What? Unplanned Chaos
- covid19 caused a worldwide pandemic.
- You were forced, outside your control, to change how people work together, where they work, the tools they use to communicate, and how you get goods or services to your customers.
- You were forced, outside your control, to look at this new work environment and create some process or system to get work done while being thoughtful about the public relations viewpoint of working through a pandemic.
- Plus, keep your team(s) and people feeling good about the organization, its work and feel secure that their work is stable and the company will work through this.
So What? Navigating Complexity
- You, or your organization, have defined its 2 to 4 priorities to focus on during this time. You know that some work will be business as usual, but finding priorities will work as a boundary to maintain focus and make progress.
- You have developed a quick form or documented process to capture what is working to increase and what is not working to decrease while the work of your team(s) is getting done.
- As you check in with your management, you are reflecting their priorities. Your reflection keeps the company viable in current to future markets, shows your value in making sense and navigating this complexity, keeping your team engaged, are developing new and unique ways to bridge capacity weaknesses and areas that will be a differentiator for the organization in the future.
- As you check in with your team(s), you are reflecting the priorities to them in a way that highlights the great work they are doing, recognizing who is excelling and falling behind as the expectations shift, seeing new skills and performance opportunities to develop; you are making needed changes to how the work gets done that support innovation and idea generation from the team(s).
- You are taking time, daily, to talk with yourself and build a solution-focused practice to make sure you are identifying what is and is not working, looking for trends and understanding how they happened, accepting that things are messy right now and that is OK; identifying what you want to have happen and where your energy is going; making small-steps and seeing how great your effort is.
Now what? From Complexity to Change
- As you continue to make progress and build your small success steps, plus recognize and understand failure – you are constructing your new way of work.
- Your work’s construct happens through your team and you stepping, looking, talking, pattern recognizing, and agreeing; this is how we do things now.
- Some things will be better, some worse, some barely changed.
- While you are moving into the unique or focused differentiators that will support your organization’s growth, you will see new patterns emerge.
- The new pattern recognition is due to your previous work on building skillsets in navigating complexity and change.
- Some of your team(s) will rise, some will fall, most will stay close to the same but different.
- As you continue to update your management, you will speak to them differently, and they will recognize your new language and pattern of increasing the organization’s market viability.
- Your team(s) will work more interdependently because the disruption and chaos threw them and you off equilibrium enough to cause a new path.
- When the new substantial disruption or chaos happens, you will have a healthier, more pliant foundation that can absorb the pressure and bounce back even smarter and more different than the current system.