What the f*ck is going on?

Fair warning. This one swears. Stop here if you're easily offended. Carry on if, like me, the only thing you've got to say about the business world today is what the fuck is going on?

Linkedin is a crazy place right now – you’ve read it right? Thrilled to announce. Sad to be leaving. Open to work. Some personal news. Thrilled to announce again, four months after the last thrilled to announce. People I've known for years, brilliant at their jobs, are on their second or third employer since Christmas. Businesses I'd have called rock solid in the spring have gone. Others I'd maybe written off are hiring.

None of this is a complaint about the people posting. It's the pace. Working life has started to feel like a house where everyone is in the process of moving in or moving out and nobody can find the kettle.

So, I did what I do for a living and went to look at whether the feeling is real. The answer is yes, but not in the way I expected. Vacancies are at 702,000, the lowest outside the pandemic since 2014. The number of people on payrolls fell by 145,000 in a year. Recruiters say the supply of candidates rose at its sharpest rate in three months and redundancy is the main reason why. All of which sounds like a market closing down.

And yet. The same recruiters reported permanent placements rising in August for the first time since September 2022. Temp work is growing at its second fastest pace in three years. Starting salaries are going up at the quickest rate since January. So, we are not hiring, apart from all the hiring. We are letting people go and paying more for the people we keep.

That duality is the pattern everywhere I look and it's the bit that's doing my head in.

Consumers are broke and spending. Card spending fell in April for the first time in sixteen months. By June it was up 1.9 per cent, largely because of the World Cup and people went to the pub. Consumer confidence is at its highest for two years while inflation is climbing again. People are saving more and buying more at the same time. That's the same person, in the same month. I don't think they know what the fuck is going on either.

Businesses are cutting costs and investing in growth in the same board meeting. Struggling to recruit in one department while running a consultation in the next. The number of companies going bust each month is back at 2008 levels, though the rate is lower because there are so many more companies to go bust.

GAME shut its last shop in March. Harvey Nichols, of all places, was sold to Mike Ashley, of all people, for £40 million in August. And it isn't only businesses. Fusion Lifestyle, a charity running 20 leisure centres with 1,865 staff, went into administration in April. Last week Papyrus, the young suicide prevention charity, closed after 30 years. A service the NHS leaned on, funded by fun runs and three pounds a month, gone in an afternoon. That one shocked me and I know the sector. Four million fewer people give regularly than did in 2019 and it is starting to show up as closed doors.

Three years ago 12 per cent of firms used AI in any form. Now it's 35 per cent (is it?) and rising. Most of them say they use it to make operations more efficient, which is the polite way of saying the same work with fewer people. Nobody puts that in the announcement.

Meanwhile the marketing channels I could once predict have gone super weird. Search doesn't behave. Email is a lottery. Attention is in smaller pieces than I've ever known it. Customers have changed what they buy, how they buy it and what they'll pay for it. They didn't send a bloody memo on it either.

I could give you 20 more of these. Every one has a decent explanation on its own. Together they don't add up to anything you could put on one slide. Which brings me back to the question. I mean it seriously. What the fuck is going on?

I don't think anybody knows - not the economists, not the people whose job is to sound like they know, not me. I've come to the view that the useful response is to stop pretending we can see what's coming next. Not one of the hundreds of businesses I've worked with had "global pandemic" or "a land war in Europe" or "a chatbot that can write my proposals and potentially will kill us all" in their risk register.

Truth be told predictions were always a bit of a con. The half-life of what we know about our own businesses has just got a lot shorter, so the con is getting found out faster. What we can do is get much better at understanding what is happening right now. Not the market in general. Ours.

What is actually happening with our customers this month? What has happened to the pipeline, not the forecast, the real one? Where are we making money and where do we just think we are? What has got harder to sell? What have customers suddenly started valuing that they didn't a year ago? What has happened to margin? What has moved in our market? And the big one, which assumptions are we still running on that stopped being true a while ago and nobody noticed?

The dangerous thing at the moment isn't not knowing. It's thinking you still know.

That last question is why we built Perspective Analysis at Equipt. We built it in Covid, when every plan in the country went in the bin in the same fortnight. It was designed on purpose for a world where the plan stops being true before the ink is dry. At its heart it's a challenging three hour conversation with someone from outside the building. One client called it a hug and a punch. Everything you know and everything you suspect about the business on one piece of paper, what's pushing it forward, what's holding it back and where to start. Then the bit that matters. You come back and do it again in 3 months. Take a perspective. Decide on what you can see. Act. Look again. Keep looking.

It sounds simple because it is. The hard part is doing it when you'd rather be doing anything else. The even harder part is admitting the thing you decided in January was right in January and isn't now. Fuck.

So, here's where I've ended up. I think the businesses that will do the best over the next few years won't be the ones that predict what happens next. They'll be the ones built to notice quickly when they're wrong. That's a different kind of business and in many ways one much harder to swallow. Smaller decisions, more often. Fewer five-year plans, more three-month check-ins. Less bollocks about certainty.

The point isn't to finally answer what the fuck is going on? I'm not sure it's answerable. The point is perhaps to build a business that keeps asking.

If you fancy a chat about what the fuck is going on with you, click book a chat below!