We tire of duress, drama, doom-and-gloom. It must be for a reason that we become weary of dreadful news, craving normalcy.
This appears to be a healthy collective reflex, a devil-may-care defiance that takes its shape as resolve and triumphs against all odds.
Here's a quote some of you may know:
"America's present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality.”
These words, spoken after a four-year War to End All Wars had taken 100,000 American lives, and a global pandemic--known as the Spanish Flu--took 650,000 more, were then-U.S. Senator Warren G. Harding's. He'd win a landslide vote to become the nation's 29th President.
When he returned from the Senate to his home town of Marion, Ohio, in July, Harding proclaimed to his neighbors, “Normal men and back to normalcy will steady a civilization which has been fevered by the supreme upheaval of all the world.” “Back to normalcy” and “return to normalcy” were quickly adopted as Harding campaign slogans (along with another one, “America First.”)
Collectively, our craving for--and our impulses and behaviors to restore--normalcy models what one scientist describes as a function common to all brains, human and otherwise.
"The job of [any] brain: “Take sensory information, and use it to generate an estimate of the current state of the world, and then to compare it to the desired state of the world … if the two do not match, compensatory action is initiated, which is what we call behavior” – Swedish neuroscientist Stanley Heinze."
Defiance and resolve are hard to tell apart, and both seem woven into the double helix of American--and builders'--DNA.
Craving for normalcy is part and parcel of Animal Spirits that make, break, and reconstitute economic cycles, wresting strength from a shambles, and puncturing boom-time exuberance like it's so much hot air.
Uncharted waters, this time, is different. Uncharted waters, this time, is the new uncharted waters. The agony of the moment--and its greatest source of uncertainty--is the potential delta between two measures of duration. One is the time it takes for an economic return to acceptable levels of activity. The other is the time it takes before emergency funding, finance, lending, and support resources run their course and expire.
Which duration are you buying into right now? Livelihoods matter as importantly as lives. Seeing it as having to choose one or the other, but not both, is a false choice. One needs the other.
We can expect craving for normalcy to play a big part in an ultimately resilient response to, as Heinze puts it, the abyss between the "current state" and the "desired state" of our world. We can expect it both on a household level, on a small business operations level, on a large corporations level, as well as a societal level.
Meanwhile, divides among us and clashes between them and us and fissures and fractures and oppositions that become hostilities challenge our capacity for a bottom-line show of fitness in the face of the shock and stress.
Here's six foundational take-aways of the last 10 years of home building, development, investment, and building products and materials recovery behavior and practice that we could pare away to as essential rebuilding framework. In every instance, in our view, "we" is crucial. Englightened self-interest demands that firms--just like individuals--look at not just their own path, but that of the community in order to weather turbulence and trial the likes of which they've never known.
- Customer-centric design strategy, intention, and execution is operational model "table stakes" for a post-coronavirus near-future.
- Collaboration is not an option, as inter-operability, or true fusion of process and parts, define value-making versus a productivity trap.
- Problem-solving, i.e., looking at what needs doing rather than why something can't be done, is part of the essential nature of the residential development and construction community
- Knowledge transfer in the form of wisdom and experience is a critical dimension of smarter decision-making.
- Inventive, self-disruptive, learning, or one of the Clayton Homes' mantras, "try a lot of things; keep what works," to keep pace with dynamically evolving need, opportunity, and insight.
- Finally, and above all, trust. As Ernest Hemingway's timeless words note, "the best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them." This goes for all key stakeholders--customers, associates, partners, and shareholders.
Home builders have a great deal of practice--and have made great strides in the past decade--in all of these areas. As we count on people and businesses to "crave the normal" as they suffer catastrophe fatigue, and act on that mix of defiance and resolve, let these six principles form the bulwarks of a resurrection, from the current state to the state of "business as unusual" we all desire.
