I used to be a strategic planner. Micro-economic modelling of the company, economic forecasts, translating business policies into numbers, five-year projected P&L's, Balance Sheets and Cash Flows.
We would run at least three different sets of assumptions, which would later be called scenarios. These would be: Do Nothing; do this; do that. Do Nothing was the shocker: what would happen if we just sat on our butts. The answer was always some kind of wasting commercial illness. Scenario planning was a good technique: it made management think about the future and what they might or might not do.
All those scenarios were run against the same background, and we were hardly aware of it. There would be no wars, space invasions, plagues, civic uprisings, collapses of social order, no changes to the overall political, social and economic structure of the country, and no 'this changes everything' new technology. At least not that would involve our home markets.
Some things are just elephants that you have to wait to leave the room. Wars are an obvious example. Turns out that Government-imposed emergency public health measures are another. When something like that happens, there are no if's and maybe's and what else could we do's. There's only the freaking elephant in the room, and it is going to move when it wants to. The plans you make when there's an elephant in the room are not the plans you make when there isn't. Elephant-in-the-room plans are all short-term, because, well, the elephant never stays that long in the room?
Does it?
Typically, most businesses and people fall into a holding pattern: do as much as we can to keep what we can remember of pre-elephant life going, and wait for the elephant to leave. The short-term is a lousy planning horizon, when you don't know how short a term it is. That's how you put on weight, go soft, lose customers, delay maintenance, and don't upgrade.
What if the elephant never leaves the room? At least for another four years?
A never-ending series of erratic lockdowns. But they never repeal the laws. They never make it illegal. They never stop the Lockdown Committee meeting. Public Health professors never stop muttering about a possible lockdown this winter, and the press never stops reporting them. The mask signs are never taken down. Every now and then the Police stop a pensioner getting on a train. Each summer there is less point in going anywhere, because each summer less remains open.
But lockdowns can't last forever? Wouldn't society wither away? And anyway vaccines?
Not the point.
The point is that assuming the lockdowns go on forever forces you to think about what you would do if you weren't twiddling your thumbs waiting for Governments to grow a pair. You know what you're going to do if the restrictions ever end. You don't know what you're going to do if they don't.
The moment I thought of four more years, I knew that I would retire by Autumn 2021 (certain things assumed having happened), because I did not want to see my life vanish three-months-at-a-time. If I'm going to be locked in my house, I'd rather be reading, writing, playing music and watching movies. Bashing away pointlessly on a laptop? No thank you. I've had enough of that.
You will make other decisions. Yours may be tougher than mine, because you could be looking at four more years of home schooling. But suppose you were? Wouldn't you go back to your employer and say Sorry, but I have to give my children four hours uninterrupted a day, then I have to do an hour's lesson prep for tomorrow. You get about four hours tops. And I get full salary, because you won't be able to stop calling me when it's teaching time. Right now, you won't have that conversation because this is an emergency that will be over in three months. But you would if you knew it was going on for four more years.
Will lockdowns really go on for another four years or more? I don't know. I do know that this one is going on until Easter, and it will be followed by a period of lighter restrictions over summer, to be followed by another winter when old people will start dying again. Vaccines? Are developed six months after the latest super-spreader / super-killer variation of the original Virus, and we will need to be locked up for those six months. It's a flu virus, so it will always mutate. And every year there is another bunch of vulnerable old people.
What part of that sounds like a process with an end?
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