VIEWPOINT
The Case Against Future-Proofing Your Business K EV I N CO U PE F OUN DE R , MOR N IN GN E WS BEAT.CO M
When we avoid grappling with change, we embrace complacency. The other day I was having a conversation with someone in the industry, who wanted me to make a presentation to her company about how to “future-proof” the business. It isn’t usually the best way to land a gig, but I told her that I couldn’t do that, because a) it really isn’t possible, and b) it isn’t a good idea. I explained: When you water-proof the basement of your house, the goal is to keep all the precipitation out. The tighter the better. Businesses shouldn’t be future-proofed, I argued, because the last thing you want to do is keep all the influences out. If we’re going to stay with the house metaphor, in a business what you want to do is build it so the windows and doors are as big as possible so you can see everything going on around you…and then, you want to throw open the windows and doors so you can feel the sun and the breeze and yes, even the rain and harsh winds when they come. Because that way, you’re in touch with what is going on around you. You don’t keep reality out – you embrace it, you use it to build your strategies and
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tactics, and you revel in the fact that you are better connected to your environment than any of your competition. That’s particularly important these days, I think, because we’re coming off a year in which the impulse shared by most people and companies is to batter down the hatches and protect yourself from what’s going on around you with masks and gloves and visors and, if you’re a retailer, plexiglass and directed traffic flows and regulated occupancy. We know that our people are stressed out – they’ve been on the front lines throughout the pandemic, and public health experts tell us that anxiety levels and even suicide are surging. What this all adds up to is companies that are in survival mode – not any sort of expansionist or experimental mode. And I get that. For much of the pandemic, retailers didn’t have to do anything different – if they could bring merchandise in through the back door, all they had to do was open up the front doors and business would be brisk. Maybe the best it ever had been.
I’d argue that this kind of complacency is dangerous. I’ve been saying almost from the beginning of the pandemic that this was a significant enough event, with market-altering repercussions, that it was critical that companies figure out how they would be fundamentally different coming out of the pandemic than they were going in. The world, after all, would be different… think about living in a new reality, not a new normal, mostly because I have no idea what normal even means anymore. And so retailers would have to be different, too. Clearly all sorts of trends have been accelerated by the pandemic – think e-commerce – and an end to the pandemic’s more restrictive impositions is likely to cause some return to previous behaviors, I’m not sure retailers can expect old shopper behaviors to return. Shoppers may want to return to the store to buy their fresh foods, but that’s because there is a tangible advantage to doing so. But going to the store to buy cereal, cookies, laundry detergent and the like – things for which there is absolutely no advantage to going into the store? I’m dubious. I think that many people have new learned behaviors, and there’s no reason to think they’ll toss away habits learned during the pandemic that actually made their lives easier and better.
