Crisis Changes Behavior

Reinforce

It is well known that war has driven technological innovation. The Second World War accelerated the development of radar and the atomic bomb, while the Cold War gave rise to intercontinental ballistic missiles and the Internet. Those innovations later led to advances in weather forecasting, nuclear power generation, space exploration, and the digital revolution. War is evil, but history has shown that its urgency and necessity can bring about bold technological innovation.
Natural disasters and major accidents can also drive growth in those who respond to them.

Deep Dive

My elementary school teacher once told us,
"Technology has made dramatic leaps forward during every war."
It made perfect sense to me.
Besides the examples mentioned in the main text, the Second World War also accelerated innovation in areas such as:

the evolution of aircraft through the invention of the jet engine
the advancement of computers through research into codebreaking

More recently, we have seen dramatic advances in:

unmanned drone technology
robotics
cyber warfare and cyber defense

It is also said that many of history's great technologies—including the Egyptians' shipbuilding techniques, the Romans' architectural engineering, and the Chinese invention of gunpowder—originated from military necessity.
Even as a child, I vaguely thought,
"When people's lives are on the line, they really push themselves to invent new things."
It wasn't until I watched Damian and his colleagues embrace the latest drones and robotics without hesitation, saying,
"If we don't use them now, the enemy will."
that I truly understood the mechanism by which a sense of crisis drives technological innovation.

The closest experience most of us civilians have had in recent years was the COVID-19 pandemic. With remote work becoming the only practical option, organizations around the world rapidly adopted online meetings simply to keep their businesses running. Competition among online meeting platforms intensified, and features such as virtual backgrounds, breakout rooms, and recording capabilities evolved at remarkable speed.
Our own way of working changed as well—just as drones and cyber technology changed the way militaries fight.

Let me use McKinney Rogers as an example.
In March 2020, as COVID-19 began spreading rapidly, we immediately started receiving messages from many of our clients:
"In-person training will be difficult. We'd like to discuss the timing of our workshops as the situation develops."
That was completely understandable.
My immediate reaction was,
"Our business could disappear."
Our workshops were built around people gathering together, challenging one another, and listening to me passionately—perhaps overly passionately—encourage them to change both their mindset and their behavior. If people could no longer gather, our greatest strength disappeared with them.
In fact, during March and April, our business literally fell to zero.
Worse still, what we had assumed would be a disruption lasting only a month or two continued to spread. Instead of subsiding, the pandemic grew worse, and even the Olympic Games scheduled for that summer were postponed. Suddenly, no one could see when things would return to normal.
We began thinking,
"If we don't build a way to deliver our programs online, we could genuinely go out of business."
At almost exactly the same time, several clients approached us with a different request:
"Mission Leadership® is exactly what we need now that we're managing teams remotely. We'd like you to deliver the workshops online."
Working together with our global team, we rapidly built an entirely new virtual workshop platform.
It included:

web-based group exercises
real-time polling to capture participants' views
breakout sessions for peer coaching and advice
chat functions for sharing insights

Our goal was to create an experience that was just as effective as our in-person workshops.
I also had to reinvent the way I presented. For years I had spoken to audiences sitting directly in front of me. Now I had to learn to speak naturally to a web camera barely five millimeters across. I practiced adjusting my delivery while reading participants' reactions through the chat instead of their facial expressions.
What surprised me most were requests like these from our clients:
"May we show the recording to people who couldn't attend?"
"This time we'd like 400 people to participate."
For years, our workshops had been treated as confidential—or rather, as valuable global intellectual property—and had been designed for groups of around twenty participants. Suddenly, they could easily be recorded or viewed simultaneously by hundreds of people.
We could have responded by saying,
"Please don't record the sessions."
or
"If 400 people are attending instead of 20, you'll need to pay twenty times the fee."
Instead, we asked ourselves,
"If this helps us achieve our vision of making Japan a global leader in leadership by August 15, 2045, isn't it worth it?"
Provided that our intellectual property remained protected, we decided to commit ourselves to this new approach.
As we adapted, something unexpected happened.
Beyond simply becoming better at delivering online workshops, we discovered entirely new possibilities through recorded content.

We began recording my presentations during online workshops with separate cameras and obtained our clients' permission to use the recordings. During the pandemic, while every workshop was conducted online, we accumulated more than 1,000 hours of content.
From that library, we selected the most valuable material and, in 2022, launched a subscription-based online learning platform called the Mission Leadership® Academy.
It also solved a problem our clients had been raising for years:
"People quickly fall back into old habits after the workshop."
"We'd like a stronger follow-up process."
Then, in 2023, we expanded again by launching YouTube and Instagram channels centered around one-minute educational videos.
Out of a crisis that threatened our very survival came the development of online workshops, the launch of our online academy, and eventually our move into social media.
Before COVID, we used to say casually,
"Maybe we should start using social media one of these days before we fall behind."
Looking back now, that feels almost unbelievable.
There is no doubt about it.
Crisis changes behavior.

Damian McKinney, MBE: Former Royal Marines Commando, who founded McKinney Rogers in 1999. Born in Republic of Kenya.