You’ve heard it countless times before:
“People don’t like change.”
“Change is hard.”
“Change activates people’s lizard brain. They’ll fight you or run away.”
“People don’t mind changing. They don’t like being changed.”
You hear these complaints so often that you’d think they’re inscribed in the 10 Commandments by now. (They’re not, by the way.)
Sure, there’s plenty of truth in those sayings, but the good news is that right now—in the middle of the Covid-19 outbreak—they’re less relevant than ever. If you want to make a change at your organization, now’s the time to do it.
The habits that people develop are like ruts in a dirt road. Whether you’re driving, biking, or hiking on that road, it’s really tough to get out of the ruts. You get stuck in the well-worn grooves that you or others have formed over the years. Which pant leg do you put on first? Do you brush first and then floss, or floss and then brush? How do you interlace your fingers? Good luck changing any of those habits.
Except.
Except when a flood washes out the road and you (and everyone else) is forced to bushwhack across new territory. Everything is thrown into turmoil, and the old habits no longer apply. When the road is gone, so is the rut.
Welcome to the world of Covid-19.
From the way you make your sales calls (at the client or remote?), to the criteria you use for choosing suppliers (lowest piece price, or lowest total cost of ownership?), to the way you train people when you’re either not at the office or physically distanced from your colleagues, to the working hours at your company, everything is up for negotiation.
We’re all adapting to some kind of coronavirus-enforced change. But since we’re all dealing with the change together, it’s not quite as fear-inducing as it might have been. The lizard brain is quiescent.
And that means you have the opportunity to introduce new ways of working that might have roused the lizard in other situations. All bets are off right now, so you can either retreat (to the best of your ability) to the way things used to be, or you can take advantage of the totally changed landscape to run experiments that would have been too scary before.
Covid-19 has washed away the rut. It would be a shame to waste the opportunity to forge a new path.