By Frank J. Diekmann
I hear ya. You’ve had it. You’re as exhausted from hearing and sharing all the 2020 jokes and memes and prayers, each more derisive and sardonic than the next, as you are of the year itself. It’s enough to tempt some to catch a flight to Australia just to get an early start on 2021.
But here’s what you may not have heard, and that is in all your haste to get to the new year you’ve missed the real lesson of 2020: it was the Year of Forecasting Irony.
As a headline writer myself, I have to concede that in the lead up to this year it was just too easy to grab the fruit that wasn’t just low hanging but on the ground when it came to making “2020” references. Every forecast was a “2020 Vision.” Strategic plans had a “2020 focus.” And in the years ahead, as we look back on the 365 reasons to forget this year, prepare yourself for all the “2020 Hindsight” headlines (which I’ll no doubt cop out and use myself).
The fantastic irony of 2020, of course, will forever be that for all the talk of vision, the vision proved to be 20/200. Or worse. The headline writers of the world were vision impaired to the point of blindness. The reporters and analysts whose work they were headlining turned out to have a case of astigmatism. The “Vision 2020” strategic plans were all looking in the wrong direction.
The Big E
The takeaway from this year is this: The big “E” on the top of the eyechart is just the first letter in the sentence, “Even the very best forecasts and models and plans can be woefully wrong.” That’s why a word previously reserved for sports analogies and Excel tables became one of the words of the year: pivot.
Those business leaders who threw out their every assumption and pivoted were the businesses that prospered (or at least suffered less). Restaurants that went all-in on take-out. Airbnb’s that rebranded as home away from home work/educational spaces. And credit unions that understood the new standard of personal service is not meeting in person at all.
For those CUs for which meeting virtually wasn’t a sufficient enough reminder of a new reality—one business leader described 2020 as “10 years’ of change crammed into 10 months”--every CU should have printed out the 2020 strategic plan agreed to at the board retreat in the Autumn of 2019, enlarged it and placed on an easel at the board retreat in 2020 for all to see. A synopsis of the 2020 plan should be part of every future board packet so no one ever forgets this year was not about strategic plans missing the mark because of garbage in, garbage out, but instead assumptions in, you just never know what might come out.
If the coronavirus pandemic has taught anything, it’s no scenario in the scenario planning can ever again be dismissed during a meeting with and an eye roll and an, “Umm, that’s a little out there, Elaine.” And neither can the hypothetical response.
Better Here? Or Here? Or Neither
There was one group that may very well have embraced 2020 with even more gusto than headline writers: the American Optometric Association. The AOA a decade or more with enthusiasm and plans to take full advantage of the year that shares its digits with the optometric term for ideal visual acuity.
“Welcome to 2020, the ‘Year of the Eye Exam’ with AOA doctors of optometry,” the organization said in the lead up to this year. “As we ring in this most propitious new year, the AOA is charging into 2020 with an ambitious, multi-pronged awareness campaign centered on the essentialness of routine eye care from doctors of optometry.”
If eye doctors couldn’t see this year would be anything but propitious for most, who could? So, don’t blame yourself for getting it wrong; just never forget that when you go “charging” into a new year, it may come charging back with an altogether different vision. There is plenty to lament in 2020, and please accept my condolences if a family member was among the hundreds of thousands lost to COVID this year, but there is also something to celebrate: ideally, it has inoculated a generation of young CU leaders against the disease of believing in infallibility. (Although we all know a few on whom 2020 will have no effect.)
Prophets or Kooks?
2020 will be forever remembered by those who lived through it for obliterating the once-entrenched concept of a “workplace,” for reinvigorating the word “Zoom,” for this Match.com commercial, and for some terrifically creative ways of keeping credit union staff connected in a virtual world.
And it should also always be remembered for this lesson: those who have visions may be prophets—or they may be kooks. And you’ll always need to be prepared for both.
Frank J. Diekmann is Cooperator in Chief of CUToday.info and can be reached at Frank@CUToday.info. Mr. Diekmann is also author of the new book, ‘501 Name Tags: Everything You Need to Know About Business Can be Learned at a Conference & Forgotten in the Trade Show.” For info: www.501nametags.com.