We were very sure that big changes were approaching, when we read the article titled “You are Likely to Get the Coronavirus” on the Atlantic on February 24th, 2020. Since then, many things have been disrupted but mostly in a positive way. 2020 was a sparkling year full of awards and achievements for GEDS strategic design consultancy. Nevertheless, we cannot deny the physiological effects of social isolation on our team during the pandemic, but we believe we have managed this period quite well due to previous chaotic times in Turkey and focusing on macro problems over the last 3 years. If to summarize our experience for the last 12 months, it would be a mind-blowing period.
We have changed our company strategy since the pandemic and switched to our crisis 3-steps strategy which consists of the following steps:
1- Setting our hypothesis about the pandemic
2- Setting our priorities and executing them strictly
3- Switching to the explorer mode to understand the problems triggered by the pandemic.
1- We set our hypothesis as follows: The pandemic may take years and will affect the economy harshly and globally. Subsequently, we need to prepare ourselves and the company for the long run until 2023.
2- Our priority was as follows: Both the physical and physiological health of the team, our loved ones, and our clients come first and then business.
3- Switching to the explorer mode and execute: From a design point of view, it was a mind-blowing period as there is a new rise of problems that need to be solved. Our execution was threefold:
First of all, we focused on supporting our clients with any help they might need. We regularly check up on our clients to make sure they are doing all right and to accompany them with the challenges they might be experiencing.
Our MIT Solve Workshop with ING Turkey Team, June 2020
Second, we wanted to understand new problems better. Therefore, we set some practices for ourselves: We haven’t made any public talks, shared projections, or written any opinion pieces. These would lead to providing some conclusive information and projections, without having enough data and experience on the subject. It might lead to some bias-decisions in the company and also in our personal lives. These kinds of actions are risky. Therefore, in a very disciplined way, we forced ourselves to be open-minded as much as possible and explore the means where we could understand the problems deeper.
Third, we chose MIT Hackathons to understand the rising problems better, discussed them with a highly qualified community, and came up with solutions together.
Running digital workshops with people from several countries – EU Roadmapping Event
After a series of hackathons, we focused on the future of work and employee experience. Later we partnered with the MIT Solve program and ran a successful GEDS workshop together with ING concerning these topics.
While we were doing all these, we have completed our design work at our large scale project Horizon2020 project MATUROLIFE in September 2020. After 3 years of hard work where some of the unplanned work moved to digital which gave us an opportunity to design new experiences for the digital space.
ESSEC Executive MBA 2021 Class
This year our course at ESSEC Business School Executive MBA program was completely remote. Nevertheless, we had fantastic results and even better evaluations than the last year’s on-campus class. We have hosted Eric Quint, VP Chief Brand and Design Officer at 3M, and Didier Boulet, Group Chief Design Officer at Thales as the guest speaker in our class.
We have run employee experience and digital transformation workshops for the multinationals during the pandemic.
Despite all challenges, we have managed to make the list of Fast Company’s Top 100 Companies with Female Founders list in April 2020. Then in June 2020, our founder Gulay Ozkan was honored by Microsoft with the 2020 Woman Leader Making a Difference with New Technologies award. We are super proud!
We are thankful to our clients, partners, and of course our families for their company in this extraordinary year.
We wish everyone a healthy and fun year with exciting opportunities!
GEDS Team, Istanbul, December 2020
