Disruptive Pandemic as a Driver towards Digital Coaching in OECD Countries

The current covid-19 pandemic is a disruptive event on various levels. Disruptive event can be defined as a situation where an agent needs to redesign a strategy to overcome the obstacles arising from a fundamental change in an environment. The required change in procedures may open further options to develop best practices towards success. This can occur on societal level, e.g. in education system, on an industry or a firm level. In this communication, we discuss corporate learning and knowledge transfer, which have traditionally taken place in a decision support environment, i.e. by utilising computerised decision support systems in a knowledge society characterised by increasingly complex systems often built and dependent on big data and artificial intelligence to support managers and different decision makers in their specialised areas. Digital coaching is today what decision support systems were in the past. Digital coaching has been proposed as a solution in digitalisation of business organisations, while digitalisation is a solution to keep schools and businesses running. We argue that the crisis can deliver opportunities for digital coaching on three conditions: i) the pandemic is a disruptive event forcing agents take digital steps, while agents have some digital knowledgebase and are surrounded by a supportive infrastructure, ii) it will be severe and long enough to create incentives to develop digital procedures, but iii) together with governmental actions, businesses are not forced to shut down and bankrupt when encountering slumping demand simultaneously with a supply side shock. OECD and its partner countries are clustered and discussed using a multiple correspondence framework with aggregated data on the pandemic and its effects on economies with varying degrees of resilience, on the forced business responses and the scenarios, which are to open or close opportunities of corporate digitalisation.