For the past 10 years, I've been waiting for life to settle down. Then about two weeks ago, I was re-reading Seth Godin's Survival is Not Enough and came across this heading:
"Change is the New Normal"
Well, duh. Yeah, it is. Life is NEVER going to settle down because life IS change. I just happen to live in a time when change is happening at warp speed so it feels like I don't even get the chance to breathe. So I accept reality. Now what?
So I read further and another big duh:
"Many employees fear change. Fear of change is rational--after all it can lead to bad outcomes. But now, NOT changing is more likely to lead to a bad outcome than changing!"
OK, so now he REALLY has my attention. Then I read:
"Companies that embrace change for change's sake, companies that view a state of constant flux as a stable equilibrium, zoom. And zooming companies evolve faster and easier because they don't obstruct the forces of change"
And then. . .
Once you train the organization to evolve regularly and effortlessly, change is no longer a threat. . . If your company is too reliant on your winning strategy, you won't evolve as quickly."
So what if I apply this to myself? I've been doing the same kind of work for a while now. I develop some new skills here and there, but I've most definitely relied on a "winning strategy" to keep me going. What if I haven't evolved enough? What if I've grown fat and happy on the stability of my old business model when in fact I need to do something to adapt to a new way of functioning in the world? I like to pride myself on being a life-long learner, but what if I'm wrong?
Says Seth:
"To often, companies organize themselves around one and only one winning strategy and then rely on plan P when the external factors don't pan out. Alas, Plan P is to panic."
And people do the same thing. I've seen it a million times. After 10 years of consulting work with Department of Labor clients, I've been around a TON of laid off people, most of whom didn't see it coming. They'd relied on a strategy that worked for years and then one day it didn't. And they were stuck.
So what to do? How do you evolve so you can zoom?
For me, it's been about starting to play around with things, to experiment. Not just in the work that I do, but outside of the work that I do, too. I love Dan Pink's work and the kinds of skills he says we'll need for the future, so I work at those. I'm also trying to bring in new, surprising elements that shake me out of my old ways of doing things, which in turn help me to evolve. Change one thing a day and soon you've changed a hundred things and you didn't even know it.
But beyond that, for me, is dropping my perfectionism and being willing to make mistakes, to do something new and be OK with it not being perfect.
So I go to Illustration Friday every week and submit a drawing. As someone who was never "good" at art, this challenges my perceptions and forces me to be OK with work that isn't professional or perfect. And seeing other people's work is a wonderful source of stimulation and delight.
I try to do 100 words (although I haven't made it a whole month) because I love the challenge and discipline of trying to say something true and real, even if it's stupid, in exactly 100 words.
I use Keri Smith's ideas to infuse my work with my personality because in doing so, it forces me to go back to my core strengths and values, which in turn makes me evolve and adapt them in new ways as I work with my customers.
And I watch Ze Frank because . . . well, the man experiments. Every day he's saying something bizarre, yet oddly profound, and that's an energy I want more of in my life. And he makes me laugh, which is also a good thing to have going on.
Careers are evolutionary. There's no real planning for them because you simply can't know what lies ahead. But what I can plan for is to evolve and to grow. So I'm focusing on the art of the Zoom.
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