This is the time of year when all your business newsletters are telling you to create a plan for the coming year. Which is perfect if you have a baseline to build from.

But what do you do when all your assumptions have been blown to shreds in the last two years? Regulations are constantly changing. Supply chains are massively broken. Employees are unreliable. Whole industries are restructuring.

Your foundation, my friends, is much deeper than that.

It’s your answers to these questions:

  • Who are we?
  • Why do we do what we do?
  • Who are we truly serving?

Yes, these are the existential questions. But if you have weak answers to these, then you are truly just being whipped around by the chaos we’re all experiencing.

Sometimes you’re not totally sure until a crisis hits. I was watching the news about the recent tornadoes, and was heartened by the number of people who became clearer that they ARE community, and they DO care about each other, and they ARE helping their neighbors to get through this together.

And, of course, people are pondering how soon they’ll lose that sense of clarity of purpose.

The same thing can happen to companies and organizations. Sure, we’d all love for things to “get back to normal” as soon as possible, whatever that was. But a crisis will show you that sometimes things irretrievably change, and it’s time to create the new normal.

Now’s the time, my friends!