Change for Good > A Clear View

Creative Resilience

We’d like to highlight how one of our clients, Medical Teams International has creatively adapted in uncertainty. Medical Teams International delivers life-saving medical care to people in crisis around the world. In the U.S., they have been providing dental care through mobile dental vans in impoverished communities.  They have adapted these vans to become COVID-19 testing centers in a fast iteration to a much needed medical service.

Articles:

Decision Making During the Coronavirus Crisis

McKinsey

To make bold decisions quickly in these uncertain times, leaders can follow these five principles.

1. Take a breath: Giving yourself a moment to step back, take stock, anticipate, and prioritize may seem counterintuitive, but it’s essential now. Ask yourself and your team these questions: What is most important right now? What might we be missing? How might things unfold from here, and what could we influence now that could pay off later?

2. Involve more people: Amid uncertainty generated by a crisis, leaders often feel an urge to limit authority to those at the top, with a small team making the big decisions while huddled behind closed doors. Consider  rejecting the hierarchical model that they might be more comfortable with and instead involve more stakeholders and encourage different views and debate.

3. Make the critical small choices: Some small choices that leaders make in the short run could loom very large over the long term as the crisis unfolds. They can be hard to spot, but leaders must look for them.

4. Set up a nerve center: One way to ensure that the right people will be the ones making tactical decisions is to set up a nerve center. This is a network of cross-functional teams with clear mandates connected by an integration team that sees that decision making occurs thoughtfully and quickly.

5. Empower leaders with judgment and character: Leaders with the right temperament and character are necessary during times of uncertainty. They stay curious and flexible but can still make the tough calls, even if that makes them unpopular. They gather differing perspectives and then make the decisions, with the best interests of the organization (not their careers) in mind, without needing a full consensus.

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Leaders Need These 3 Qualities to Thrive in Uncertainty

IDEO

1. Convening power and coalition building The problems of today are too big for one person or organization to solve alone. We need many a vast diversity of perspectives to begin to think about old challenges in new ways.  2. Holding short- and long-term views simultaneously. Particularly in times of uncertainty, leaders must be able to think about the short- and long-term simultaneously. Our solutions must stay relevant in the years to come. 3. Enabling teams to work faster to match the pace of change The nature of change is that it shortens time horizons. The pace and energy of innovation must match the pace of change. When cycles of corporate innovation are years long, the solution becomes irrelevant before it’s ready to launch. Read the Article

How To Navigate Through Uncertain Times

Forbes

Imagine yourself as the helmsman of a boat whose only goal is to navigate your boat out of uncertain waters to a secure island. How would you make sure you come safely out of the situation and handle any obstacle along the way? You would need an overview of where you are at any given moment, be able to evaluate provided information and be flexible enough to change course. Here, creative thinking and emotional resilience could be exactly the tools you need in such a situation.

In her book The Neuroscience of Creativity, Anna Abraham writes that "the creative mode is called for in contexts that are unclear, vague and open-ended." She further explains that creativity is our capacity to generate original, unusual and novel ideas that are appropriate and suited to the context. Read the Article

Focus on the Positive: A New Approach to Change Management

Gallup

Recent behavioral research has shown that when groups focus on solving problems, they become depressed, but when they formulate plans by working backward from what they want to create, they develop energy, enthusiasm, optimism and high commitment. And yet, in general, most people, teams and organizations find it very difficult to explain their own success but are very good at obsessively explaining, analyzing and documenting their failures. Read the Article

8 Tips to Help You Thrive During Life Transitions

Thrive Global

In order to cope with change, many of us find ourselves in a “fight, flight or freeze response.”A difficult transition may cause us to get angry, to compartmentalize our feelings or avoid them all together. We may feel like we’re unable to move forward – frozen with worry and fear. Behind the scenes, a number of complex mechanisms are set into motion that we are not aware of. Tips to practice to stay positive during change: 1. Be “in the now” 2. Maintain your sense of humor. 3. Accept that change is natural. 4. Recognize and summon your strengths. 5. Rely on simple self-care routines. 6. Tap into your network. 7. Build a new community. 8. Take things one step at a time. Read the Article

How to Build a Strong Remote Team Culture

Atlassian

Statistic after statistic extols the virtues of remote work – it’s a boon to productivity, it boosts morale and lowers stress for the majority of workers, and it reduces operating costs. And yet, businesses often take their remote teams for granted. Many, unwittingly, take an “out of sight, out of mind” approach. 1. Define and Refine 2. Hire with culture in mind. 3. Communicate across a variety of tools, apps. 4. Measure engagement regularly. 5. Build healthy, rewarding habits. 6. Invest in your people. Read the Article

The Biology of Corporate Survival

Harvard Business Review

We believe that companies are dying younger because they are failing to adapt to the growing complexity of their environment. Many misread the environment, select the wrong approach to strategy, or fail to support a viable approach with the right behaviors and capabilities. What does this mean for business leaders? First, they need to be realistic about what they can predict and control, what they can shape collaboratively, and what is beyond the reach of managerial influence.Second, they need to look beyond what their firms own or control, monitoring and addressing complexity outside their firms. Third, leaders must embrace the inconvenient truth that attempts to directly control agents at lower levels of the system often create counterintuitive outcomes at higher levels, such as the stagnation of a strategy or the collapse of an ecosystem.

We have identified six principles that can help make complex adaptive systems in business robust: 1. Maintain Heterogeneity 2. Sustain Modularity 3. Preserve Redundancy 4. Expect Surprise, but Reduce Uncertainty 5. Create Feedback Loops and Adaptive Mechanisms 6. Foster Trust and Reciprocity

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Better Teams. Better Space. We believe community transformation happens when people, architecture and technology are leveraged to create thriving cultures of collaboration, generosity and trust. Founded by Sheri and Sergio Lozano, Link2Lift provides strategic direction and resources to build collaborative teams and spaces that can be more effective in how they positively impact their spheres of influence.