Becoming Qrious With James Brown

While we all #StayHome and #StayAlert, the impact Covid-19 virus has had - is still having - on our lives has not passed any of us by.

Against the rapidly shifting sands of the economy we are forced to venture into new ways of working and are faced with the trickier question; how do we change the way we work and the way we interact with our customers? Smart businesses are looking how they can use this to accelerate their shift into providing more and better digital services. James Brown heads up innovation and strategy at experience design studio Qrious. And he’s no stranger to changes in the workplace. It’s his job.

“Innovation is about imagining all the things you could do, and strategy is choosing between them.” Originally from York, James worked in London for 15 years, running strategy and consulting at the UK’s largest independent digital agency, before moving back up north recently.

Having recently joined the team – almost entirely virtually – his expectations of a ‘normal’ induction were quickly derailed. “I’ve been really looking forward to working with friends in a sociable office again, but then the lockdown happened! I’ll have to wait a bit longer. But I’m really enjoying using my experience to help our clients adapt.”

“It turns out that I’ve been doing either remote or distributed working all my life, from managing offshore digital teams across Europe to working from home in Durham.” Clearly remote working isn’t the only adaptation that businesses across the country are having to make. The lockdown has forced a lot of firms to make changes in a very short space of time. Changes which may have previously taken several years to be formulated within a company, are now frantically being launched – to varying levels of success. “There’s a famous Lenin quote that has become a truism,” says James, “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.” “When it comes to thinking about digital, we often meet companies who have some kind of transformation or customer experience roadmap that they intend to roll out over the next three to five years. But the virus has put the pressure on leaders to immediately digitise their processes, launch new online products and services within days or weeks, and find ways to rapidly generate lost revenue.”

James cites a recent survey that says fully 75 percent of us who have tried out digital services for the first time during the lockdown say they’ll continue to do so once things return to normal. Clearly businesses are having to rethink how they do things, but are they ready to make those changes? Can they use their current technology to do it? Can they do it without breaking the bank? And what new processes or training might be needed behind the scenes to deliver it well?

“We have our Q.Lab for just that reason,” explains James. “You get access to our team of senior digital specialists who help your team rapidly think through exactly those kinds of issues – with the right people we can usually work out a simple roadmap together in just a few days.”

It seems likely that those firms who figure out how to embrace digital technologies during the coming months are going to have a major advantage. There’s no doubting that more innovation will come out of the Covid-19 lockdown. Many firms have had their eyes opened to what really is possible. However, discovering and making use of innovation is where James and Qrious can help. It’s what they do.