When you look at all the ways COVID-19 has disrupted our lives, it’s natural to dream of a time after the pandemic, when things go back to “normal” and we can all breathe a little easier. Here’s the thing, though — life after the coronavirus is going to look a lot more like life during the coronavirus than like life before coronavirus.
Oh, sure, a lot of specific things will return to their previous state. I’m not talking about wearing masks or canceling holidays or closing schools. The characteristic of the pandemic that I think is going to stay with us, and that’s going to pervade much of what we do, is the constant, unsettling sense of disruption and uncertainty — the feeling that everything is provisional, and subject to change.
And that’s because it mostly will be.
In the past, change followed what could be called a “punctuated equilibrium” model, a phrase coined in a very different context by paleontologists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge to describe brief periods of intense change followed by long eras of stasis. In the long decades after the upheavals of the Securities Acts of the 1930s, for instance, the accounting profession had plenty of time to adapt to its new role attesting to the integrity of the capital markets, and to create business models and cultures to support that role.
In the first two decades of the 21st century, however, we’ve moved to a model of more or less constant change, of constant iteration and reiteration, with regular bouts of disruption, driven in large part by the relentless pace of development in the world of technology, which continually overturns the current state of things as it doggedly pursues the new.
What this means for you and your practice is that you can’t expect to make one big change and be done with it. The big change isn’t going to be moving to the cloud, or figuring out artificial intelligence, or using data analytics to create a new service line; the big change is going to be recognizing that change is now permanent and frequent, and building a firm that is smart enough to recognize the next change that’s coming, and nimble enough to make the most of it. It means understanding that you may need to jettison your current models without much warning, and being prepared to build new ones on the fly. It means being able to, in a popular phrase of the moment, “learn, unlearn and relearn.”
In some senses, the current pandemic is good practice for all this — with new rules and new requirements coming out all the time, rapidly changing situations requiring equally rapid adjustments, and old industries going under while new ones rise to prominence, with all of them needing help in new ways.
And that brings us to the bright side of all this: Accountants have actually adjusted fairly well to the pandemic. By and large, you made the shift to remote work with a speed and ease that surprised many, and you’ve more than proved your value as a trusted advisor to your clients in especially trying and confusing times.
This is because, hard as it may be to believe. accountants are actually good at change. What other profession could so quickly digest, say, the enormous complexities of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, or the Paycheck Protection Program, and turn around and guide clients through them with such a sure hand? This is a core competency, and the profession needs to make the most of it.
We will recover from the pandemic, of course, but I encourage you to remember how well you reacted to it as firms and as a profession — because you’re going to need to do something similar on a regular basis going forward.
