What Are Your Working Assumptions?

Like most of my colleagues in the cultural sector, I’ve been thinking a lot about what reopening looks like. I’ll say upfront that there are way too many unknowns to make any kind of recommendations yet. But we have to be able to plan. It’s also true that any path to reopening will depend on what sector you’re in, and will also vary within the same industry based on that type of organization you have. We that in mind, it’s important to articulate what assumptions underlie one’s thinking so that others can help us evaluate the validity of the scenarios we propose.

First let’s define terms. According to the white paper “Assumption-Based Planning” by Dewar, Builder, Hix and Levin, an assumption is

…an assertion about some characteristic of the future that underlies the current operations or plans of an organization.

Here are my general assumptions that I’m using to frame how I’m thinking about reopening. Assumptions you make may be different depending on your industry. That said:

• Priorities (beyond remaining solvent) should be/are 1) staff safety and 2) audience safety
• There will be no vaccine for 18-24 months. An even more conservative view suggests 36 months at minimum, and that’s if we have almost perfect global cooperation.
• We cannot return to anything close to pre-COVID “normal” until there is robust testing and contact tracing in place. Until then, is it even ethical–to say nothing of responsible–to ask people to physically show up to work and/or attend events? No.
• We will be social distancing and sheltering-in-place for a while. Even August might be too optimistic.
• Whenever we do reopen, we should expect people to be extremely hesitant to attend events, especially if there’s insufficient testing, tracing and safety protocols in place. And even if there are, expect that not to change as long as there’s no vaccine.
• It’s a great time to focus on digital delivery of services and experiences, but not all organizations are prepared for the capacity and capability requirements that this heavy focus on digital will demand.
• The digital divide is real. Some members of your audience might not be able to participate because of lack of access to technology.
• See this downtime as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to focus on non-public-facing activities, i.e., planning, building infrastructure, improve internal processes.
• Mandated safety protocols will be an additional expense (technology, processes, staffing). How much? We don’t know.

Of course, everything is dependent on cities meeting reopening metrics that local, State and Federal agencies put into place. Here is guidance from NY State. On the other hand, with NYC being the hardest hit city, the NY Times explained why our path to reopening will be much more difficult.

I can’t make any recommendations to anyone yet. But you see that once you articulate assumptions, you can begin to clarify a range of actions you can take related to how you deploy resources–both financial and human–as well as how you begin to think about where to focus your organizations. You can also put those assumptions up for scrutiny. After all, we may be making the wrong assumptions.

But for now, that’s the best we can do.