The value of simplicity in a world that’s never normal

There cannot be a company that did not use this year’s annual kick-off meeting to talk about addressing the challenges of enormous changes in our world.

We certainly did that at EXA Infrastructure. But our meeting was a little different - not least because it was our first kick-off.

As a business that was only born last September, we are inevitably focused on the future. Our team heard at our kick-off from entrepreneur, advisor and futurist Peter Hinssen that the world has entered an age that he called ‘the never normal’. Seismic shocks  - the pandemic, but also politics and social phenomena - are causing work, life and play to change faster and more profoundly than ever before.

Over the course of two days, we talked in detail about the implications of these huge shifts for EXA, and how we will respond to them. We also spoke to a group of our customers and partners about their expectations of us and how we measure up. That covered our digital infrastructure provision of course, and systems that we are using to serve our customers, and the culture of the business that we are building.

It also touched on a very important point, that sparked a lot of conversation and that we have carried on after the meeting through initiatives we are undertaking. In such a fast-changing world, where digital infrastructure and network capacity are so crucial, we also need to be easy to do business with.

In other words, the technology AND the human exchanges that customers and partners encounter when they do business with us must be right for them. We must be clinical in how we do things - fast, but also highly accurate. And we must be flexible enough to deal with the change that our customers and partners are grappling with, but we must also be reliable.  They depend on our technology and on our people.

It all comes down to keeping things simple. In a complicated, changing world, our underlying networks just need to work and our people need to make that experience as uncomplicated as possible for our customers.

As things that were never normal before seem a normal part of our lives now, being easy to do business with will only become more important.