The Return of the Breakfast Buffet

This morning I had the pleasure of walking past a real life operational breakfast buffet. The sight of people walking with their plates piled high with runny scrambled eggs, cold meats and pastries, weaving in and out of each other to politiely but swiftly grab the last croissant and recklessly touching spoons, surfaces and plates that every other hotel guest had touched, well it was wonderful. This is it I thought. Covid is over.

But the truth of course isn't that simple. It isn't over. But it is different. We have learned to live with it. We have adapted to a new set of circumstances and found a way to enjoy life and create moments of happiness again. That may sound over the top for a breakfast buffet, but now more than ever, the small things matter.

Scratch a bit deeper and you discover that everyone at that buffet has either shown proof of vaccination or a negative test and so it's not quite the careless super-spreader event that it appeared from the outside. They have just found a way to make it work.

And this, importantly, reminds me that to every problem, no matter how insurmountable it may intially seem, there is always a solution. Right from the 4th Century Mespotanian farmers who breathed a collective sigh of relief when one of them invented the wheel to enable them to farm larger areas, to the many new business initiatives we see spring up every time there is a new rule or regulation such as GDPR or IR35 announced.

And I see this refelcted in people too. Some of the most successful leaders I have met have a great openness to possibilities. They are not phased by even the most challenging of problems, becasue they believe a range of possible solutions exist, they just haven't found them yet. And like they old saying goes, if you believe you can or you believe you can't, you are definitely right.

So as tempting as it would be to seek refuge in the certainty of things we know and the old way of doing things, I am going to do my best to throw myself into new ideas and trust that if I search hard enough, I will find the solutions to make them work.

Now please excuse me while I poilitely, but swifly, grab myself a croissant.