Let's move to Cheese Station - V

In 15 days flat, VUCA has punched the living daylights out of large parts of the L&D industry – in particular the Experiential learning industry. Two weeks back we were buzzing with activity, with hardly a moment to spare and yet today – here we are with all the time in our hands.

What should we be doing?

A good way to view this whole experience is through the lens of the Kubler Ross change curve.

The pace at which things have unravelled in the last 15 days has left many of us in shock. It is a natural human reaction. The shock is often followed by denial. “This cannot be happening,” “This feels surreal,” “This feels like we are in a Hollywood movie.” We have heard all of these reactions coming up in this short space of time.

Denial of the new reality often leads to frustration and anger. “This could have happened at least after March,” “Why do these Chinese eat everything that moves?,” “What the hell will we do now?” All these and a significant deal more – are reactions we have seen all over social media and popular channels.

If this line of thinking and venting continues, we could see large swathes of people tumbling into the stage of depression – a state that is marked by low energy and sense of being lost or purposeless. Definitely not a place we would want to be in.

What is the way out?

The biggest distance we need to cover is in our own minds. The moment we are able to make that leap in our minds that the cheese station as we knew it earlier has moved – is the pivotal moment when we start to make new beginnings.

This starts with a period of experimentation. New behaviours – new ways of working, which may be radically different from what we used to do in the past. Any change though moves us to a place of discomfort. We yearn for the comfort of the tried and the tested – the past, the way we used to do things “in the good old days.” We need to move past this. That is “old cheese” and it is gone forever. Even when the world recovers fully from Covid-19, do not expect life to go back to what it was. That is the nature of change. A lot of customers who have been pushed to experiment with the virtual world would now embrace it as a way of life. The choice is with us – do we move on and reinvent ourselves and stay relevant or do we remain where we are, wistfully hoping and crying for “the way things were!”

We need to move decisively towards this new world. It is a world that holds the promise of much bigger opportunities than we have ever experienced before. Opportunities to collaborate and work across borders, to stretch ourselves as individuals and professionals, to embrace new and interesting tools, to bring value to our customers in much more efficient ways than we ever have. It is up to each one of us to define how we want to operate and add value going ahead, in this new world.

The last 10 years has been a great time – not a single slow down after 2009. It has been the largest period of time ever between two recessions. All of us have enjoyed in its spoils. But that “period” is now history. As a learning fraternity, we need to collectively discover a new cheese station.

“Stay hungry and stay foolish,” Steve Jobs would have advised.