ASSIGNMENT CHALLENGE – LEARNING LAUNCH    CHALLENGE.  Covid-19 hit the hospitality sector in our region really hard. As an island destination, the  economy relied heavily on international tourists. However, the island city is also known to be  the most cash liquid region in the country. The company decided to close down all the  properties it operated (2 small town resorts and 1 city hotel) but as soon restrictions were  lifted, the company decided to take the risk and also address its legal obligations to its  customers from prepaid bookings and vouchers sold.    SELECTION.  The demand for local travel surged with the lifting of border controls. It gave us a very narrow  window of time to plan and deploy. There is also no reliable data to use as comparison and  baseline as covid and its impact is unknown. We chose the LEARN LAUNCH tool to allow for  agile decision making, evaluation and constant pivoting according to market response and any  changes in border control.    APPLICATION.  All leaders were gather together and the primary goal was identified – to open and satisfy legal  obligations. Once this was done we set in place possible scenarios dependent on market  response which were: 1) fill the weekends 2) fill the weekdays 3) expand capacity. At the onset,  basic services were offered to satisfy the primary goal. When we saw that goal met we pivoted  positioning to fill weekend stays. When that goal was met we retooled manpower and shifted  to focus to central reservations to fill all the days. However, it was all in the process of meeting  goal 2 when we set out to parallel capacity expansion. We say demand continually increase.  This also introduced a possible dilemma in terms of new normal protocols due to capacity  issues with continued expansion. The Learn Launch model allowed us to review our positioning  and revisit this based on market response.     INSIGHT.  The Learn Launch tool allow teams to remain agile. With minimum viable products in mind and  possible scenarios explored at the onset, a trigger point was identified for each phase and it  allowed us to make decisions without having to go through the problem dilemma each time it  happened. The entire team’s awareness that pivots would be constantly made based on market  response and the triggers of each possible pivot made it easy to execute when the time came.    APPROACH.  For me, mind mapping prior to the learn launch would have been most helpful. A lot of the  brainstorming was done in discussions and scenarios were considered. Mind mapping would  have helped us foresee the customer/guest perspective and therefore have a more accurate  business forecast in terms of demand.

