What struggling with an unstable internet connection teaches me about Change Management

If my life had background music, the only moments when Queen’s iconic “Under Pressure” would be blasting full-volume are the ones when a small message pops-up on my screen: “Your internet connection is unstable.” Over the past months, I have been volunteering to manage and facilitate panel conversations work for an online global conference, and the dreaded message appeared on my screen quite a few times. On a handful of occasions, things got worse pretty quickly, and the connection crashed, sending everyone back into the scheduling logistics pain. One instance was particularly frustrating, and I remember standing up from my desk yelling “Can nothing be stable in this house?????????”, quite a counter-intuitive reaction from a Change Manager…

At some point, my reflex of looking at things through the lens of Change Management random thoughts potential kicked in, and I started to think about it. Usually, as soon as an idea, as in a “writing challenge”, appears, my desk gets quickly covered in post-it notes. This time, it felt more “hicuppy” than usual, and I told myself it must have been because I was still easing myself back into the weekly writing routine after the vacation. I mentioned this to one of my best friends when we chatted over the weekend, he smiled and said “Hey, isn’t this the perfect analogy? The frustration of not being sure! Of anything…” The smile his reaction put on my face has been very stable over the last few days, I am still wearing it as I type.

So here we go. I don’t know why 1999 romantic comedy film “Notting Hill” popped up in my mind, but I felt inspired to say that “I’m just a girl, holding her laptop on the couch, by the router, asking it to love her with some stable wi-fi signal.”

Anything can just unexpectedly come to an end, and there is nothing you can do about it. This was the biggest learning from the spring of 2020, when the Covid pandemic hit the world, and everything felt like it stood still for a second. Then, as we all found ways to move forward, this learning started to fade away. Until the dreaded “Your internet connection is unstable” started to pop up on my screen during some of the most inspiring and uplifting conversations. ?After one of the instances when the internet crashed, I went outside on the terrace to watch the sky, looking for a new perspective. I started to think about all the things that came to an unexpected end in my life over the past year, without me being able to do anything about it: personal relationships, my lease contract in Luxembourg that accelerated my relocation to Switzerland, planning my dream trip to Portugal, projects or parts of on-going initiatives at my fulltime job or within my side projects and volunteering work. In the absence of the expected, contracted end-result, how do you still showcase value? Knowing that the internet could crash and take away the possibility to deliver the end-result, how could I still create value throughout the interaction and work together with the panelists? One of my personal answers to this question is “connection”- oh, the irony of it!!!, built and nurtured through how I strive to show up in our interactions, hopefully always with curiosity, compassion and courage (even to a raging extrovert like myself, it feels a little daunting to reach out to over 300 strangers all over the world within a few weeks). Just like in any interaction along a Change Management journey. When personal or organizational life happens and things come to an unexpected end, in the absence of the end-result, you can still create meaningful value. Quite possibly because over the last days I have been seeing the news about the newly minted dollar quarters with American poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou entering circulation and making history, one of my favorite quotes came to mind: “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” How can you create meaningful value so that people will feel inspired and committed to give it another go?

Beware of over-accountability. When the technical challenges appeared at my end, I apologized over and over again, to everyone involved. Arguably, I made quite a few “deposits” into the “sorry cycle of overapologizing”, as research calls it. I felt really bad and frustrated, and even to some extent responsible. I must have come across as extra wound up during a conversation right after Christmas, and I got the following question: “Why are you so stressed? After all, it is volunteer work, right?” That question triggered sooooo many thoughts. While most of them feed into my inner child and shadow work, some can be shared here. As I started to draft a keynote on self-leadership for (yet another) volunteer project with The Hague University of Applied Sciences, I revisited my own values and beliefs, and I fundamentally and unwaveringly believe that my word is my word, and it carries the same weight regardless of the context within which I give it. There is also a permanent “mental post-it note” in my mind now to be extra intentional and mindful to pick-up signs of over-accountability in the conversations I will be part of. Especially within the organizational context, during project retrospectives and lessons learned interventions, I will pick-up on signs that speak of potential over-accountability, as a result of personal and professional journeys coming together within the company culture eco-system. How accountability and ownership are defined, dispersed, and contracted within teams, fulfilled by the people on the project teams became even more important to me, all thanks to my unstable internet connection.

“May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears”, this is one of my all-time favorites, courtesy of South African anti-apartheid revolutionary, political leader and philanthropist Nelson Mandela. As connection challenges became quite serious over the last days, and the absolute, non-negotiable deadline for getting the recordings done approached, the offer to simply cancel panels was put on the table. I could have accepted it. I did not. You want to ask me whether it was only hope fueling my decision, and not also a little bit of over-accountability? We all know the answer to this one, I don’t have to type it out, right? I wanted to give it one last shot, gave heads-up to all panelists, asked for understanding, patience, help with taking over the facilitator role, if needed. I feel infinitely blessed and grateful I only got “Of course, what help do you need?” replies. Our interactions reflect our hopes, and not our fears, and this is the best takeaway into my Change Management work.

When searching for tips to make an internet connection more stable, one stood out in particular: “Decongest.” This word to me sounds like a perfect source of inspiration for an entire “Seinfeld” episode, and I imagine Kramer would have a field-day with it. I do not find much comfort or help in it, yet I believe words come into our life for a reason, and maybe this will help some of you. I will just continue to fantasize about crawling back into my cave and playing with my favorite pet dinosaur… I won’t be impressed with technology until I can download ice cream!!! And the connection better be stable then.

Until next week, keep calm and enjoy stable connections!