We are not special. This is a good thing.

I’m sure that, like me, you’ve lost count of how often someone has said that today’s finance professionals face “unprecedented” challenges.

Today is unlike any era in history, so planning is a lot harder than ever before, right?

Because we don’t just have “unprecedented” change to deal with, we have an insane surge in political corruption in superpowers that shall remain nameless, and while we’re at it, what on earth are the kids wearing these days?

That last one probably doesn’t affect your planning process but I put it in there to prove a point. None of these are new complaints.

King Naram Sin bemoaned political corruption in 3800 BC.
Yoshida Kenko was unimpressed with depraved modern fashions in AD 1330 or so.
And the Greek philosopher Heraclitus noted the constancy of change in 500 BC.

LinkedIn posts, blogs, business papers, they love to say that everything is unprecedented…but it’s not. Sure, the details are new, every year, of course, but ultimately everything is always changing.

Are we supposed to think that 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago people were reading news headlines that said “Everything is fine, nothing much is going on”?

Let the media and “influencers” do whatever, but the problem is that if you start to believe all that, it makes it easy to not try. Against this tide of madness that no one has ever run into before, why bother attempting to improve your budgeting process? There’s no way your planning can compete with that!

It can, and it will, like it always has. It’ll be wrong too, like it also always has been, but that doesn’t make the process useless.

You can make your planning better, and you and the business can benefit.