Planning for Business in a Pandemic New Year

By now any business that can adapt to carry on in a pandemic has done so. Many businesses that can’t have gone under. Many, but not all. Some are hoping to return to normal sometime in 2021 and start reclaiming lost ground.

Looking at the pace of vaccination roll-out combined with the emergence of at least two more contagious variants of SARS-CoV-2, that may not be realistic.

One of the businesses I’ve been getting involved in had to shut down completely in the first month of the initial lockdown in England. This is more difficult than you might imagine. It has scaled down, changed its processes, and found ways to carry on during lockdown even though delivering product requires installation work at people’s homes.

You may be thinking surely the changes we’ve made can be dropped sometime in the next year.

We are not counting on that. Why?

How We See Our Planning Horizon

The World Health Organization now warns that SARS-CoV-2 is probably going to be an endemic virus. Too much of the world did not clamp down hard enough and soon enough. We let it spread. We gave it too many opportunities to mutate. Vaccinations will help, but our odds of being able to eradicate the virus are dwindling. We are increasingly likely to have to learn to live with it the way we live with less-lethal influenza.

Vaccinations dramatically reduce cases of COVID-19, but we don’t yet know whether vaccinations will prevent spread of the disease. It may turn out that vaccinated people still catch it and can spread it for a little while even though they don’t get desperately sick.

Some people have health conditions that make the vaccines impossible for them to take.

What does all of this mean for our business?

It means our planning horizon is not for getting through several more months and then reverting to the way it was before the pandemic. Our planning horizon assumes COVID-19 must be factored in for the long haul.

Converting Temporary Measures into Long Term Changes

This year has been about rejiggering on the move, flying by the seat of the pants.

We see opportunity for our business next year, growth instead of the hammering it took while searching for a new footing that can cope with lockdown. But to accomplish that growth, we need to convert temporary make-do measures into methods of operation that are sustainable for the long term.

We do not presume we will ever return to normal. Instead, we are planning so that our business will be a good one to work for and a good one to buy from (safe and comfortable for workers and customers) no matter how long SARS-CoV-2 continues to complicate our lives.

When I suggest planning in such ways, in the face of so much uncertainty, I’m asking you to come along with me and do as my business partners and I do… not just as we say. We can all have a better 2021. And I hope you will.