Jim Blasingame

Business futurist, award-winning author, speaker and columnist

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Futuring

Reconciling Blasingame’s 2020 Crystal Ball Predictions

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Since 2000, I’ve offered prognostications on what was coming at small businesses in the New Year. Then, at the end of each year, I’ve reconciled my predictions against what actually happened and gave myself a score.

Through the 20 editions prior to 2020, my accuracy record was 73%. That might not impress you, but in the Major Leagues, batting .730 would get you into Cooperstown on the first ballot. Just saying … 

As the third decade of the 21st century dawned, my 21st set of predictions, published on January 5, were heavily influenced by three-years of Main Street optimism about the momentum of the U.S. economy. But then, in less than 90 days, everything changed. An organic invader turned our reality from halcyon to horrific in a way that only Chinese President Xi Jinping could have anticipated.

In our history, never have American business owners had to simultaneously fear that a deadly disease would attack their families and the political response to that pathogen might kill their businesses.

Because of the unprecedented weirdness of this year, scoring my 2020 predictions as I have in the past isn’t possible. Reading the list will either produce a wry smile, a cringe, or an expletive. Consequently, this year I’ll follow each prediction with appropriate commentary without a score – even when I was right. Some of my predictions have been omitted from the original list because the pandemic either made them irrelevant or moved them forward. Buckle up for a bumpy ride.

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The New Regular: The Coronavirus, Inconvenient and Inevitable

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This is the thirteenth edition of my New Regular series (nope – not superstitious), which is dedicated to helping small business owners stick their finger in the eye of the coronavirus. Normal has assumed the stage name “Abnormal” and is now touring in a traveling freakshow across the Australian Outback.

When you think about it, there’s not much new about change in the past 5,000 years, just variations on old themes. Electrification is lightning in a bottle and your PC or Apple Watch are battery powered Antikythera Mechanisms (circa 2100 BCE). But there is one thing new about change: its velocity. Change is happening faster.

As analog has been supplanted by digital, we’ve witnessed an unprecedented compression of time between model generations, from hardware to software to associated behaviors and practices. And out here on Main street, that velocity – not the change – is what’s taking our breath away.  Now, let’s apply that truth to both the coronavirus pandemic and our response to it.

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The New Regular: There Will Be Many New Niches

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This is the 11th edition of my New Regular series, which is committed to helping Main Street businesses make the tenuous transition to a post-pandemic economy. Normal hasn’t been seen since corona was just a beer.

Do you like baklava – that pastry so luscious it’s served in little pieces? Who doesn’t? But what does baklava have to do with operating a business in a pandemic-induced panic? Well, as scrumptious as it is, the connection isn’t about how it tastes, but rather, how it’s made.

Cutting a baklava square in half reveals that it’s constructed of multiple layers of buttery, cinnamony, honey-drenched, walnut-laden sheets of phyllo dough baked into an elegant and rich eating experience.

Slicing into the marketplace you’ll see it looking increasingly like baklava: multiple layers of innovation-drenched effort baked into elegant choices and rich experiences. But zoom in closer. Just as each wafer-thin sheet of baked baklava breaks into more layers of cookie-inside-a-cookie, the marketplace stratifies into finer layers of even greater variations, nuances, and elegance.

Those finer layers are called niches. (My snooty friends say “neesh,” I prefer “nitch.” Tomato, to-mah-to). A niche is defined as being “perfectly suited for the person or thing in it.” And if there were ever two things perfectly suited for each other, it’s the niche and small business. It’s a beautiful thing to watch an entrepreneur discover a new niche and fill it, and later identify and fill a niche of that niche.

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The New Regular: In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic

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This is the third installment of my New Regular series (seen anything normal lately?).

The first was about customer expectations and cheese, the second one was about paradigm shifts, tiny and not so much. The goal is to establish perspective and maintain focus on whatever is coming at us in the post-pandemic marketplace.

This offering is about identifying the implications of a pandemic shutdown. In that quest, another book came to mind that perfectly reveals the power of gaining 2020 perspective clarity from the 20:20 hindsight of history. In the Wake of the Plague, by the late Norman F. Cantor, chronicles the bubonic plague pandemic of the Middle Ages. Don’t leave – you’ll thank me later.

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The New Regular: Your pre-pandemic paradigms are shifting

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This is the second column in my “New Regular” series (“normal” checked out in February). The focus is on how familiar, pre-pandemic customer relationships are likely to morph into less familiar post-pandemic customer behavior and expectations.

You’ll hear those twin-terms – pre- and post-pandemic – more and more, perhaps for the rest of your life. Like December 7, 1941, the date that lives in infamy as it marked a global generation, the events of 2020 will bisect memories and lives for decades.

In thinking of that pre/post bisect, another book comes to mind: Paradigms: The Business of Discovering the Future by my friend Joel Barker, one of the great futurists of our time. Joel didn’t invent the paradigm concept, but his landmark book and companion film reestablished it in our modern consciousness.

Barker: “A paradigm is a set of rules – written or unwritten – that establishes boundaries within which we learn how to be successful.”

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The New Regular: Your Cheese Has Been Moved

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These are rough days on Main Street. Business owners are experiencing extreme stress and anxiety, unprecedented in cause, abruptness, velocity, and impact. 

Just now we’re dealing with a one-two punch to our lives and livings. The first blow was from a novel coronavirus pandemic and the second from the shutdown response to it. 

The shutdown punch – however necessary and politically-variable – has dealt a devastating financial blow to millions of small firms. And as the arc of the disease danger seems to be descending, business owners are increasingly struggling with an unprecedented internal conflict I’ve termed “Owner’s Choice”: Having to daily reassess the risk of a deadly disease against ongoing damage to their family’s financial future.  

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