2020-2021 destroyed the Normal and then enabled the Impossible.
If anyone told us a few years ago, that all these people would be working from home, or that in 2021, 75.5 million people would resign from their Normal jobs (in America alone), we'd say: Impossible.
"Normal" used to be knowing the rules, playing by them, winning, and getting paid for winning. Our world was perfect.
Then comes change. And what usually happens is that people who are comfortable with Normal say no. They resist change and continue fighting it until it's too late. Ask Nokia and Yahoo. Actually, that's the majority of us. Most people now are burning to go back to normal. But.. There is no going back, this is the new normal. Most of what was normal before 2020 is now upside down.
The question now is: Are we taking the initiative to adopt the new normal? Are we changing the game? Or: Are we waiting for someone else to change it on us, and then we live the struggle to just catch up?
It all started when Henry Ford industrialized the world with the idea of "the production line," which led to mass production, turning factories into big factories that needed more workers and then into companies that required even more workers. And thus, the education system, as we know it, filled the world with workers eager to fit into job descriptions to make a living. And here we are, for most of our lives, we've been cogs in a machine managing or being managed.
Management in the sense of using the authority of controlling how much people get paid to tell them what to do to achieve one goal: improving processes to make them a little bit faster and a little bit cheaper in a reliable way. That was the industrial age's primary rule, and the world needed it for many years, but it made us thirsty for being humans again because we aren't good at being cogs. We are good at creating and making change happen and leading.
Leading is nothing like managing. Leadership is testing the edges that haven't been tested, searching for problems and trying to solve them, figuring out how to make change happen knowing that it might work or fail because if it were sure to work, it only needed a manager to run the process.
The new Normal is for leaders. Those who can deal with the fear of being wrong—the ones who don't copy the others or follow the pattern—the ones who embrace change and take responsibility. And That isn't easy because it dictates that we get enrolled in the journey and be 100% sure we want to go forward.
That's the only way to conquer our inherited fear of change. That's the only way we get back quickly into the game when we make a mistake because testing the edges includes making mistakes, but it also becomes a hit when it works.
Once we're done with that, we have to answer this: What change are we trying to make? Who are we trying to change? If we can be super clear about that, everything else that we do becomes in support of the change we seek to make until we test that edge and solve that problem and proudly show up and say: Here I made this .. Work that matters for people who care.
That's leadership that people are thirsty for, and it has nothing to do with copying ideas that are sure to work, offering them for a little bit lower price, hoping that someone will notice you until someone else offers a lower price or shouts louder than you do.
