Your Survival Guide for our post-covid world - From BC {Before Covid} to AD

Please Download, Use and Freely-Share the three embedded TRANSFORMATION posters.

Last week, during lockdown, I attended an Accreditation Fair. The exhibition hall was laid out with all the top providers of project practitioner skills and assessment. There was a large, purple Association for Project Managers stand with its rolling slideshow ‘About APM’, an array of stories and examples, and a very comfortable and stylish black sofa set. A bright blue Project Management Institute (PMI) area showed a video of opportunities. The hall was full of activity and information. I watched the people mill around and explore. You like most of us have not felt the buzz and dynamic of an excited conference crowd for a while. It was a wonderful sense of nostalgia, our lost world. I joined one group of qubot-avatars at a café table for a chat before I had to give my kick-off keynote on the large circular main stage. 

Chris Herd, the remote working guru, says that having spoken to over 1000 companies, he confirms that evenly spread globally, about 30% are planning to get rid of their offices entirely and go ‘remote-first’.  If he is correct, we’re going to need different ways than video conferences and document sharing to keep us engaged and sharp. We’re need to be able to social include, provide a cohesive culture and help people feel and be productive. 

I’m only partially sure of this. Mid last year I wrote an article on the five possible futures we faced and speculated on which would emerge and how it would affect you. You can guess the list easily; Back to BC - where we are all dressed head-to-toe in stylish lightweight spaceman-style suits or vaccinated like swiss cheese and go back to BC [Before Covid], Partially Locked – here we yo-yo between old freedoms and restrictions, Accidental Rut - where the habits built up in periods of lockdown persist and your zoombie eyes keep rotating and swivelling, Another Phoenix – where your organisation, that has been rubbish at innovation, now tries to reinvent itself for new customers and markets, and the one I believe will be our real future - The Meld a mixture of all the above in no organised fashion. 

Which do you think is most likely?

To survive The Meld, face-to-face, remote, new activities and culture must all share the same, even playing field. The only way to achieve this it to create an accessible parallel world.

Jeremy Dalton in his new book Reality Check says that avatar-based events and work – like the Accreditation Fair I have described - are the future of work. 

The Economist in its Special Report on The World Economy said that QUBE, the super real digital world I use, was to be "the next office facility"

The easiest way to understand how qubot-avatars work is to watch this short video about Virtual Tourism where human-beings role act as your controllable avatars, not on QUBE but in the Faroe Islands.

A qubot is essentially the 'person' you control in the super-real world on QUBE. Being a world and not a platform or app, it empowers you to do everything you wish. And with a focus on real feel and not real look the human emotional aspect of remote working is satisfied. The Wall Street Journal described the QUBE super-real world as the "Virtual water cooler".

Now to AD [ After Death of the Old World ]

Our past is now as unfamiliar as our future

Either way Our past is now as unfamiliar as our future

We dream of a world we recognise and understand but that no longer exists.

As you’ll know, when faced with a completely new challenge the safest way to succeed is not to set goals about something you don’t understand but instead to take a step review and learn. You need to be systematic and disciplined. In our new post-covid world having a system for success will trump any audacious but ungrounded goals you have. A system is a disciplined repeated behaviour selected. Use Foggy Project methods & Agile methods – drumbeats, StickySteps and ActionReplays to solve new challenges.

The journey is just beginning

You responded so well to the crisis. It is easy to believe our new status-quo is also our best future. It is NOT!

What must you now unlearn in order to be able to progress? Comfortable pyjama bottoms on teams calls need to be replaced with proactive engagement of key stakeholders. Document sharing needs to be replaced with synchronous collaborative workshops. Unless you unlearn you will be unable to grow into new opportunities.

Learn to Transform

Change is not enough. To re-invent you must Transform. A butterfly is not simply a caterpillar with wings.

Last year you moved from response to recovery to renewal. Now move to re-invention. Your BC leadership & management 'Body of Knowledge' and best practice are now obsolete. Don’t lament. Your best practice was optimised for BC. Now It needs a further upgrade.

BC work was delivered through a lot of meetings, sharing of documents, spreadsheets and workflow apps. not agile or fast or exciting mostly. And because it was so easy for work to go off track, you could build a career by gaining a reputation for putting out fires. Now we must learn in advance from what has not yet happened and avoid the bad bits collaboratively together. The system I use is called glydePath. Also, now you have to juggle the team, the network, the community plus your stakeholders!

Those making the transformation leap use MetaMorph I’ve described in this column previously 

Relax and find a guide

Without a guide, travel to a new land is just empty buildings and strange looking food.

There are two ways to reinvent – one is to copy everyone else, find the trendy buzzwords and push a bunch of ideas for working better and see what works. The safer route is to find the most demanding (or obnoxious stakeholder) the one who demands what you cannot currently do (or understand). One who is dismissive on your blocks and barriers. Use them as a guide to the future. Reinvent to meet their outrageous demands. Often the rest of the world will want what this person demands six months after they have spelled it out, so you will be ahead.

If you select to be guided by a consultant check their bio. If they weren’t expert in whatever they claim 7 years ago fire them. Remember in our new AD [Accelerated Development] world opportunities are everywhere so you will suffer much more by being led astray than by doing nothing.

You want technology on YOUR side

Technology can enhance and empower people.

Technology can enslave people, delete their sense of purpose and crush their dreams.

Speaking with one accrediting body at the Accreditation Fair last week, they were proud of how their syllabus content was constrained, the process was systematised, the training tutors assessed. I asked how, with the lack of face-to-face classrooms, they were delivering the nuance and emotional connection needed to grow superb project managers and not technicians. They answered that they used e-learning and webinars. I replied, “Can’t those just be recorded and AI used to create a database of responses? If so, the business model for the training companies is over? Where is the human element? How is the technology empowering the tutors? Enhancing the learners?” I was their obnoxious stakeholder but they glared at me with a fierce intensity, obviously dismissing my comments.

If 2020 has been our ‘crisis’, then 2021 marks our first year AD. It is the year our energy and creativity emerge from lockdown to build, knowing that the best is yet to come. I hope you have begun already.

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Chris Herd                 Why the 2020s will be the Remote Work Decade | by Chris Herd | Medium

Jeremy Dalton           Jeremy Dalton (pwc.co.uk)

Foggy Change           https://QUBE.cc/PETs/TypesOfChange

Sticky Steps               https://QUBE.cc/PETs/StickySteps

DrumBeats                 https://QUBE.cc/PETs/DrumBeat

glydePath                   https://QUBE.cc/PETs/glydePath

MetaMorph                https://QUBE.cc/PETs/MetaMorph