I don’t know about you, but I’ve observed that things just are not normal lately.
I read that a sinkhole swallowed a house in Florida last week causing a fatality – not normal! A couple weeks ago, a meteorite blazed through the atmosphere and part of it landed in Siberia – not normal! The Super Bowl, the largest TV audience of the year, had the electricity go out – not normal! Just a few months ago we had Hurricane Sandy that laid waste to a good portion of the heavily populated East Coast – not normal! Businesses that have prospered for many decades have been under siege in the past few years – not normal!
I mean, who goes through life expecting a sinkhole or meteorite or hurricane-flood or the digital camera? Just ask executives at Kodak or the dinosaurs.
Or maybe all these disruptions are, in fact, normal – the new normal.
Maybe it is normal to have huge disruptions causing havoc from natural causes and changes in the marketplace and changes in technology. Maybe we should consider sinkholes and meteorites and hurricane driven floods and power grid disruptions the new normal and prepare for them, instead of assuming they are anomalies.
Chances are you and I will probably never experience a sinkhole swallowing us or a cataclysmic, almost instantaneous change in the marketplace, but the new normal says that we are going to experience some emergencies and major disruptions to our business and personal lives and, if we are wise, should expect them to happen some day. We can either ignore the possibility (probability?) or prepare to respond to natural or unnatural emergencies of some kind.
At the very least we should protect ourselves with redundant records, create a method of communications among family and business associates, and have occasional “what-if” conversations so, should a disaster strike, our lives and businesses can survive intact.
It will probably never happen but, in case it does, the future will go to those who have considered the possibilities and planned for the new normal.
Please Wait…