every single time I see a potential leader resist change they take down a fuckton of people who couldn’t even see they had a choice with them.
(originally posted may 2021)
I’m pretty well versed in dancing unintended change personally, and am paid to support organizations and individuals to design or navigate through changes- intentional or otherwise.
And there’s a theme.
The people who come out of a change… less frustrated if not actually fulfilled?
They design either the change itself or their response to the change.
Note: this doesn’t mean attempting to stop or control the change, it means steering into the skid so as to more quickly regain some control and prevent unnecessary disaster.
Occasionally my posts may seem aspirational or intended to inspire… and if you feel that, awesome. My intent however is not about how you feel.
Change is happening and we are either leaning into it for possibility or bottlenecking and resisting.
We are each, moment by moment, Barth by breath, one “open up plan” or call to our neighbors at a time, either upholding the scaffolding of society as we’ve known it or building a new one.
For some of you life already felt perfect (did it really? Maybe you had more $ but in conversation after conversation I’m hearing “burnt out” “not fully in my purpose” “caught in a damaged system”)
For many years our systems have been coming apart at the seams.
Our educational systems have been broken and bloated, and decision by decision and bottleneck by bottleneck we duct taped them back together to retrofit an industrial era system for an information era generation…
in the name of “jobs” (I know a lot of teachers- most of them know the systems are broken)
For years we’ve known our disjointed medical “systems” have been bankrupting us and killing us, and yet individually and at leadership we bottleneck to prevent change in the name of money and job loss. (I know a lot of doctors. Very few of them get to practice in a way they had intended.)
For years we’ve had colleges and universities where very little “collegial” experience occurs.
We have bloated administration in every system… we’ve gotten so entrenched in our systems and ideologies predicated on professionalizing (standardizing… these frames all come out of an assembly line era of worker production… get your “mental health” back together so you can go back to the line) every aspect of life… despite all evidence that this is failing us personally, professionally, economically and socially, that we’ve even outsourced our conversations about our shared grief and emotions to professionals.
Even those who want to open up were by and large walking around with back pain and frustration about the way they and their families were treated like cogs in an outdated system.
And, in a moment, our old systems, despite our years of attempts to juryrig it back together for the convenience and illusion of “no change”
Have changed.
So now we have another moment of choice. Will we, despite all evidence that the old ways of doing things are failing us at our very cellular level, after clear evidence that everything can change and the previous ways were not equipped for our changing world, choose to duct tape it all back together until “next time” where we’ll hold the curtains again individually and hope it stays watertight?
Honestly I fucking hope not.
Not because, though it may seem like it, I care deeply for each of you…
but because every single time I see a potential leader resist change they take down a fuckton of people who couldn’t even see they had a choice with them.
You are at the helm of something and you are either steering into the storms or you are getting tossed around and patching up constantly.
And you know who’s at stake?
Everyone. And our little dogs too.