In a digital Era, it doesn’t matter WHO did it, rather, WHY he did?

For few decades, we have been fascinated by Spencer Jonson’s book and training “Who Moved My Cheese?”

I always had a question in mind, it's not who, but, WHY did anyone would want to move the cheese in 1st place?

Published in 1998, The book describes change in one's work and life, and four typical reactions to those changes by two mice and two "Littlepeople", during their hunt for cheese. A New York Times business bestseller has sold more than 26 million copies worldwide in 37 languages.

The learning points were the "The Handwriting on the Wall"

While “Who Moved My Cheese” remains one of the best-selling business books, a question to rise is, will asking “Who” remains the important question in a digital Era or “Why”?

The concept of dealing with change (After) it happens in an existing (Maze), is changing!

Now, the cheese is being moved frequently, rapidly and even to unexplored mazes with different nature of walls – Virtual ones; it’s not enough anymore to anticipate a one simple (or single) coming wave of change, because now, what’s coming is not known, not anticipated and have never been dealt with before (e.g.: COVID-19); accordingly an emerging new set of skill trends are required to handle such changing nature and complexity of CHANGE; replacing “Change Management” by “Change Agility” they are (not only):

1.     Learning Agility: our ability to flexibly and endlessly learn - unlearn – re-learn over and over.

2.     Digital Dexterity: our ability to embrace digital mindset and utilize new technologies

3.     Integration Reasoning: ability to find opportunities in connecting things together (Data – People – Business results – Processes – Technology – Old and New – Norms and Trends…etc.)

4.     Social Interspersing: ability to increase your social network to gain, share and collaborate knowledge, opportunities, experiences and build on each other’s core strengths and guess what, that might need to happen VIRTUALLY! 

You can see that the major theme here is “Fluidity”, accepting the new norm of quickness, technology, integration because of dependencies and proactively seeking to be in the eye of the storm not to wait till it’s gone to rebuild your abilities.

According to The World Economic Forum, here’s the Top 10 Skills needed by 2030

Back to the original question, it’s clear that the whoever moves the cheese, have a good reason to do that, so, what about you? In the middle of all the modern (current and foreseen) evolvement, do you know why do you need to be the one who move his own cheese? Why do you need to be ready for the future of work?

It’s because Disrupting yourself, your current abilities and mindsets will enable you to continuously embrace ANY new emerging Mazes, even better, create new Mazes yourself if possible. 

Bottom-line:

No one needs to tell you what you should do to adapt if you realized why do you need to do so!