Will You Lead or Follow in the New Normal?

Shahin Sobhani and Joshua Lincoln discuss 3 priorities to ensure success in remote working and learning

July 1, 2020

min read

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Shahin Sobhani

Principal, Custom Digital Learning, BTS

3 priorities to ensure success in remote working and learning

As the world surpasses 12 million recorded cases and 540,000 deaths from Coronavirus, it is becoming increasingly clear that recovery will be a slow and painful process. The COVID-19 pandemic has massively disrupted the economy and aggravated longstanding social inequalities, resulting in a resurgence of social justice protests.

Despite these massive shifts, some businesses and governments, whether consciously or unconsciously, still cling to the hope of a “return to normal” — normal markets, normal profit margins and normal electoral cycles. This is a mistake. The future will not look like the past.

Amidst the tragedy caused by COVID-19, organizations must find their footing and work diligently to create the new normal. The question is, in this unknown world, will your organization lead or follow?

Why corporate learning is critical

In the “new normal” caused by the pandemic, remote working and learning have already emerged as critical for success. Before COVID-19, only 33% of corporate training was done via virtual classroom or self-paced digital learning while 54% was still delivered in person. Yet in-person learning, as every university is finding out, is now a very risky proposition.

To survive in the new environment, businesses will need to reverse that balance and shift far more to remote learning. The traditional obstacle preventing companies from moving to digital learning was cost, though this had dramatically improved in the years leading up to COVID-19. The challenge now is that businesses in survival mode have already started cutting their learning and development budgets at precisely the moment when they should be maintaining or increasing them.

Today’s barrier is not just a delivery issue, meaning how training is delivered within corporations, but a prioritization issue – businesses need to reserve budget for training. The purpose of corporate training is to help onboard employees and support them in all aspects of their functions through continuous training. Because the pandemic is changing the very way in which business is done, corporate training is mission critical for people to perform at their best. Furthermore, the kind of corporate training previously carried out may be neither possible nor desirable today. Both the delivery and the content of corporate training need to be rethought and redesigned.

Surprisingly, the answer is not to just do more “online.” As work-from-home (or living-at-work) — whether loved or hated — becomes a permanent part of the new normal, companies need to help their staff explore and refine both the optimal work processes and their boundaries. This necessitates a tolerance for the unknown, a willingness to take risks, an acceptance of mistakes, and a dedication to experimentation. For the foreseeable future, the virus has made companies and employees alike pioneers.

Defining the new normal will require experimentation around three human-centered priorities:

1. Reboot communication and consultation

In the traditional manager-worker relationship, the worker’s experience often takes a backseat to the manager’s authority. This balance has shifted because the business’ survival now depends on front-line workers managing the daily risks and difficulties of customer interface under pandemic conditions.

As speed, safety and flexibility all become more important, managers need to truly listen to their front line, which is closest to the pulse of this rapidly moving situation and is — literally — running the risks. Any manager who does not truly listen to their front line is on borrowed time.

Agility and adaption to local circumstances are now more essential than ever. Businesses must innovate service delivery and customer service on the fly and week by week. At the same time, there is also now less margin for error with respect to safety protocols and quality standards.

The managerial impulse will be to go more rigid, with tighter one-size-fits-all protocols and processes. Instead, these layered challenges are best handled through iterative communication, feedback loops and consultative processes. As a number of studies begin to tease out the relationship between individual and group work, and the benefits of moderation, timing and bursts in communication, teams need to continually test out what works for them.

2. Accelerate diversity and inclusion

It is now well documented that COVID-19 and its knock-on effects disproportionately affect vulnerable populations — minority communities, the elderly, women, the poor. Therefore, part of the response to the virus must be to reverse the effect of these long-standing social injustices.

In remote learning, promoting diversity and inclusion must consider questions of equal access. Managers need to give careful attention to broadband connection, IT equipment, and even access to working spaces in the home.

Overall, less than half of all households (48%) have what the 2018 US census defines as “high connectivity”: a laptop or desktop computer, a smartphone, a tablet, and a broadband Internet connection. According to the same census data, minority households were the least likely to have high connectivity. Low-income households were far less likely to have high connectivity than high income households (21% of households with an income under $25,000 v 80% of households with an income of $150,000). The rural/urban divide also compounds this gap: only 54% of low-income rural households had high-speed broadband versus 96% of high-income urban households. There is work to do.

COVID-19 is also eroding decades of hard-fought gender gains in the workplace as women lose jobs at a faster rate than men. Remote work and corporate training need to be redesigned to ensure they do not disadvantage caregivers — mainly but not exclusively women — working out of the home. The overall understanding of remote work and training needs to evolve from a benevolent tolerance of the “toddler run” and the “potty break” to a new reality in which comprehensive and tailored child care are seen as critical.

Above all, businesses will now need to work even harder to reach out and recruit, retain and promote a diverse workforce at every level.

3. Act with empathy (and expect it from others)

No matter how tech savvy you may be, all workers have been pushed to use and rely on technology far more than in the past. As companies and managers navigate the physical changes to working in the pandemic, it is important to remain attuned to the psychological and emotional needs of employees and customers.

COVID-19 has heightened the challenge of maintaining a work-life balance, and employees may need more flexibility from managers to mitigate this issue. More seriously, there are many for whom home may not be a place of comfort and safety. Awareness of these issues is the mandatory “new normal” baseline for managers.

For example, the virus has disproportionately affected older citizens. Older learners and workers are not only getting sick at higher rates, they are also more likely to be challenged by the increased use of technology and new ways of working, so care must be taken to ensure they are not left behind. Corporate remote learning and operations need to extend beyond one-size-fits-all learning models to address these needs, as it started to do with addressing accessibility requirements.

Solving these problems and the many unknowns still over the horizon will require genuine empathy — felt and acted on by those in leadership. Regardless of the business age and size, success will also require a spirit of entrepreneurship and experimentation.

Contribute to the new normal or be consumed by it

In times of change, the data shows that those who act fast and engage firmly with the new reality will do the best in the long run. Organizations that fail to step up and contribute to formulating the new normal will be left to embrace the reality created by others. If you’re not at the table, you’re probably on the menu.

As they pivot, managers will need to embrace a posture of humility to help their people see success. If you think you know what the new normal is, think again. None of us do. Listen to those around you, care for them, trust them, and they will help you create the future. We are all pioneers now.

^{Learn how to design conversations that actually move decisions forward.}

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1. Las capacidades sin contexto no sobreviven al día a día

Un ejecutivo de ventas puede salir de un taller sabiendo exactamente qué preguntar, cómo estructurar una conversación de valor, cómo posicionarse como asesor estratégico en lugar de vendedor de productos. La semana siguiente, el peso de las métricas de corto plazo, la presión por resultados y las urgencias del día a día terminan arrastrándolos de vuelta a la rutina de siempre.

McKinsey (2024) encontró que más del 70% de las iniciativas de transformación comercial no logran sus objetivos — y la principal causa no es el diseño del programa, sino la falta de condiciones organizacionales para sostener los nuevos comportamientos.

El problema no es el taller. Es lo que existe o no existe en la realidad de la estructura comercial.

2. El cambio requiere alinear seis pilares

Lo que diferencia a las empresas que realmente transforman su modelo comercial de las que solo capacitan, está relacionado con seis pilares que operan simultáneamente.

1. Patrocinio de la alta dirección que empodera en lugar de solo exigir

2. Disciplina en gestión de cuentas/clientes estratégicos, con metodología y seguimiento

3. Conversaciones centradas en el cliente, no en el portafolio de productos

4. Cada interacción con relevancia estratégica, preparadapara crear valor medible

5. Nuevos comportamientos integrados al ritmo operativodiario y la cadencia del negocio

6. Líderes comerciales presentes que sostienen la cultura, no solo la expresan

Cuando falta uno, los demás no escalan y terminan provocando un círculo vicioso.

3. El liderazgo que sostiene vale más que el que exige

El patrocinio de la alta dirección y la presencia de los líderes comerciales sonlos pilares que más frecuentemente fallan. No porque los líderes no crean en el cambio, sino porque el día a día los jala de vuelta a revisar resultados, no a construir comportamientos.

Gartner (2024) señala que los equipos comerciales cuyos líderes hacen coaching activo y visible tienen hasta un 28% mayor probabilidad de adoptar nuevos comportamientos de manera sostenida.

El entrenamiento define el rumbo y entrega el mapa; el liderazgo es lo que realmente ayuda a navegar y sostener el cambio.

‍

Conclusión

Si tu empresa está invirtiendo en transformar la forma en que sus equipos comerciales se relacionan con los clientes, la pregunta ya no es si el entrenamiento funciona. La verdadera pregunta es: ¿qué tan preparada está la organización para sostener el cambio?

Porque el talento existe. Las habilidades se desarrollan. Pero la cultura no se improvisa; se construye todos los días, con liderazgo, alineación y consistencia.

¿Cuál de estos seis pilares es hoy el más débil en tu organización?

Blog Posts

May 5, 2026

min read

Eight weeks, 24 countries, one diamond: The pattern behind our applied AI breakthrough.

Part 2 in a series. BTS CEO Jessica Skon shares stories and lessons on what made the first Applied AI diamond spread, what it felt like inside the team that built it, and what we see as clients adopt this approach.

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In Part 1, I told you about the three decisions we made two years ago and the simulation flywheel that produced our first Applied AI diamond.

Here’s the field-notes version.

Over 80% of our global business have now adopted a new Applied AI approach for doing simulations in the first eight weeks, across 24 countries and every practice.

‍The flywheel didn’t stop with simulations. It moved into finance, sales enablement, legal, operations, and client delivery. Teams started building agents and bringing them onto their own org charts. We didn’t plan for any of that. We built the conditions for people to find their own breakthroughs.

What it felt like inside the flywheel.

When the simulation team went live with their first clients on the new way of working, the lead person hit a wall. Their words:

“You’re asking too much. You’re making me be a full-stack developer. Up until this point I did a small part, and I sent it to the team, and they built off the back end, and they brought it back. And now I have to end-to-end soup to nuts, basically alone.”

There was graphic UI work nobody had been trained for, the fear of delivering quality below what BTS expects of itself, and the weight of not having a playbook. This was not the joyful adoption story most consultancies tell.

Then something shifted. Six members showed up for product testing, where the usual was two or three. The work created teamwork I hadn’t seen at BTS in years. The breakthrough was not an instantaneous change from skepticism to celebration. It was a breakdown in confidence, then rally, then bonding. If we didn’t make room for the breakdown, we would have lost the rally.

The other breakthrough was global teamwork; not yet a BTS core strength. Our culture is beautiful: high-freedom and entrepreneurial. But people’s first identities are to their countries. Almost every prior attempt we’ve made at a global initiative has failed. The one exception was Covid. So, when I say what happened next surprised me, I mean it.

I asked to join the simulation team’s Slack channel rather than pulling them into status meetings. What I got to watch in the mornings was someone in South Africa waking up, posting “I tried this and got stuck,” then London adding on, then San Francisco weighing in, then a surprise breakthrough overnight from Tokyo. We didn’t engineer that. Curious and determined BTS’ers did. The problem was interesting enough that the org chart didn’t matter. It was amazing to see and a glimpse into the next evolution of the BTS culture.

The pattern: Explore, expand, institutionalize, renew.

What we’ve now seen play out, both inside BTS and with clients, follows the same four-step pattern. Each step asks a specific decision of the leader.

Explore.

Stay stubborn on the aspiration and fluid on the path. Our breakthrough wasn’t the path we originally took. We changed tools and approaches. Nobody could have foreseen that. And if the team had taken the first six months of learnings from AI as their definitive “this is the detailed path we will follow,” we never would have gotten the disruption. Five different tool combinations were tried before we found the one that worked. Companies that lock into a single path or tool too early are betting against compounding capability that doubles roughly every seven months. That is not a bet I’d take.

Expand.

Run the old way and the new way side by side. When the simulation team’s breakthroughs got real, the instinct was to retreat into more internal testing. We did the opposite. They ran old way and new way in parallel on 6 or 8 live client projects across all three geographies. Every single one ended up going live the new way. The backup was always there. They didn’t need it.

Institutionalize.

Burn the boats. The simulation team committed that no new client work would be done the old way after January 1. The other practice leads then committed to dates within Q1, even though most of them had not yet experienced the new way themselves. They had to trust their colleagues. If you can do it for the most complex thing, you could probably do it for the less complex ones. By February 15, we had approaching 90% global adoption across 24 countries, across all practices. I was shocked and proud. We had spent years failing at exactly this kind of global rollout.

Renew.

Treat your agents as contractors. People on our diamond teams are now managing 30+ agents they built themselves. Our teams give agents performance feedback. We terminate their contracts when they don’t deliver. We expand the responsibility of agents when they outperform. The frontier question we’re wrestling with now is token budgeting. Two friends of mine running engineering-heavy companies believe that within 6 - 9 months, their token cost per engineer will exceed the cost of the engineer. Whether that’s the right framing is open. The question is real, and every CEO will be asked some version of it within the year.

What had to be true for this to scale.

Once we achieved this amazing global innovation, the leadership sat down to figure out what made it work. We named five things. None of them were about the technology.

Real pain points as the starting point. We had so many people frustrated from those ways of working, all the back and forth and all the wasted time, that this was gold for them. The old way was already painful. The new way wasn’t a forced disruption; it was relief. Find the workflow where the pain is loudest and start there.

The diamond unlocked creativity, it didn’t constrain it. This was the most differentiated insight, and the one most leaders miss. It wasn't "here's the new tasks and rules." It was, "once you learn how to do this, the sky's the limit. You can be even more creative." If your rollout feels like a new set of rules constraining your people, you’ve built the wrong thing.

Pair deep expertise with fresh eyes. The disproportionate share of our breakthroughs came from a tenured tinkerer with total command of the work, paired with someone new to the role who hadn’t yet built the muscle memory of how it had always been done. Without that pairing, you get incremental improvements to the work you already know how to do, instead of a reinvention.

Refuse the “people are too busy” reflex. When I brought the rollout to the global leadership team, the excuses came fast. “Our people are too busy. They’re burnt out. Q1 is going to be busy. No one’s going to have time.” My response: “This is a chance to eliminate the tasks you dread and expand what you love. I know it is a short push of extra work, and I think after the fact you and your team will feel joy and pride and say it was the best time we ever spent.” This is the moment most AI rollouts die.

Senior leaders must lead by example and do the work themselves. This is not middle manager’s job. This is not something you delegate. Even though you don’t build simulations anymore, you must know what this is. One of our partners proactively put time on senior leaders’ calendars and forced them to do the work. Once they started building, the excitement grew, and they could advocate for the rollout because they understood it. If your executives haven’t put their hands on the keyboard, you don’t have a rollout. You have a memo.

What we’re seeing across clients.

We’re now running this play with client organizations across industries and geographies. The companies whose flywheels are accelerating paired their A-players with their early-career talent, pulled IT and legal into the working sessions, refused the “too busy” reflex, and put their senior leaders’ hands on the keyboard. The companies whose flywheels are stuck almost always have a leadership pattern at the center of the stall. Not a tooling pattern. Not a governance pattern. A leadership pattern.

If this resonates, let’s talk.

If you read Part 1 and asked yourself whether your flywheel was turning, the question I’d add now is sharper: do you have the conditions in place for a diamond to appear? If yes, you’re already moving. If no, the technology will not save you.

Here's where we're starting with clients: a working session, half day to a full day, with a small group that owns one of your highest-friction processes. Together we map where your first diamond is most likely to land, how to set up the side-by-side trial, and what your version of "burn the boats" should look like.

The destination, if we do this right, is a self-reliant culture of applied AI inside your company. 5, 10, 15 diamonds compounding into a fundamentally different way of operating. From what I have experienced this is a once in a career opportunity for dramatic shareholder value creation if you get that muscle going. I say that because I'm watching it happen, in real time, inside our own company and across our client base.

If you want to get your flywheels spinning and map your first diamond, start here. Bring your hardest workflow. We'll bring the playbook.

Blog Posts

September 25, 2025

min read

Team meetings: A missed lever for performance?

BTS research shows meetings with clear accountabilities boost team effectiveness 3.9x, turning routine meetings into real performance drivers.

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Meetings are a universal ritual in organizational life. While managers on average spend more than half their working hours in meetings, many leaders can’t shake the feeling that meetings are falling short of their potential. Are they advancing the work, or quietly draining energy? At BTS, we study teams not as collections of individuals, but as living systems. This perspective reveals dynamics that traditional methods often overlook. Rather than aggregating individual 360° assessments, we assess the team as a whole to examine how the team functions collectively. Applying that lens to one of the most common team activities (meetings) uncovers patterns worth paying attention to. Drawing on thousands of team assessments in our database, we focused on two meeting behaviors:

Do teams meet regularly?
Do team members leave meetings with clear accountabilities and next steps?

Our question: How strongly do these behaviors relate to overall team effectiveness?

What the data revealed

Using data from 1,043 respondents (team members and informed stakeholders) we ran a Bayesian analysis to evaluate the predictive power of each behavior. The results were striking:

Both behaviors were linked to higher team effectiveness.
But one mattered far more: leaving meetings with clear accountabilities and next steps was 3.9x more predictive of team effectiveness than simply meeting regularly.
And teams that often or always wrap up meetings with next steps rated 0.66 points higher on a 5-point scale of team effectiveness than teams who sometimes, rarely, or never close with accountabilities - that's almost a full standard deviation higher (0.96 sd)

Meetings aren’t the problem, muddy outcomes are.

Teams often default to frequency, setting cadences of check-ins or standing meetings. Our data suggest that what differentiates effective teams from the rest is not how many meetings they hold, but what comes out of them. A team that meets less often but ends each session with clear accountabilities will outperform a team that meets frequently but leaves outcomes ambiguous. In other words, meetings aren’t inherently wasted time; they become wasted time when they don’t translate into aligned action.

A simple shift that pays dividends

The good news: improving meetings doesn’t require radical redesign. Small changes reinforce accountability and dramatically increase the value extracted:

Close with clarity. Reserve the last 5–10 minutes of every meeting to confirm: What decisions have been made? Who owns what? By when? This habit shifts meetings from “discussions” to “decisions.”
Make commitments visible. Use a shared action log, team board, or project tracker so next steps are transparent, and progress is easy to follow. Visibility builds accountability.
Assign a “Closer.” Rotating this role signals that closing well is everyone’s responsibility. The Closer ensures the team doesn’t drift into vague agreements, but leaves aligned and ready to act.

When teams adopt these habits, the difference is tangible: less rehashing of the same topics, faster progress on priorities, and a stronger sense of shared ownership. These small shifts compound quickly, making meetings not just more efficient, but more energizing and effective. In a world where teams face relentless demands and limited time, focusing on how meetings end may be one of the fastest ways to improve how teams perform.