Everyone knows what “intentionality” is, right? We don’t need to define it, do we?
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I ask because I’ve been hearing that word and its derivatives a lot (and using them myself) in a lot of discussions and in a lot of different contexts recently. For instance, when discussing succession planning, people will say, “Firms need to approach this with a great deal of intentionality.” Or they might say, “Young accountants need to be very intentional about the direction of their careers.”
If we all know what it means, I don’t need to spend any time here discussing it, right?
You know what — just in case, let’s deliberately spend a little time talking about intentionality and why the word and the idea seem to be having a bit of a moment right now. Perhaps the best way to define intentionality for accountants is to say that it is the exact opposite of SALY (or “Same as last year,” to be intentional about our explanations):It means examining why you’re doing what you do and making sure that your actions align directly with your goals, while also accounting for unintended consequences.
To borrow a phrase from another discipline, intentionality is the opposite of the amateur pool player’s strategy of “Poke and hope;” rather, it’s about trying to figure out all the angles in advance.
Here are a few examples of areas where the profession needs to be more intentional:
- Firms need written, numbers-driven growth plans supported by carefully curated long-term prospect pipelines.
- Partners need to build firm culture on purpose: naming specific values and firm visions, and putting in place initiatives to inculcate those into their staff.
- Practice leaders need to clearly identify their ideal clients, and put in place deliberate plans to find, engage. land and keep them.
- Young accountants need to build their own detailed career plans, and not rely on the structure of the profession to usher them along.
Those aren’t the only areas, however — pretty much every aspect of the modern accounting firm, from technology to marketing to remote work strategies and beyond, now requires serious thought and some kind of deliberate plan. As technology, demographic change, and growing competition disrupt more and more parts of the economy, this is true of most industries, but accounting as a profession has been able to take more for granted, for longer, and now many things that could once be relied on to look after themselves require your direct attention.
This is both unavoidable and annoying, but also an opportunity to chip away at years’ worth of “That’s how we’ve always done it,” and peel away layers of tasks and attitudes that have long since lost their point and perhaps — just perhaps, if you have the time and energy and focus — to be intentional about making sure new ones don’t accumulate in the future.
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