Never Say Never Again
When we went through the Great Recession of 2008/2009, I remember thinking to myself (perhaps consoling myself) that I would never see an economic downturn as bad as that ever again in my lifetime.
I mean, the scale of the trouble at the time was such that multiple markets around the world, multiple sectors, multiple categories, all got hit at once, and the resultant economic malaise took years to overcome. Surely, something at that scale could never happen again?
Well, never say never, I guess.
I don’t have to tell you that we’re now in the middle of something that is beyond what any of us could have foreseen or even imagined. Entire swathes of the economy are out of work with no definitive view as to when they can return and to what level. Jobs that so many of us didn’t even give a second thought to, are now, rightfully, considered essential. It’s all pretty unbelievable, except for the fact that it’s happening, right now.
Of course, eventually, we will go back outside. Eventually, the millions who have been forced out of work, will go back to work. Eventually, we will return to normal - a different normal in the near to medium term but a more “normal normal” ultimately. (We just don’t know when.)
And when we do, we’ll likely take a few lessons from this entire experience, for better or for worse. Two, in particular, at least in my mind, will be around options and agility.
We’ll need to better plan our futures in terms of options, considering alternative scenarios, different permutations and not simply the best case, or the worst case that we can imagine. We’ll have to be ready to consider a plethora of factors that could influence what we want to do, as well as how and with whom. Understanding, assessing and testing out options is going to be essential in this ever more uncertain world we can expect going forward (including post-COVID-19 vaccine development).
We’ll also need to become more agile, far more than we’ve been used to. (When the crisis hit, at my firm, we had to pivot and rethink what we were doing, where we needed to focus and how we could help our clients do what they needed to get done. It required us to rethink and react quickly with the resources available to us.) I think the nature of this experience has been such that the psychological ‘scar tissue’, for lack of a better term, will remain for a long while (much like the frugality that lingered post the 08/09 recession did), and any material plans we make will also be accompanied by the expectation of the unknown, so to speak i.e. what could happen next that I might not have otherwise expected? Yes, this might result in a bit more conservatism for some, but that may be the price to pay, at least for the foreseeable future.
Of course, it’s a whole separate discussion as to how we’ll be 3-5 years from now, when a vaccine is in place, when we have a pandemic response mechanism, etc. We humans can have short memories, so that future remains to be seen.
But, for now and for a while to come, I expect ‘options’ and ‘agility’ to become guiding principles.
