Why it takes a crisis like #COVID19 to drive change.

Why does it take a crisis to make people change their behavior?

It's something that we're probably all seeing at the moment with the covid-19 outbreak is that it only takes this mass change - this change in our environment - this change in the way in which we do life everyday to force us to start doing things differently often.

It takes a crisis a big moment of reappraisal a big change for us to see that we were at the pinnacle of where we thought we could get to and that she that there is another side.

To the mountain to climb back down that there somewhere else to go and it takes those big moments these big tectonic shifts in our lives to actually make the difference in terms of changing our behavior.

For some of us in the past couple of weeks that's been working from home for others. It might be having to deal with home-schooling, or for many many workers right now is going everyday into work, which is situation looks completely different to what they've had before for our NHS Frontline workers for even the folks that are having to just manage getting groceries into the shops every day everything looks different.

So why does it take a crisis to change our perspective?

Why does it take a crisis to move us from here to there?

Well, I think it's because when we're in our daily experience, there's just not the imperative to make those big shifts sure.

We might try and put habits in place to help us move forward a little bit everyday, but many of us by this time of the year have long given up on those earlier New Year's resolutions.

And so it takes a big move like a change of job, or a baby to come along or finding someone to get married to or these types of moments in our lives.

These big junctures that cause us to shift our behavior and a crisis like this is another one of those moments, not one that we chose but one that's been forced upon us.

So, how do we Deal with this big shift this big tectonic movement in our daily experience?

Acknowledge this isn't normal

Well, the first thing is to recognize that this isn't norma.

Change management processes that we try and build into businesses have a bit of an on-ramp. They take time to get going. They bubble up from somewhere before they become something, crisis management however is completely different and it causes us to react in a very different way.

So - acknowledge that this is not normal!

Don't change everything in one go

Secondly is don't try change everything all at once.

We have a habit when crisis happened to try and deal with it all in one go some people try and have a baby and move house and get married and think about, you know, changing their career all in one go because it feels like it's somehow easier to try and do everything in one go get the hard work out of the way.

But if we want to see lasting change come out of this crisis recognize that even though it's come upon us very quickly change doesn't happen that quickly.

It certainly doesn't stick around if we try and handle it too fast. \

So focus on the few core things that you can do now one of those might be adapting to working from home. Maybe your business has been struggling with this for a long time and all of a sudden it's upon you now is the moment to bed this in not as just something to handle this crisis moment, but to become much more a long-term parts of your daily working experience

Give yourself a break.

Thirdly give yourself a break.

These are not normal times, when we try and bring in big process change when try and move our organisations in under normal circumstances.

We have to hold ourselves much more accountable to KPIs and being driven and getting things done within certain time frames. This is not that - these are different times entirely.

So if it doesn't work the first couple of weeks give yourselves a break. Don't try and hold yourselves to the same standards that you would hold yourselves to under normal working life.

And at the same time recognize that this could be a real moment to push the organisation that you're in further than you've ever been able to before - maybe because we are socially distancing we're forcing ourselves to think about the way in which we communicate with one another, how transparent we are in the way in which we're doing our work if that's not working for you right now.

Don't worry - give yourself a break but let's use these moments to pick up on where our transparency isn't as transparent as we want and where our candor isn't quite as radical as we might like it to be and where there is an opportunity for us to move forward rather than use this as a time to stay still and hunker down.

So if you're wondering why it takes a crisis to move things forward remember, these things usually would happen under different circumstances.

1. Recognize that this is not normal

2. try not to change too many things all at once and third is give yourself a break.

3. Don't try and hold yourselves to the same standards as normal times,

Use this as an opportunity to bed in the things that you want to see, be more transparent be be more available and work on our collaboration.

Because that's what's going to see us out the other side of this crisis and long into the future.