Before you start yelling at me about who caused this whole mess, I’m not suggesting that you take accountability for the actual pandemic. In fact, I’m not talking about who’s to blame at all.

What I am suggesting is that you take accountability for the actions you took before the pandemic, the actions you’ve taken since the pandemic began, and — most important — the actions you will take right now.

Here’s the truth: Our plans for 2020 got blown up. Everyone’s plans. We didn’t plan for our lives or our businesses or our cultures to get this disrupted.

Back in the spring, we got scrappy. We came together. We figured out new ways to do things. Back in the spring, we thought we were trying to weather something that would be a few months long.

Now, we’re tired. Tired of zoom calls. Tired of the uncertainty. Tired of waiting. Waiting to see if our kids can go back to school. Waiting to know whether we can go to conferences. Waiting for the office to open. Waiting for answers.

Guess what? We may never have those things again. Or we may. We just don’t know.

We do know that dwelling in that fatigued, victim place isn’t useful. Plus, it feels miserable.

So how do we get out of it?

Taking action

The way out is through action. Before we talk about how to take action, let’s address the elephant in the room: I can’t take action because I don’t know what’s coming!

Here’s a secret: you never knew what was coming. None of us did. We pretended that we did because that’s what our investors or our shareholders or our employees wanted us to do. We all wanted some sense of control.

Yes, you need to have a target for where you’d like to be in three years or five years, but good luck trying to make a real plan for more than three months in advance right now. What you’re doing at that point is just fiction. Forecasts based on assumptions or past performance have always been a sort of fiction. Now they’re basically science fiction.

No one knows what’s going to happen next.

Accountability > Control

Not having control doesn’t mean you have to sit still and wait for the world to happen to you. Even when you don’t have control (reminder that you never did), you do have accountability.

I was talking with a client recently who, pre-pandemic, used to get a lot of leads from attending conferences. They’re really itching to get back into the conference scene calculating when that might be an option again.

That’s a big unknown, and the chances for a quick return are pretty low. They could sink into a victim mentality — we couldn’t get any leads because this whole mess destroyed our lead generating activities.

Or they could figure out how to fill the top of their funnel right now, with the facts on the ground being what they are today.

The more agile and resilient you can be, the more you can move towards action and accountability, the less likely you’ll get stuck when the situation changes in ways you didn’t anticipate.

So what does it look like to be accountable in the midst of a pandemic?

Turn back to your values and vision

Back in the early spring, many of us took quick action to do what needed to be done. Now that we’re months deep with no real end in sight, it’s time to take a step back and reassess.

What are your values? I come back to values again and again because if you want a successful business, they have to be the foundation for every decision you make.

You built a business based on your values, hired people based on what you needed, and created a company culture within the world that existed at the time.

The world has changed.

What needs to change in your company to realize those values in the world that exists now? Different systems, different processes, different people?

Maybe your team doesn’t really work in a remote environment. Maybe you hired people that are really good at informal communication but aren’t good at structured communication. So how can you help your team interact better, knowing what we know now?

If you’ll allow me to engage in a well-worn metaphor here, running your business is like steering a ship. And if you want to make it to that destination, you can’t spend your time gazing off the back of the ship at what you left. That’s a surefire way to miss the both winds and currents that could take you off course and the channels that might offer an alternative route.

We have to stop looking backwards at how we did things before. Pull up the anchor and stop waiting for things to change, get worse, get better, go back to normal. Stop thinking of the actions we take right now as stopgaps and start seeing them as an opportunity to chart a new path.

Keep your eye on the horizon — your vision.

Finding solutions

How can we put solutions into place right now that address our challenges for as long as they last? If your company’s culture has gone rancid because you don’t have the coffee machine talk anymore, stop waiting for your virtual coffee machine to turn into a physical coffee machine.

Instead of trying to wedge your culture into existing technologies or existing frameworks (or even existing team members), stand back and determine what needs to change.

If you viewed this moment as a blank slate, you could ask yourself:

What do we want our culture to be?
What do we need our processes to be?
What do our culture and our processes look like right now?
What could we do right now to move in the direction we want?

Both my team and our clients are missing the casual connection that came from group events, so we looked around. What could we try that’s different from the zoom calls we’ve been having. We’re trying a new technology for video meetings — one that’s built for nightclubs and comedy clubs. This platform might help create an atmosphere more conducive to informal, casual conversation.

We’re not looking for stopgaps anymore. We’re taking accountability and solving the problems that are happening right now, no matter what happens tomorrow.

Taking accountability for your business

As we enter the season of annual planning, maybe we should also reconsider both its seasonality and alignment with the Gregorian calendar.

We’ve shifted our focus from 12-month calendar planning to looking at systems. We’ve now experienced why agility and readiness is important to our businesses. How can our business systems be more nimble?

We see more and more leaders and business owners shift their focus to looking at quarter by quarter. Make a plan for three months, measure, assess what we’ve learned, and repeat for the next quarter.

I also encourage more scenario analysis. Not just a SWOT analysis. (Did you have a pandemic on your Threats list?) Look at each step in your plan and identify the possible outcomes, and have a plan for each possibility. It helps us be ready to respond quickly and less emotionally.

Basically, in business and in life, we can take some steps, stop and look at where we are, and then take some more steps. We’re then rarely looking back or ahead too far.

All while keeping our eye on the vision, that point on the horizon, our purpose.

Final thoughts

The victim mindset is draining and depressing, and it robs us of an agency that we could use to move forward. Yes, this pandemic is hard. Yes, it has disrupted our businesses.

Being a victim ascribes blame. But does it matter who or what got us here? We’re here nonetheless.

The mindset of accountability is empowering.

AND we are accountable for how we’ve responded to it and how we continue to respond. That’s good news because having agency is so much better than not having it.

What actions are you going to take to make your organization work in the world we have today? Send me an email to share how you’re moving forward.