proximity and physicality for their customers, over a sense of distance?
#4
BEING IN PUBLIC
How we behave and play our role on the public stage
Sociologists have, for a long time, observed how staging ourselves in public is a massive part of how humans build identity and ensure public spaces feel comfortable for everyone. People portray themselves differently on the street — and on social media, for that matter — than they do in their homes or in private conversations. Behavior in public is a tacit skill — you just know how to greet people, how to stand in a line, how loud to speak, when it’s appropriate to talk to a stranger.
COVID has meant all of this has to be unlearned, perhaps temporarily or perhaps for the longer-term. If the public space is a theater stage, we are all given new roles. How are people learning to play their new roles? How will people react to an increased degree of surveillance? What social codes express safety, and what says danger? What functions previously fulfilled by public space might shift online? And how should brands behave in this new public?
Shifts in the deep structure of public norms could no doubt challenge the design of retail, which will need to continue to deliver on needs like inspiration and human connection without sacrificing on a sense of safety. It could also inform product design in categories that put consumers in close contact with the outside world — cars, sports apparel, and sharing economy services, to name just a few.
#5
VALUES & PRIORITIES
How we think about right and wrong, important and unimportant
One need only look to the growth of sustainable businesses in recent years to see that a collective sense of values and priorities can create a powerful cultural and economic zeitgeist. One need only look to the virtual disappearance of this obsession in times of COVID to see that a pandemic can drastically alter what we understand to be important.
Like many crises in human history, COVID has highlighted inequalities and divisions; led to blame games and villains; and shifted the scales between altruism and selfishness, private and the collective, me and us. (Social science has shown that this tradeoff sits at the core of most social systems). It has introduced unprecedented levels of moral and social control. It has familiarized us with new, charged vocabulary like ‘essential’ and ‘inessential,’ ‘vulnerable’ and ‘low-risk.’ It has highlighted not just how businesses deliver for their customers, but how they treat their employees and supply chain partners. And it has prompted people to reevaluate what they should and should not be consuming — based on factors like affordability, safety, responsibility to others, and the overall importance of a purchase.
Should these lead to changes in this deep structure, brands will have to rethink product portfolios, business models, marketing strategies, and much more. Where COVID sends our values and priorities will no doubt have implications for what constitutes a good brand, a great product, a likable piece of marketing, a reasonable price; the kinds of innovation consumers and investors seek out; and what types of purchases consumers consider meaningful or ‘worth it.’ What will constitute ‘value’ in a world where our priorities have been so shaken up? What will good corporate citizenship look like?
…
COVID-19 crisis might turn out not to be as big of a disruption to the system as we feel it is right now. Maybe our deep structures — beliefs, values, social norms — are strong enough to survive this upset. In that case, we’ll come out of the crisis a bit shaken and dizzy, but ultimately not too far from where we started. On the other hand, maybe they aren’t, and we won’t. Maybe this crisis will lead to fundamental changes in one or two of our ‘deep structures.’ Or maybe none of them will be left untouched, and the crisis will end our current understandings of how to live, creating an entirely new playing field.
All three scenarios are possible. But if you want to be among the first to know which is probable, keeping an eye on these deep structures may the best investment you can make right now.