When things are fine, the weather perfect, health A-OK, finances pumped and the family happy, we can think of pleasant things in the future. Maybe it’s a trip to an idyllic place, island or forested mountain cabin. Perhaps it is a new home with features dreamed of before. Or it may be a new car with a retractable top and some gurgling horsepower waiting under the hood for an adventure.
In good times future pleasantness beckons. It is easy to conjure such thoughts.
In bad times, though, we see our hopes and dreams fade. We blanch at the turn of events. We feel fear and loss. The future has escaped us. But that wasn’t the future was it? That was a dreamworld we wanted to taste sometime in the future.
No; in bad times we face life’s negatives. The challenge isn’t yet known. Only the loss and subsequent frustration.
Envisioning the future, however, is an intellectual exercise we need to master throughout life. Why? Because it tests our adaptability to changing conditions, and yes, even disaster.
There is an entire industry entitled ‘disaster recovery.’ It comprises teams of people schooled in minimizing current damage from a storm, fire, flood or other disaster, then restoring the facilities to original functioning. Disasters, you see, occur with surprising frequency and no organization is without the need for planning how to handle such events if they happen. The faster the recovery, the healthier the organization will be after the disaster.
Disaster planning helps see the ‘other’ condition we don’t want to happen. The failure of the business. The loss of key facilities. Loss of key individuals in leadership or specialty fields critical to the organization’s success. How do we prepare for such? Can we do anything that avoids the event? Or at least minimizes its impact were it to occur?
Good questions. All the more reason to plan responses so we can move quickly when called upon to do so.
Pandemic is such an event. The workforce is home. Barebones operations can be maintained maybe with work from home arrangements for some employees. But the whole of the organization remains paralyzed. Cash flow ceases. Liabilities and expenses beg attention. Worse yet, we fear that our markets will be unable to support our products and services when we return to operation. This is now our real world. What to do?
Leaders worth their high salaries will have been prepared for some of this. They will use the quarantine time to lay plans for the organization to return to whatever becomes the new normal. Yes; everything is being renamed and changed to unknown standards. We don’t know what the normal will be but we still have hopes and dreams. How do we navigate the uncharted?
Frankly, we envision what we hope outcomes will be. That’s the hardest part. What ‘ought’ to be happening a year from now, or six months? In two years what and how will we be doing? Thinking realistically, are our visions possible and probable. How much so? What is the range of probability?
Knowing what assets and expertise we possess, how can we marshal them to get back to work and make the vision a viable possibility? What steps do we need to make? Who will do this within the organization, what teams can do this work? What partners outside the organization will be available to help us?
This exercise recognizes we are not in control of our future. But we can be to a degree via planning and practiced envisioning. This is not our purpose for being; that is our mission. No, we are speaking here of vision, how the surroundings will be when we are able to maximize our mission over time.
That is a different challenge. One worth doing. After all, our future depends on it.
May 29, 2020
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