Listen to the news a little or, if you’re in business, see how the market behaves and you begin to get a sense of anxiety. There is changing happening everywhere, all at once. Change is good because it helps us progress. It presents, however, its own challenges because things … well, change. Managed change is a brilliant way to move forward.
Businesses, people and societies need managed change because that is how we grow. This is our means of applying the “Adapt. Overcome.” dictum of trained snipers and elite combat soldiers. But that is not how change normally happens. What happens, and you can apply your own business experience here, is that something changes which makes what we used to do a little bit harder, or inefficient, or less straightforward and we patch things up to kinda bring things back to the same sense of ease we had with them before the change occurred. That fix will then need, at some point, anther fix and then another and then another and, at some point, it makes more sense to chuck the whole system and carry out an upgrade that will require some ‘retraining’ which will bring about greater efficiency.
This is not the best way to achieve change. It is however acceptable when it comes to, let’s say, changing legacy systems to new ones in a business environment. Or planning and building a new road in a city. It is, however, a less desirable way to deal with change when it comes to something like changing an airplane engine while the plane is in flight. And that, unfortunately, is where we are at right now.
Our world is in flight in the sense that everything we want to change right now is a working system we can’t actually, completely shut down. From our forms of government to the way we manage global resources like lakes, seas and giant forests – locally. At the same time we have no choice. To go back to my analogy, we change airplane engines in flight because the existing ones can no longer do the job. We’re losing altitude and, at some point, we will lose the ability to fly. “Crash and burn” then is the only other option available to us.
To manage the seemingly unmanageable change that is happening all around us, to successfully find the solutions to seemingly insurmountable and definitely challenging problems we need to do what we have always done in such situations: rely on each other in order to become smarter, stronger and better.
“Intentional Leadership” then is an event about just this. It may teach you to be a better leader. I hope it shows you how to be a better human. But really, its goal is to help you decide how you can best answer the question “How can I be of assistance?” in this particularly trying time in the history of our world.
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| Take Control Of Your Actions. | Make Better Decisions. |
