LOOKING INTO MY CRYSTAL BALL
The year is quickly coming to a close and chances are you're coming off a year of exceptional growth like most businesses that service an affluent audience. When the rich get richer, so do so many of those who serve them as customers and clients. So how do we use the experience of the last 2 years to think about the next 2 years? Is this a new normal? Is this an anomaly? What have we learned and how should we prepare for the future?
A few years ago, I had a chart reading done by Aemen Bell, which informed me of a lot of things but one is that my moon is in Pisces which apparently contributes to having strong intuition. I've always felt I was good at predicting the future, from my Master Class in Crises at the start of Covid when I encouraged people to not shrink and contract but to think of possibilities for growth, to my class on running a business without social media where I called the shift 6 mo before Apple's privacy changes. Both proved positive experiences for those who attended. Or as a client recently reminded me, I've always been good at predicting the future of companies at least 2 years in advance. So as we close out the year, I wanted to leave you with a series of emails about how to think about the future and the potential long-term disruptions we're facing in the coming years, what that means for your own growth and how to approach it with the most level-headed perspective.
But before I look into my crystal ball, let's dig a bit deeper into intuition as understood by Nobel Prize-Winning Economist Daniel Kahneman in his 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow. Whether or not your moon is in Pisces, you too can begin to develop your own predictions. Among the many brilliant things that Kahneman says about intuition in this book, he states,
"Valid intuitions develop when experts have learned to recognize familiar elements in a new situation and to act in a manner that is appropriate to it."
This definition is helpful as we so often misunderstand what intuition actually is. We call out having a gut feeling about something but can't pinpoint any evidence for it. The key here is to recognize "familiar elements in a new situation". If we can all increase our understanding of how the economy works and how consumers behave, we can be much better at predicting what might transpire in the future.
This is why, over the next 3 weeks, this newsletter will be featuring a wide variety of voices from experts—almost 20 in total!—across a wide variety of fields from Marketing & PR to Financial Planning and Human Resources to Leadership Development, to share with you their words of wisdom about how to think about the future when we're facing down major sources of long-term disruption that might permanently reshape how we plan for growth.
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SUPPLY CHAINS
Everyone is now familiar with the fact that there are major supply chain issues happening and likely to continue over the next few years. There are potential events on the horizon that could make this significantly worse as well. But for now, things are already dicey enough that we should be considering how we're adapting over the next 24 months to avoid major disruptions. What we are feeling now is just the beginning and this isn't just limited to the producers of products that use materials sourced from abroad. The ripple effect will be felt by the entire ecosystem, from workers to consumers, and the serviced-based businesses that service those product producers.
The boom that so many companies felt over the last 12 months happened before the reality of the long-term disruption set in. What does this mean for the next 24 months? Supply chain disruption is an everyman issue. Over the next three weeks, we'll look at how this should be informing our marketing and communications to how we can adapt our financial projections and production schedules to anticipate long-lead times, quirks in production, and manage the expectations of everyone involved.
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SPIKE PROTEINS
Coupled with the supply chain is the continuation of the nuisance of the spike protein and Covid 19. Even with innovations in treatments, vaccinations, boosters, and masks, covid continues to disrupt whether it's our back to the office plan that gets stymied by a break-through infection or the continued need for working parents to adapt their schedules when schools deal with infections or just our general fatigue around how to make hybrid situations actually work. We'll look at how to continue to evolve our leadership & approach to human resources so that adapting to changes becomes normalized and not something that drains us emotionally. How does our company culture address the need for a consistent evolution in how we relate to work?
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AND SACRAMENTS
In his new book, Recapture the Rapture, Jaime Wheal, an expert in peak performance (that phrase lol) and leadership points out 4 key beliefs in rapturous thinking:
- The world as we know it is broken and unsavable.
- There is a point in the near future where everything is going to change.
- On the other side of that inflection point, everyone we value will be saved/redeemed.
- So let's get there as fast as possible, without much concern for the world we're leaving behind.
He points out we're watching rapturous thinking right now as Elon Musk believes that in order to save humanity we must colonize Mars (LOL!). But we see less extreme versions of rapturous thinking every day and almost all of us, myself included, have likely leaned into one or all of these points over the last 24 months. Wheal approaches shifting this mentality with IDEO's Design Thinking. The three principles are Inspiration, Ideation, and Implementation. Here is a good time to note that Design Thinking isn't something I'm fully (if ever) in agreement with, but I appreciate Wheal's consideration and application for his own teachings.
One of the pillars of the process is about rethinking sacraments when it comes to our own transformation from rapturous thinking to creating a world that works for everyone. In the religious sense, sacraments are rituals that teach, strengthen and express faith. But in this case, we're not talking Christianity, we're talking resetting the culture of business growth and work.
Rituals are important because they give us time for reflection. Reflection, when done critically, does strengthen our faith in our path forward -- our vision. In their book, At a Distance, Spencer Bailey and Andrew Zuckerman share stories of 100 Visionaries at home in a pandemic and note that the consensus of leaders was that the pandemic afforded us a zoomed-out point of view on a wide variety of topics from the climate crisis, to food systems, social justice, big tech, inequality, public health, and human rights. And the consensus from these leaders was that they hope we don't lose that zoomed-out view -- that's the vision. The pandemic gave us the opportunity to reflect deeply. But as capital grows and consumption is on the rise, we can teeter between believing in this new trajectory and asking if this is the new normal?
Circling back to Kahneman's definition, the ability to recognize the familiar in the unfamiliar, we can connect our own practice of sacraments to the process of developing our intuition. So I hope you'll join us over the next three weeks to hear from those who have thought deeply about this next era and with their advice, develop your own sacraments that help you grow your intuition to make the best predictions for growth in a world that works for everyone.
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BUSINESS GROWTH FOR CREATIVE ENTREPRENEURS
REGISTRATION IS NOW OPEN FOR THE 2022 BUSINESS GROWTH PROGRAM. Thank you to everyone who has helped spread the word. For more details about the course including a bit of history, the philosophy of the program, feedback on who should attend, Syllabus, Calendar, FAQs, and much more, check out the full Program Manual here. If you still have questions, don't hesitate to reach out!
When you're ready to register, email Holly (hhoward@askhollyhow.com) by responding to this email. Please indicate:
- Which cohort group you would like (Monday or Tuesday)
- If you have additional team members that would like to attend
- Payment option: Full Fee OR Payment Plan
We'll save your spot and we look forward to working with you in 2022!
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