It’s Time To Start Rebuilding

Start planning for emerging from the lockdown now to avoid the same mistakes

No one was ready for the Coronoavirus — not the government, not the medical community, not the business community, not you, not me. No one.

We all got blindsided going in. Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen on the way out.

Several weeks ago, I wrote a post about planning for the impact of the COVID-19 crisis. In it, I talked through how we need to start with today and think about the best case, a worse case, and the worst case. For each of those scenarios, we made plans to execute as conditions deteriorated. Now we need to do that again, but in reverse, in preparation for conditions to improve.

We need to be smart about this. We’re not out of the woods yet, not by a long shot. We don’t know the extent of damage to our lives, our jobs, even our ability to go to a place that isn’t a few yards from our front door. But we do know there will be an end — there is flattening, there are results, there is hope.

So just as we pulled ripcords on emergency plans when we were given new recommendations that squeezed us further into boxes, we need to start defining action plans so we have levers to pull as all-clears start to sound.

If we don’t plan now, we risk acting with the same panic and taking the same ill-advised missteps we took on the way down. Things will happen slowly and guns will be jumped. There will be a second wave that we won’t see until it’s too late. People will continue to defy recommendations because we weren’t built to live this way for long.

Believe me, this will happen. Think about how poorly we listened to all the advice going in.

Let’s not do that coming out.

Start with the worst case and call a bottom

We’re going to start planning from where we are today. Maybe your world is still spiraling downwards and you haven’t hit your worst case yet. Maybe you’ve found an inflection point and are already starting to recover. Like I said, the bad times are still here, but now we can see when the battering will end, so it’s time to estimate the damage and react.