You've changed

Photo by Tim Gouw.

This weekend we were at the mall. On Labour Day. It was exactly as awful as it sounds. The little kid needed a new backpack for school. She only informed us of this well-past what would be a reasonable timeframe for ordering one and having it shipped to the house.

We were getting everything ready for school and she said, "This backpack isn't really me anymore."

And while we could be grumpy about having to solve it on a tight timeline, that thing. That, "This isn't really me anymore." That's happening everywhere we look.

When Melissa was first coming up to Toronto for work, in the late-2000s, her colleagues said to walk west but not too far west. These days, right around the point where they told her to turn around, there are giant white letters on the side of a building. The public art piece, by Jesse Harris, says: YOU'VE CHANGED.

Artists talk about interventions. The idea that the art isn't passively consumed. It is in conversation with its surroundings. And is meant to provoke an idea or a feeling or reaction.

It's unclear whether the message is for the neighbourhood or its inhabitants. That it's unclear is precisely the point. Walking past, you not only take stock of all the ways West Queen West has changed. You take stock of all the ways you've changed.

This isn't really me anymore

We're having a collective experience again. And it goes something like this.

1. Everything has changed.

2. I've changed.

3. I need to figure how to go forward with a changed me against a changed backdrop.

If you squint, you can spot the Quiet Quitting variation.

1. Office work has changed dramatically.

2. I'm increasingly aware that the ways I used to engage with work, while once satisfying, no longer suit me.

3. I'm experimenting with how these changed entities (work and me) exist in relation to each other.

And it's not just humans. Orgs are doing a version of this as well.

1. The economic climate has shifted. Uncertainty looms.

2. We made it through the pandemic. We got clever. We got lucky. Maybe both.

3. But we need to pivot again. Or double down. Or make dramatic, strategic changes. Or just update our Q4 goals. Maybe all of the above.

The conditions for transformation

It all has us thinking of this series of posts from Caveat Magister in 2019, again. He was writing about why so many people seem to have a transformative experience at Burning Man. And what he points to is that there are things you can do to reliably provoke transformation. Besides the EDM and psychedelics, he means. Conditions you can create that make it easier for people to change how they see themselves and what matters to them.

The posts take a winding path through 1960s Rogerian psychoanalysis to get there, but the bottom line is clear. When you take people out of a fixed context where they know how things work, and put them in a dynamic one where everything is changing and up for renegotiation, something powerful happens.

... and then six months after he wrote those posts, the pandemic hit.

Black Rock city lasts a few weeks. We're now at two and a half years of everything changing. Asking us — forcing us — to tell new stories about our work and ourselves. Transformation whether you like it or not. For years.

And now there's this push to lock it all in. Like the music has stopped even though COVID hasn't. And there's this urgent, narrative pressure for everyone to find a seat. Whether it's driven by recession fears, or a back to office plan, or sheer exhaustion, we're hearing a lot more from companies who want things to crystallize. Stop the music. Make it fixed again. Make it predictable.

Oh, and by the way, they're having trouble setting goals that anyone cares about.

You've changed

Transformation without integration is chaos. Everyone's changed, but not everyone has had a chance to take stock and make sense of who they are now. The result is that it feels like you're being impulsive, random, unreliable. Or that everyone else is. Confused and frustrated with things that used to work, that used to feel good, but now don't. We're seeing this everywhere right now. With individuals and with organizations.

The solution isn't nostalgia — it isn't back to the 2019 office or back to the 2019 goals for your organization. The solution is to acknowledge and process the change. To integrate it and come back to something newly coherent. And the way you do that is reflection.

There are a million journaling prompts out there and dozens of rigorously studied frameworks for reflection. But they all boil down to basically the same three questions, and you've gotta take 'em slow:

1. What?

2. So what?

3. Now what?

What? What has changed in your organization? What assumptions did you have that the last few years have shattered? What happened that you didn't think was possible? What mistakes did you make?

So what? What do you draw from that? What have you learned? What does it imply about what's possible now? What does it make you realize about who you are now?

Now what? What changes do you need to make, given what you've learned? What doesn't fit any more? What needs more of your attention? What would feel amazing, given all this?

You can write these in a notes app. You can talk them through with your friends over wine. You can use them as an exec team offsite agenda. The only rule is that you have to actually dig — your first, superficial answers might be crap. Keep going.

Something happens to you as you do this exercise. The pieces start to link together into patterns, and the patterns start to feel meaningful. If you're doing it in a group you may notice the volume go up as people start to build on each other's reflections. If you're writing by yourself, you'll find that the words uncork and start falling out faster. That's integration. That's sense-making. That's pulling these bits of transformation into the light so you can recognize and name them.

And then, when you're done, and you've taken a break and had a glass of water. Go back and look at the goals you had written down. Our strong suspicion is that it will be obvious what's wrong and why no one cared about them. You'll realize you don't care about them either. You'll find yourself quoting our kid. "This isn't really me anymore."

And then you can start figuring out what they should be, instead.

- Melissa and Johnathan