Tools for coping in a world in flux

Adopt a Flux Mindset™

We need to start by adopting what I call a Flux Mindset™. A Flux Mindset™ sees change consistently as an opportunity, not a threat, by being clear and grounded in your values.

So how do you do this? The first important step is awareness of what I call your relationship to change and uncertainty. What are your typical responses and defaults? What kinds of change and uncertainty do you tend to struggle with more than others? Being aware of change and how it affects us enables us to prepare for it and be better at it. The best thing about change is that you don’t need to make any investment in training or technology to practice dealing with it; life gives you almost infinite opportunities to do so every day.

Think about it: minor changes happen constantly, from your schedule changing to the weather changing to your mood changing. Obviously, there are also big changes that happen less frequently, like a retrenchment or loss of a loved one. Being aware of how you cope with small changes and practicing awareness of change daily will help you be better prepared for the big changes.

An important first step is every time change happens to step back and ask how you are reacting to this change. Often, our default reaction is fear. Many humans are inclined to catastrophize. Once we recognize that fear is driving our response, it’s important to ask: Is this life-threatening? If it’s not, which it almost always won’t be, then it can be extremely powerful to flip the question and ask instead: what’s the best possible outcome that could come because of this change?

Asking this question does not take a special credential or secret wisdom; all it takes is to stop and pause for a moment. Change can happen at any point in the day or night; you simply need to take the opportunity to do the work when change presents itself to you. Dealing with change is like a mental muscle: The more you practice it, the stronger it becomes, and the easier uncertainty is to understand. Moreover, don’t just do this alone. When teams develop a shared practice to pause together and take time to reflect on change in this way, it can bring about exponential benefit.

It is also important to work out what changes you are relatively better at managing and what changes you struggle with more than others. Every human excels at some kinds of change and struggles (sometimes disproportionately) with others, because we are all unique and have different personalities and life experiences to build upon. This should be celebrated! At the same time, there are some types of responses to change that are almost universal amongst humans. For example, most humans love the changes we choose or opt into in some way; I am still looking for the human that loves change that blindsides them. It is important to realize that how we deal with change at work often has little to do with work. Helping people understand how their attitudes to change were shaped is often the first step in understanding how to help them deal with change. These attitudes are often shaped in childhood – long before any job, employer, or workplace challenge – and they are not typically on one’s CV. As a result, we rarely know such things about even our closest colleagues, yet fewer things matter more to effective teamwork and to flourishing in the workplace. If we can take time to reflect on the stories of change in our lives, both the joyful and the difficult, we can work out why we respond the way we do and then try and reframe our negative responses to change in our day-to-day lives. When we do so together with colleagues, truly amazing things can happen. Unfortunately, most organization systems have overlooked this very human aspect of change; – there is no line item in the budget for it, yet it often yields outsized returns.

Instead, we have tried to put change into a framework. But traditional change management frameworks don’t acknowledge how people actually feel about the change, and they are not designed to help someone’s response to change shift from fear to hope, for example. Rather, as I have written about before, Change Management requires a Change Mindset. Rather than relying on checklists or rigid plans, to thrive in today’s world, it is far more important to build capacity within your team to cope with ambiguity than it is to put a change management process in place.