How to think about change

If you’re not doing ‘change’ right now, you’re not in fashion.

Whether it’s organisational change, personal transformation (hi Spring!) or even career change, it’s in the springtime air. I’m so down for this.

Change is my favourite thing – new growth, ideas, and possibilities. But apparently, not everyone feels the same. People always grumble about how “resistant to change” their colleagues and teams are. Rubbish. People don’t fear change – as Heifetz and Linsky point out, no one gives back a winning lottery ticket! It’s loss that people are afraid of.

The world got weird

In 2020, the world feels less knowable than it used to, and the potential for loss seems around every corner. People are losing their freedom, families, and jobs as COVID continues to ravage the globe. In New Zealand, we’re bizarrely insulated from the primary impacts of the pandemic, but the secondary ones are starting to hit hard. Economic uncertainty and border closures are having a ripple effect through our businesses, policy-making, and future planning.

COVID aside, work and the world feels less knowable than they used to, don’t they? Our parents and grandparents left school, got a job, and felt confident doing that job for their careers. It wasn’t necessarily easy, but it felt stable.

Teachers taught. Lawyers lawyer-ed. Doctors doctor-ed. But now, when my kids talk about what they want to be when they grow up, I’m unsure what to say. What is a teacher in pandemic uncertainty and with online learning? What are lawyers as we advance blockchain, encrypted data and global commerce? How will medicine evolve as bedside assistants become robots, society ages, the middle-class questions vaccines and biotechnology hurtles ahead?

Change is constant

Take heart if you’ve got personal, organisational or career change on the cards. According to a LinkedIn source, people will, on average, switch jobs fifteen times in their lifetime, which could include a handful of significant career shifts. The rules are different now, and the options are more varied and flexible.

Change is not new. We’ve been grappling with new occupations, ideas, and technologies forever. But the kind of change we’re dealing with is different. Like our career paths, it feels less knowable than before. Things are more complex.

Lucky for us, complexity is not a bad thing. Complex systems, like in nature, are more resilient and adaptive. We lose our more fragile bits as we go through adversity and come out the other side smarter, stronger and better prepared for the next thing.

You're made for this

People, communities, businesses, society and policy have been growing, changing, learning and improving for centuries. Sometimes, it’s slow, and we hardly notice how far we’ve come unless we look back. Sometimes, it’s fast, scary and turns everything upside down.

Either way, it’s OK. We’re built for this. We’re an evolutionary animal, and we thrive on the chance to improve things – as long as we feel like we’re part of it. So don’t step back. Don’t be a plastic bag battered around by the winds of change. Focus on your bit. The exciting bit. The learning, the growth and the opportunities.

And hey - I know you can’t feel like that every day. It might be that today, this email hits your inbox, and you roll your eyes and swear at me through your phone. That’s cool, I get it. Some days, getting up and feeling grumpy, worried, and resentful is fine. Being a person is hard. Being a person who doesn’t know what’s coming next is even harder.

But you can’t stay there – and it’s unlikely you will. Take the day, be emo, and then start again tomorrow.

You’re born to change. Keep moving.