“Anyone who waits and sees will miss out.” ~ Saul Colt 

How are you doing six months into the COVID pandemic, with no end in sight?

If you’re a parent of school-aged children, how are you coping with decisions around the impending school year? 

If you’re an employee, how is your organization handling remote workforce issues? Are you feeling Zoomed out? Are you feeling that work boundaries have stretched to intrude on your personal life? That 9 to 5 has morphed into 7 to 10?

How are you feeling about the progress of your career? Are you feeling that you have control over your professional future? Does the future seem to hold an attractive outcome? 

Are you just muddling through?

Disruptive Times Call for Disruptive Measures  

Thanks to Whitney Johnson, Dorie Clark, Chris Brogan, and other smart folks I’ve read lately, these thoughts about our disruptive time have percolated in my brain for the past few months. They may provide some useful guidance on how we might come through this time in a better way.

• Differentiate yourself — play to your distinctive strengths.
• Embrace your constraints–what do you not have enough of?
• Skills required in these disruptive times:
  1. Problem-solving and critical thinking–diagnosing vs. selling
  2. Emotional intelligence–we need to understand others’ feelings and thoughts
  3. Authenticity–not perfection
  4. Reinventing best practices–conventional wisdom will fail us
  5. Tell YOUR story–it’s always Day 1 in your story to someone else
• Be agile–understand the value of iterative–lagging will penalize people more than ever before
• Understand the difference between chaos and crisis. One is proactive and can lead to innovation (chaos); the other is reactive and protective (crisis).
• Be at the crossroads of the marketplace, which is always changing and shifting. Embrace it. Ask these questions:
  1. What will be the pent up demand in our market?
  2. How can that demand be framed in terms of solvable questions? (Those who ask the right questions are perceived to be experts.)
  3. How can these questions/solutions/strategies be operationationalized?
  4. What are the systems that can respond to these questions?

As the song says, “the times they are a-changin’…if your time to you is worth savin’, you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone…”

A Final Word

How are you prepping for emerging from this disruption? 

Are you hoping we’ll drift back to how things were pre-COVID? Or are you embracing some of the thoughts listed above? If so, which are you finding success with?

Email me at scott@scottwoodardcoaching.com and let me know. I’d love to hear how you’re doing.

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