We often think that the operating mode that we adopt when facing a crisis is indeed effective in the short term, but is impaired when comparing to what should be done over the longer term.

José Andrés invites us to reconsider this hypothesis, in an interview given to McKinsey Quarterly. The founder of the World Central Kitchen NGO, who managed the extraordinary feat to deliver 170 million meals during the first six months of the war in Ukraine, draws a counter-intuitive and stimulating lesson from more than 10 years of work in emergency situations. What if, rather than going “back to normal” once the crisis over, we would seek to sustain what enabled us to get things moving that fast?

What emergency teaches us is that even when a problem is complex, simple solutions can be effective. The essential thing is to rapidly move into action. In Ukraine, WCK started by considering what could be done with the existing. The NGO did not set up a central kitchen with a complex logistics: it combined a network of 500 restaurants, caterers and food trucks. By targeting very short-term concrete results, even if not perfect ones, it set the basis for a large-scale change.

Source: It’s important to bring the spirit of emergencies to the long term, McKinsey Quarterly, November 2022.