Pandemic Lessons for Leading Through Change

April 20, 2025

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#405 – April 20, 2025 [6 Minute Read]

Remembering Pandemic-Era Lessons

Hello, fellow strategists! While being buffeted by tariffs, trade wars, political uncertainty and AI, you may have a sense you’ve seen this type of upheaval before — during the Covid-19 pandemic. Here we recap those lessons, look at AI prompt engineering, the IKEA effect, a perspective on risk, and ways to inject life into routine briefings… all to help you achieve greater success with your strategies.

Quick Takes:

Remembering Pandemic-Era Lessons During Change

As the distinction between normal operations and crisis management continues to blur in these times of uncertainty, we do well to remember these five pandemic-era lessons for leading through change, from HBR.

Proactively engage with uncertainty. (Identify future possibilities amid the turbulence.)
Balance employee and organization needs. (Rigid, one-size-fits-all workplace policies don’t work — take a thoughtful, multifaceted approach.)
Quickly test and refine new ideas. (That may require a shift in how you think about systems, risk and innovation.)
Make smart decisions with limited information. (Waiting for complete information before making a decision may not be an option.)
Communicate to build trust and confidence. (In times of uncertainty, people look to their leaders not just for clear, consistent, and authentic information but also for reassurance and direction.)

These leadership imperatives aren’t temporary adaptations. They represent a fundamental shift in what effective leadership means today — thriving in uncertainty.

Welcome to the IKEA Effect:

In his Curiosity Chronicle, Sahil Bloom says we don’t value what’s easy. We value what we earn. The more effort we put in, the more value or meaning we extract.

In 2011, behavioral scientists Michael Norton, Dan Ariely, and Daniel Mochon coined the term IKEA Effect to refer to a cognitive bias where people place significantly more value on things they put effort into creating.

The researchers cited the example of the legendary Betty Crocker food brand, which saw sales of a new “just add water” line of cake mixes flop in the 1950s. It seems the process was too easy, which meant consumers paid little attention to the process and valued the output less than before. When the recipe was adjusted to require adding an egg —a tiny bit of incremental effort— sales skyrocketed.

“So, why do hard things?” Bloom asks. “Because nothing feels better than a hard-earned win.”

Prompting Your AI Marketing Assistant

If you’re using large language models in your marketing work, it’s critical to develop a good working relationship with your AI tools (such as Chat GPT, Gemini, Claude, MS Copilot or Perplexity). Masterful prompt engineering can help you remain the master of your tech.

On MarketingProfs.com, Linda Emma from CloudControlMedia, suggest that you be a mentor to your AI, treating it like a human helper. Guide it well, she says, or get “garbage in, garbage out”. She also advises to give it a persona — give your AI a name, define her role, and set out expectations.

Here are some other specific tips to consider, even if you are not in marketing:

Assign your AI specific tasks, defined with specific, concise language.
The more detailed your directions, the better results.
Give your AI assistant some rules to follow. Introduce constraints and resources.
Use varied inputs for your prompt — audio, video, art, images, slides, charts, graphs, and even code when appropriate.
Have a back-and-forth conversation. Provide feedback to your AI, commenting when it’s done a good job (or missed the mark), and offer insights as to why you want a task performed in a particular way.
Use prompt-chaining. Break down a high-level prompt into smaller, more manageable steps. Use multiple prompts sequentially, especially with complex problems, feeding the output of one step into the next.
Try tree-of-thought prompting. This advanced prompt engineering technique asks your AI to help you explore multiple options, like the branches of a decision tree. Use it to help you brainstorm, define the problem, and generate alternative solutions. Then work with your AI to evaluate and “prune” each path until you select the best one.

Remember to evaluate AI responses with a critical eye. As we are told so often, AI makes mistakes and “hallucinations” remain a reality, so check your assistant’s work!

Why not pick one tip to work on this week?

Q&A with 8020Info:

Injecting Life into a Routine Briefing

Question: I have to deliver a routine quarterly update to a senior leadership group. They have all the details in my report, but I fear few will have read it (fairly routine, bureaucratic stuff!). Can you suggest any ways to tweak my remarks so my report-back will be more engaging?

8020Info Replies: Here are 10 ideas to consider:

Help the group focus, and speak to anything of significant importance that non-readers, scanners and skippers might overlook.
Try not to dwell on routine process content, deadline dates, document references and the like. Only those accountable for the report would be interested (and maybe not even them!).
Draw their attention to one or two critical milestones achieved — perhaps a pivotal project now completed and/or an intriguing initiative in progress that is building momentum or breaking new ground.
Mention anything that is stuck, drifting, slowing, failing or at risk of failing, and why. Point out risks they should be aware of, especially if they’re not so obvious for a casual reader.
Tell a “look-ahead” story. (What might happen next?)
Share some colourful testimonials from customers, clients or staff.
Briefly highlight “lessons learned”.
Walk them through a “drill-down-to-illustrate” story — how a project got started, who was involved, a couple of challenges along the way in their “hero’s journey”, a decisive point or moment of truth that determined success, and the happy ending to the story.
Elaborate on some unique detail that reinforces the organization’s overall purpose or values.
Engage the team with a focused discussion question that encourages them to react to the material. Or invite the team to comment on what stood out for them personally, from their own observations, expertise and experiences.

For Your Reading List:

This month, we’re reading Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a former derivatives trader and author of The Black Swan, Antifragile, and Fooled by Randomness. Taleb argues that having “skin in the game” is essential for fairness, accountability, and sound risk management. “The symmetry of skin in the game is a simple rule … and the ultimate BS-buster,” he writes.

His core message: never trust anyone who has nothing to lose. Without personal risk, he warns, people can benefit from their actions without bearing the consequences of their mistakes. The phrase is common, but one we rarely stop to examine. So when choosing a service provider, business partner or advisor, it’s worth asking: do they have a stake in the outcome?

Closing Thought:

“Everyone dreams big until they see the price tag.” — Shane Parrish, author and founder of Farnam Street.

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8020Info helps senior leadership teams and boards develop, clarify and build consensus behind strategic priorities. Our services support strategic planning, governance and change processes, marketing communications and research / stakeholder consultations. We would be pleased to discuss your needs and welcome enquiries.