Maybe you’ve been stuck in the 7 stages of pandemic grief – anger, denial, bargaining.
The smart ones among us moved to ‘acceptance’ a long time ago – including myself. What will your post pandemic future look like?
If you aren’t thinking about it now, you won’t have the strategies to get you to this new world of opportunity.
“Our pandemic path to the future? Endless days of unpredictable routine as a result of the routine unpredictability that surrounds us!” – Futurist Jim Carroll
A shoutout to my good buddy Ian Bates for this one – as a teacher, he’s in the midst of a return to school, albeit in a massive zone of uncertainty as to what actually comes next. While talking about the unknown complexities that he is faced with, I commented:
Long term view, 1 month from now: your life will be settled into an unpredictable routine.
And with that, I captured the perfect synopsis of the complex life of many people at this moment in time. We might not know where the heck we are going and how we will end up there, but we sure are making a great time.
There is a tremendous amount of uncertainty in an uncertain world right now – all having to do with the big question, ‘when will we return to normal?’
I don’t believe we will ever get back to the ‘way it was before.’ The axis of our universe has shifted.
People seem to have an attitude that our old future ‘will come roaring back” when there is a vaccine, or some other seismic event happens. And yet, the science is telling us that the virus, even in the context of a vaccine, is not like an on/off switch – i.e. that today we’re in the era of Covid, and then one day Covid-19 is magically over.
It won’t be like that; it doesn’t work like that. It’s going to be a long, complex, tortuous return to a world that is forever unlike what it was before.
And here’s the thing – there will be a lot of unknowns thrown our way during this wild, crazy ride. Do you think you’ve had an unpredictable six months? Wait until you see the next 60!
If that is the case, what are you doing to align to a ‘non-roaring back before 2030?’ scenario? What’s your plan to survive and thrive in a wildly unpredictable future, and what routines are you building into your day to help you on your path?
“Who led your digital transformation strategy? Your CEO, CIO or CTO? No, it was Covid-19!” – Futurist Jim Carroll
This is a two part story. The image is from a video I filmed yesterday afternoon on the accelerated need for leadership insight and the trend towards customized event videos. The actual quote comes from a project I’m currently doing for one of the largest hi-tech companies in the world.
I originally saw the idea in a tweet that can across my timeline some months ago – it resonated with me and I kept a screen grab. It now opens this 15 minute custom video that I’m putting together for my client – it will be used to open a major insurance conference near the end of September.
If you think about it, this is certainly a reality. We’ve just witnessed the absolute and massive virtualization of entire industries and companies literally overnight. We’ve seen them successfully implement an infrastructure to support a collaborative, digital distributed workforce. They’ve ramped up their ability to service and support customers through sophisticated digital information channels. They’ve quickly migrated their supply chains and support systems to virtual systems. They have literally gone virtual, almost overnight – after talking about the potential opportunities and benefits of doing so for years and years and years.
Change happens when there is a big driver for that change!
There’s a lot of it that has not gone well, obviously, and behind the scenes, there are likely a lot of disastrous implementations – I shudder at the thought of the security holes that exists with millions of home computers that are now a part of corporate networks. But overall, we’ve seen more corporate digital transformation change in the last six months than we have seen in the last 50 years.
Companies have learned a thing or two as a result of this voyage. They’ve learned that rather than debating the merits of a digital world, it is something that simply makes sense. Rather than studying the benefits to death, they quickly discovered its merits. And rather than long, complicated studies to understand the pathways of how to get there, they simply took the voyage.
Years from now, we will look back and realize that we learned something powerful about the idea of transformation – first and foremost, speed matters, and virtual works!
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