Leading Change in an Unpredictable World

Whether it's politics or a pandemic, when norms are challenged, everything gets harder

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One thing that has come roaring back to me in the past few weeks is the profoundly disorienting experience of leading change when the larger world feels like it’s operating outside ordinary norms. I keep thinking of this bit from a 2018 John Mulaney Netflix comedy special about the horse running loose in a hospital and how, if nothing else, it is extremely distracting because you keep checking for updates as to what the horse is up to now. And whether you’re personally red, blue or unaligned, the shifting political reality is impacting you. Even if you’re hardly online or watching the news - it’s impacting you because it’s impacting people in your community.

You might personally be really glad and think it’s about time for the horse to force the hospital to fundamentally rethink how it functions or you might personally be deeply worried the horse running amok will make the hospital cease to function altogether. Either way, you are trying to lead change - and I would imagine you are trying to lead controlled, orderly change - in a larger context of change characterized by challenges to stable norms. And that is an especially challenging task because implementing orderly change is hard enough but when you have a community distracted or worried, it makes the task exponentially harder.