It begins with a question: A colleague of mine reached out the other day — she and her husband are experiencing work stoppages due to the current federal government shutdown. She’s a highly reputable, mid-career pro in her late thirties who excels at her craft. She was checking to see if I might have job leads she could pursue.
“But what do you want to do, though? The same kind of work? Or …?”
“Well, I’ve been doing it for 15 years now…”
“Yes … and …?”
“What do you mean?”
“So OK, you’ve been doing this now for 15 years … and?”
She paused. We were on a Zoom call, and I just happened to see her put her head down for a moment. She was thinking.
It’s not comfortable. We talk a lot about “managing change” in organizations, but the fact is that changes in our organization often are not up to us. The only thing we can manage is the degree to which we will ask ourselves impossibly disquieting questions, the kind that are hard to answer and that, well, make us think — and maybe squirm a little, too.
Due to circumstances beyond our control: Today it’s a shutdown. Tomorrow maybe it’s a merger, a re-org, or “we’ve changed our business model.” Or how about, “AI ate my job.” It’s true — a lot of change cannot be managed because it’s tough to manage change we can’t control — and that makes us feel like we’re the “object,” or dare I say the victim, of what’s happening. But, can we “see it coming?” Are we sufficiently aware of our surroundings, our environment, the nature of the business we’re in, to anticipate what might be getting ready to shake our tree, wake us up to “nothing is forever?” and possibly set us back on our heels a bit?
Our relationship with work is changing again. Change de-stabilizes, which by definition isn’t necessarily a bad or good thing. It just is. Or better put: Change subverts what exists. It stands at our door and declares, “Look at what could be” and “Here’s what’s next!” It can multiply and even threaten our realities, cause us to lose balance perhaps and, yes, it can provoke fear. Gone are the days when we stuck with the “line of work” we began in our twenties, perhaps earning an employer’s “lifetime of service” award, and then retired on a pension we could live on. Our relationship with and our expectations of work, our leaders and employers, and our colleagues — all have changed.
Learning is having a hard time keeping up with new changes. That is a challenge for organizations, for our leaders, and for all of us humans. We embrace the change before us, only to see another transition just months later — portions of which roll back or restore what altered previously. In my client work, I have seen agencies re-organize multiple times in the space of just two to three years — merging, then de-centralizing, then integrating yet another entity to expand their mission, only to jettison another function or branch because “it no longer ‘aligns’ with our vision for the future.” And then there are the culture collisions and process conundrums: “We’ve always done it this way … well now we’re doing it this way … aren’t we? No one told us that …” It is dizzying. And it’s hard for workers to keep their eye on the ball because “tell me again, which ball it is now?”
Time to pivot? If you’re feeling the shutdown blues, you’re entitled that. But what are the questions you might ask yourself now, during this pause, that you’ve been meaning to ask yourself, except you’ve been too busy? Or you’ve been too certain things wouldn’t change or you might have to correct course? What passion or mission or pursuit have you neglected, that wants to be re-discovered, that deserves the benefit of your skills and talents, that might cause you to want to re-align? Take a breath and think: What do you want to change while waiting for the shutdown to end?
Nina is a change management practitioner and principal of InterrogativesWork, LLC, a change advisory service dedicated to helping clients and consultants plan and implement organizational change. She has supported a wide variety of organizational change and strategy efforts — from digital transformations and functional re-alignments to the stand-up of enterprise risk management programs, PMOs, organization-wide policy and culture change, performance improvement initiatives, and more. She has an MA in Communications and an MS in Organization Development and graduated from both the Johns Hopkins Fellows in Change Management Program and Georgetown University’s McDonough School’s Change Management Advanced Practitioner Program (CMAP). She is ProSci trained, and has written about organizational change for govloop.com, Change Management Review, and Government Executive.
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