One year summer

Photo by Pixabay.

When do you think the border is going to reopen?

Are you coming down for Thanksgiving?

When do you think we can come up?

It's not possible to answer any of these questions. They are unknowable. But that doesn't stop the asking. And the answer, at this point, finely honed. Designed to convey shared frustration at a shapeless problem with no fast solutions.

We don't know. We have to wait and see. We're not in charge of the border. But soon, we hope.

We're all a little edgy lately. Maybe you're not. You're great. But if you find yourself sharper, more easily annoyed, with less tolerance for bullshit, well, we're right there with you. It'd be nice if the act of naming it and writing about it allowed us to sidestep the more infuriating parts. But it doesn't work that way.

The last few weeks, every small thing that takes more than a moment to resolve has felt painfully slow. We are impatient. Pathologically so.

The school boards here are still trying to decide what to do about the rest of the year. And in our rush to find out, we tripped the Apple News algorithm so many times that it started serving up school reopening announcements from other provinces. When Siri tells you to chill tf out, you know it's serious.

You can't make up for lost time

This is the root of our problem right now. We're trying to cram more than a year of missed time into a summer.

Our parents want to catch up with their 9- and 3-year-old granddaughters. Our companies want to catch up with their 2019 projections for 2021. Everyone back in offices, back on planes, back in traffic. People are impatient to catch up on their plans for their careers, and their plans for their life.

And that's not going to happen.

It's obvious when you drag it in to the sunlight and say it out loud, isn't it? Our parents can't catch up with their 9 and 3-year-old granddaughters. Those children are now 11 and 5. You can make new memories, but there's no way to replay the tape with extra visits. The pandemic straight up took that time away.

This is also, we think, why people are angry that vaccinated folks are still masking. Because they see masks as the thing standing between them and the finish line. They're eager to return to the path they were on in early 2020. With whatever plans and hope and dreams and ambitions they had. But that path is gone.

We're not trying to be gloomy. But it's gone for your business, too. You can't catch up on your plans for your business. Because everything about your business, and the world it inhabits, has changed. Founders and CEOs want to fight this. They had a revenue target, a fundraising target, a headcount target. They feel like those things still haven't changed. COVID changed a lot but it didn't change math, right? Their business still needs to make money to pay salaries and fund growth, doesn't it? Why, they want to know, is it so unreasonable to want to catch up on that stuff?

And the thing we come back to is: pandemic hasn't changed your business' need to pay its bills. But pandemic has changed your business. Whether you have let that thought fully settle in or not. Pandemic has changed your people, your pipeline, your policies, and your prospects. Your old plan, however good it sounded, describes a world you don't live in anymore.

Impatience to get back to the plan is what it sounds like when you haven't accepted the change. It means acknowledging how much this virus has taken from us and continues to take. You might find that there are still some parts of the plan that are easy to let go of. And there will be others that are still painful, and involve some surprisingly raw grief. But accepting that the old plan is dead is the precursor to what comes next.

Picking things up means putting things down

Whether you're a CEO, or the leader of a 5-person team, or running this whole thing solo, the next step is the same. It's time to clean house.

Our teams are still building for pre-pandemic roadmaps, with pre-pandemic partnerships, and pre-pandemic expectations, like 2020 never happened. Only we're doing it now with post-pandemic humans.

So stop. Look around. Where are you running an outdated plan? Do the priorities your team has right now make sense, right now? Does the composition of your team still make sense? Does your job description? Does your company?

We've all developed new muscles and skills during pandemic and those are worth a look, too. The past year has had more of us chasing work in isolation. It gave us speed, and cut down on distractions when we couldn't handle them. But it makes it much harder to do the collaborative, generative stuff. And it means that your team now has 7 individual systems to get the same work done. Where do you document those, or merge them, or thank them for getting you through and then shut them down?

14 months ago, we talked about how all bets were off. It was obvious that we would need new plans, but none of us were in a headspace to be able to write one. It wasn't time, then. But if you're feeling impatient to get going right now in June of 2021, it's time. And if you're going to write a new plan, we recommend a blank sheet of paper.

- Melissa and Johnathan