Deputy Chief Human Resources Officer at UC Davis Health & Adjunct Management Faculty, San Jose State University.
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Change is a complex phenomenon that has been studied, understood and explained in multiple ways. Despite decades of insightful conversations about this elusive concept, it stays inherently contradictory and ever evolving. “Change is the only constant” has perhaps not been so well experienced ever before as during the current pandemic.
As much as we have been reminded of our fragile and tiny existence, the pandemic also highlighted the power of our dominant spirits and ability to adapt and evolve rapidly and continually. Change has challenged existing notions about our natural resistance to change. We saw the emergence of a new paradigm around change, highlighting our inner agility, innovative abilities and strength to seize opportunities for speedy personal and organizational transformation in a crisis.
The learnings on change obtained during this pandemic are a result of action, rather than theories. While testing our limits, 2020 stood out as a master teacher on change responsiveness without preparedness.
1. The neuroscience of change is at the forefront.
A large portion of the scientific research around change has highlighted our brain’s defense mechanism to unplanned change in our lives. More often than not, an unplanned change affects our sense of stability, and we react in certain ways — fight or flight — to accommodate the shift in our lives. During this extended season of unplanned change, however, we’ve had no option to fly. It has been about facing the challenge, and we fought in our personal and professional lives to handle what came our way, often with little time to prepare.
In addition, our brain’s elasticity has been tested like never before, which is likely rewiring our brains in rapid ways we never anticipated.
It can be quite liberating to realize that if our capability to change is restricted to a certain extent by the brain’s hard-wired mechanism, its neuroplasticity also empowers us to reshape our thinking and behaviors through a self-directed course of action that mobilizes change faster than we considered.
Our capacity to change, then, has more to do with our willingness and energy redirection to create the plausible future — and not so much about building on or redirecting trends of the past.
2. We have a new understanding of our ‘resilient’ selves.
The pandemic saw a strong emergence, or re-emergence, of the significance of our personal and professional resilience on the entire continuum of mental, emotional, physical and social resilience. Resilience, by definition, emphasizes our ability to recover quickly from setbacks. If the concept is aligned with an understanding of change, it refers to our elasticity and ability to adjust to change. Although the diminishing work-life boundary has tested our sanity and coping mechanisms like never before, it also resurrected the interconnectedness between our resilience and overall wellbeing.
The concept of wellness has now moved beyond perks such as the ability to work from home, an on-site gym facility at work and using technology for easier and faster life. In fact, what was previously a perk now became a burden, and working from home has created more burnout rather than prevented it.
Tapping into our true, resilient self has required going through an introspective journey of sound judgment and prioritization of work and life matters, self-compassion and holistic self-care. Change, in this case, has been about enhancing our emotional intelligence spectrum and ownership over creating balance and discipline in our lives.
3. Unplanned change leads to innovation.
One of the major outcomes of the pandemic is that it has helped us evolve and define new practices around change in an unknown — and to a certain extent — new world. We have heard and seen an open acknowledgment by business leaders of having overnight solutions for issues and initiatives that were a distant vision for a long time. Leading ourselves and our workplaces during these uncertain times has sparked our creativity and spirit of experimentation in unthinkable ways.
Interestingly enough, innovation in this case has not resulted out of curiosity, but out of pressure to survive.
Key to this new understanding of change is that our adaptability and responsiveness to anything that threatens the foundation of our existence can considerably shift us to inculcate a growth mindset. Vision, in this case, loses some of its significance, as the emergent future is guided by breaking historic stereotypes, facing a sense of urgency to find optimal solutions, and being more fearless about risk tolerance.
4. The path forward requires adaptation and evolution.
Organizations have spent so much time and research on the best ways to implement structured ways of change, and our current paradox has clearly revealed that the traditional ways of thinking about change need to shift. There certainly have been forceful learnings about unplanned change. In absence of time for a structured, well-thought-out change management process, we learned a new path to creating efficiency and effectiveness by continually adopting and evolving ourselves — first to survive and then to thrive.
As I see it, there’s no end in sight with the change brought on by the pandemic, and there’s not a definitive “new normal” on the horizon. We’ve unlearned our previous ways of living and working, and that will directly affect how we live and work in the future. We’ll forever think about personal health and public health in new ways and personal and professional life balance with a different lens.
Amidst the contradictions that we’ve experienced during the past year, our current crisis has created a new awakening. This journey has brought to the forefront the significance and our ability to be resilient and limber as we face the unknown.
Change is a continuous process, and it occurs perpetually around us. This new paradigm requires us to shift to a mindset of adaptation and evolution, where continuous adaptability is our new reality. We will continue to be flexible, and we will have a new view of what it means to prepare ourselves for personal, societal and organizational change.
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