Never Waste A Good Crisis: What if……

What if The Pandemic is a door into the future? What if the disruption it represents is an accelerator for all kinds of change for the good? What, am I crazy?

What if we find out that school and all the information we try to pack into a young person’s head to absorb day in and day out and regurgitate on a test is not the best approach to lifelong learning (or creating value or even getting a job for that matter)?

What if millions of people could work from home and still be connected?

What if we (the humans) focused more on what binds us together than what separates us from others?

What if we took the time to acknowledge how lucky we are to live in 2020 and not 1920 or 1820?

What if we all made the effort to use the disruption of The Pandemic to discover what may be better paths for the future? What if we made an effort to become the best version of who we could be?

Disruptions represent moments in time where we have a chance to reconsider; to deliberate, to pause. to try new ideas and new things, collectively and importantly, individually.

We talk so much about disruptive technologies and how positive they are. We rebuild after disaster disruptions, often for the better. What if we treated COVID-19 as a disruptive technology or disaster? While a small few of us humans work out how to successfully conquer the intruder, the rest of us, instead of going after each other, looked at what’s happening in our lives and considered what better future might be right in front of our eyes and then do the work to allow it to happen.

Is having kids home really a bad thing? Will they not be as smart in 5 years?

Is working at home really a bad thing? Will we really be less productive?

Is getting centered with who you are and how you add value to the planet or your family and friends a bad thing?

Disruptions from the Roman aqueducts (technology), to the plague (disaster), to the horseless carriage, to the telephone, to flight or landing on the moon, to mobile phones, to a tsunami, to a nuclear plant meltdown, to weapons that can wipe out entire cities, to 9/11, to getting laid off, to losing a spouse or a child, disruptions confront us with a likely altered future. The Pandemic is not a moment. It’s a period. We can choose to embrace this period. We can choose to work on how we see the world in front of us.

What if we USED this drawn out period before the recovery period to better understand the things we take for granted that we can actually change? What if we consider the things or qualities we might actually want to retain for our personal futures? What if there are “better practices” at being human right in front of our eyes. We are not predestined to merely work to create a recovery that makes the world (macro or personal) like it used to be. We all know it can never be like it was before. So let’s not bother with how it was and make it better!! How it is and how it can be.

I’m curious about what you are finding to be “better” now than before The Pandemic. What do you want to continue if The Pandemic ended tomorrow? Send me a comment and I’ll make sure they are posted right away. Looking for how to shape a better tomorrow is the core of positive change. If you don’t see it right away, turn around or take a step. It’s there. You just have to be open to it.