How easy has it been for you to think creatively for these past endless weeks in lockdown?

If you've struggled as a leader, think how hard it’s been for your team, separated from colleagues and confronted with having to quickly merge work and home lives.

With many companies in crisis mode and a third of the global workforce working from home for the last four months, it might be expected that business innovation has taken a back seat.

Yet surprisingly, COVID-19 has had the opposite effect for many businesses. The crisis has galvanised creative response and prompted digital transformation on an unprecedented scale. The pandemic has highlighted just how agile and responsive businesses can be when immediate action is called for.

And what the CHROs we’ve been speaking with during the pandemic are telling us is that the best way of creating agility is to think along two axes in order to respond to fast-moving events:  empowered, local teams acting in coordination with centralized guidance.

By adopting a strategy of ‘distributed control with centralised coordination,’ honed by the military to facilitate response to surprise attacks, companies empower their people to make important decisions in the moment while ensuring everyone is working toward a shared mission and goals.

In a time like this, as national lockdowns and safety guidelines are evolving into much more targeted responses, varying by region, country, and even city, such an approach is almost mandatory.

At the same time, never before has employee training been more important to help people adapt to new working situations and stimulate creativity. Even in the depths of the crisis, most of the companies we’re regularly talking to are doing more learning than ever.

One San Francisco-based Academy member, for instance, built a whole library of content on how to work at home over the first weekend of lockdown, then saw it widely adopted across the business.

Other companies have rapidly implemented new training to help people shift into new job roles – such as from in-store sales to online sales and customer support.

Innovation comes from agility

That’s far from the only benefit of learning and development (L&D) in the current crisis. Companies that have invested in developing employees’ power skills, such as curiosity, teamwork, communication, and time management, are much better prepared to rapidly react and adapt.

For example, PepsiCo dramatically accelerated planned updates and rollouts of digital tools — ranging from its employee learning portal to the merging of multiple databases for improved experiences — as the vast majority of its employees defaulted to working from home.

This acceleration was driven by the sudden urgency to equip people with the tools they needed to do their jobs effectively remotely. One of the most critical projects involved revamping the company’s employee onboarding system to accommodate virtual interviewing and online induction.

Typically, a project of that scale usually takes months, but urgency proved an important driver, and, without travel and meetings clogging schedules, it was possible to complete the initiative in five weeks.

The accelerated project timelines were so successful that this major global brand is now looking at how it can replicate the same level of agility in future projects.

But PepsiCo is far from being alone in looking to use new thinking to drive positive change.

Belgian-based multinational drink and brewing company Anheuser-Busch InBev’s responded to COVID-19 disruption by converting production at several breweries to address acute shortages for hand sanitiser products.

In a period of weeks, the company’s distributed approximately 500,000 units of sanitizer to frontline healthcare workers, emergency shelters, and communities in need.

To facilitate the pivot at the locations involved, the company implemented weekly goal-oriented sprints out of the agile development methodology playbook.

The focus on key objectives and ongoing feedback cycles has had such a positive impact on employee engagement and problem-solving performance that the company is considering making such sprints standard practice and potentially moving away from traditional six-month performance reviews.

This pandemic has taught us that business agility and innovation are inextricably linked.

And, in order to create agile and innovative company cultures, leaders have to re-examine the training provided to employees; in particular, they must ensure there is priority placed on the power skills that foster team collaboration and adaptive thinking.

Leaders must also make sure that traditional organizational structures and decision-making processes are not getting in the way of work and stifling innovation.

Summing up, our challenging 2020 has highlighted how collaboration, real-time problem solving using a radically decentralised model for decision making and investment in skills has really changed many enterprises for the better.

Mark Spratt is vice president of customer success at The Josh Bersin Academy, the global development academy for HR and talent professionals