shelidonMarch 8, 20201 Comment on Just that weird kind of quiet.

Greetings, everyone.
It is Sunday morning, here in Milan, ad everything is very, very quiet outside.

Quiet.
Like silence, but not really silent…
Like the sound when you lie upside down in your bed.
Just the sound of your heart in your head.

It might be simply because it’s Sunday morning.
Still, it feels like a strange kind of quiet.

I was idly sitting on my couch with my partner, yesterday evening. We had just finished watching one episode of His Dark Materials when one of my guys posted the news on our #general Slack channel. You might know the story already: our Government was discussing the possibility of shutting down half of northern Italy. Milan is right in the middle of it, the epicenter of the epidemic being very near to here. Esri’s Living Atlas provides updates in near-real-time.

This possibility became reality late tonight. And I am still waiting for the actual text of the decree. It hasn’t been published on official channels yet, for reasons that frankly escape me. I am waiting to see the actual wording of the final thing. Still, there’s no point in waiting to face the reality of things, which is: we’re nearly quarantined.

I was prepared. I was prepared for the possibility that schools would stay closed until the end of April. I was actually prepared that they would not reopen until September. And, as some of you know, I work as a consultant and a lot of my business revolves around teaching. That is one heck of being prepared.
Still, I was not prepared for this.
And I will confess that yesterday, late in the evenings, we had the conversation of trying to execute a quick extraction of my guys from the margin of the new red zone.
I confess we had that conversation.
Crucify me. Or sing with me.

The problem is a little deeper than “not being able to go to work”, as I read o social media under the wonderfully spiteful #StateAcasa (#StayAtHome) trend.
And it doesn’t surprise me that I need to explain this to people who think that “working” means having tricked a Company into signing a contract with them and then shamelessly using every single worker’s right in order to work as little as possible.
As odd as it might sound, some of us need to actually work in order to get paid.
Just going to work, and keep your armchair warm, is not going to cut it.
Some of us will not get paid if they don’t work.
Odd, ain’t it?

…but you work in digital transformation!

I know.
Another odd thing.
I can smart-work the shit out of what we produce back-end, and we usually do: everything is in the cloud, we’ve worked successfully even when I literally was on the other side of the world.
My team is not the problem.
It’s the contact with the rest of the industry that is being disrupted.

My business mostly revolves around personal interactions.
Hands are shaken. Eyeballs are licked.
That is how I live and breathe.
That is how I drive innovation.

Which might sound weird, giving that such innovation is digital transformation.
My industry is founded on a solid basis of hands being shaken ad emergency beers being consumed late in the night.
We meet to share knowledge.
We meet to crack problems.
This is a problem we will not be able to solve with beer.

Or will we?

I am a problem solver. My mind is wired like this.
Having moved past the impromptu idea of taking one of my guys and throwing him in Switzerland, never to be heard from again, and mostly being aware that even my guy in Tuscany might not escape the general madness, I have to go back to the drawing table.
I already moved on-line the solid bases of our courses.
It is not enough. It is not going to be enough.
We cannot stop. We must not stop. We will not stop.
Luckily enough, this kind of transformation requires digital innovation.
And digital innovation is what I do best.