No easy answers. No playbook.
Insightful practitioners have been saying this for years. Here's another voice worth listening to, referring to the very current and salient situation of how our economy might make its way back after #COVID19. Professor Bob Gregory, emeritus professor at the Australian National University, says...
" 'At the beginning of these crises there's a lot of uncertainty ... but you sort of think that having uncertainty at the beginning is normal, that the uncertainty will go away... That as the weeks and weeks go by you'll become more certain. And that doesn't happen.'
'Outsiders tend to think that because we're 'experts' that we sort of know.
'But you don't really know and you're guessing all the time …' "
In my experience effective #leaders and #resilient #teams are the ones who cultivate the #courage and #patience required to play together in that #uncertainty, as they attempt to navigate their way through to slightly higher ground. It takes time and genuine #trust. And trust is an analogue process – there is no way around it. Teams need to spend time together, learn to ask the important and often difficult questions of each other, and to not be afraid of the answers.
...trust is an analogue process.
And if it's true that uncertainty never really goes away, then what these things together suggest to me is that the way through that uncertainty - without feeling our world is unravelling at the seams at every turn - is through #connectedness.
The #value and effectiveness of our connection to our colleagues, our teams, our work and our organisation can be understood in a number of ways, to name a few:
your sense of #belonging
the constancy of your #resilience
your levels of #productivity
the clarity of your #boundaries
the twitch of #creativity
the presence of #purpose
an experience of sustained #enjoyment.
Questions worth considering
I believe there is value in trying to unpack these in greater detail in the near future.
But for now, if you were to use these categories to interrogate your current connectedness to those with whom you work, what do you think they would reveal to you?
How ready do you feel facing up to uncertainty day in, day out? Where do you source your stamina? And how might your connections play a part?
Questions worth considering indeed.
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