The COVID-19 pandemic has provided a shared, simultaneous crisis experience for all UofL faculty, staff, students, and residents. This experience forced us to quickly focus attention on how we work, teach, and care for patients. We had to define what was critically important, prioritizing what we do and how we do it to preserve and deliver on our mission. We needed to move quickly, with decisive action. This shared experience, much like any natural disaster, has accelerated a unifying effect on us as the response to the crisis brought us together to get things done far more quickly than if we were not in crisis-mode.

As we begin to emerge from the restrictions we have endured for the past few months, we need to pause and reflect on just what is to come in our post-COVID 19 world at the UofL Health Sciences Center campus. Here are some questions on my mind:

• What will we do differently because of what we have learned?
• Will more of our work be in a virtual environment?
• How much telehealth will be done post-COVID?
• Will we become more nimble and agile in our decision-making?
• How will this change our organizational culture, if at all?
• What have we learned about our purpose, and what brings meaning to our work in healthcare?
• If the COVID-19 pandemic brought us closer together, what will happen when the crisis is gone?
• How can we use the CARDINAL principles to see more clearly the behaviors we need to engage in and encourage for UofL to thrive in the post-COVID world?

We work in a primarily siloed, highly hierarchical environment in an academic institution. Before the pandemic, we spent a lot of time developing consensus, engaging leadership, faculty, and staff in committees to make recommendations and decisions. This process, so embedded in the academic world, can take months and even years in some cases to make decisions and operationalize those decisions because we lean into giving all levels (and silos) of the organization a voice in the affairs of our academic world. However, all that had to change in early March. Decisions had to be made about keeping students on campus rapidly, staff and faculty working from home, suspending research, infection control procedures, expanding telehealth capability almost overnight, and switching to online teaching and virtual meetings. What a change! That was followed by responding to the financial impact caused by the lack of cash flow as a result of suspending elective procedures and surgeries, reducing outpatient visits, requiring decisions about salary reductions, furloughing employees, imposing a hiring freeze, and suspending retirement benefits. Any of these decisions in normal times would have taken months to convene the required committees and task forces to gain sufficient consensus to pull the trigger. Yet, somehow, we did it in days, not months. We had no choice. Our rigid and usually slow administrative structures somehow responded when the moment mattered most and did what had to be done. Make tough decisions in an incredibly short amount of time. So, if we are capable of working this way for two months, what should we expect, maybe even mandate, as we exit the crisis? What will be (should be) the new normal? How will our campus and University community look different in the years to come?

A recent article from the Korn-Ferry consulting group (Accelerating Through the Turn, 2020) was written to engage us in thinking about the post-COVID 19 world. I think it is a helpful framework for considering what is to come, and what we should deliberately build into our organization going forward. Here is what they suggest is coming post-COVID for all organizations:

• Work shifts to virtual: at least some work can readily be done from home and does not require sitting in an office on campus. What will that look like?
• Consumption without contact: we have been immersed in telehealth and virtual teaching. Don’t you think our patients and learners will demand that some of this will still be available?
• New ways of working: decision-making processes will change and need to change as a result of the world around us. What will the new work look like, and what will be the definition of good jobs?

Korn-Ferry suggested that organizations lock in these new ways of working now to accelerate growth post-COVID 19. They anchor some recommendations around the following framework.

In our next post, we will look at how the COVID-19 pandemic has worked to expose our purpose as a university, reflect on the behaviors that emerged from the crisis, and how it has united and engaged our workforce. As we begin to implement the new UofL strategic plan, let’s explore how this unanticipated event might impact the academic, clinical, educational and research missions of the University post COVID-19.

• Purpose is the new strategy. The clarity of purpose brought by the COVID 19 crisis united the workforce. How do we preserve that focus of purpose going forward?
• Organizational capabilities create focus and discipline. Define which organizational capabilities create value in your business and use discipline and focus to accelerate your rebound.
• Priorities replace long-term plans. Create, communicate, and execute a set of clear short-term business priorities that align with the organization’s purpose.
• Agility depends on the right people data and analytics. Make sure you know the true worth and flexibility of one of your most valuable assets-baseline your talent.