Over the last few years I resisted writing – anything. There were so many voices speaking and just as many listening. That’s not a bad thing because writers want to be heard but the voices were very diverse, distinct, and confusing for me. I understood their ideals, but the foundations beneath them were new and different voices. To me, it was like listening to the local Starbucks barista explaining something I’ve never order before. I thought I wanted to understand what they were going to serve me but I didn’t know how it was going to taste because I didn’t understand the ingredients and the preparation method.

I watched the news sparingly as the news unfolded, and listened and read their words.

The vocabulary was endless, and toppled mine – I don’t like to use big words, but their words were well placed and chosen so I enjoyed reading them. On the back end of their words, I was confused and realized I was listening to another generation. I was once that generation – full of fire and opinion, and facts to share. My fire was less about the general public and more about my career and the people around me. Today’s times is much about diversity, mine has always been about technology. I do think there are some parallels and things to share. This is not my goal in this post. I’d expect the readers to make the subtle corollaries as they see fit – which is fine.

There was so much content and volume, hard to ignore, but I didn’t want to – I just heard someone speaking toward a problem, and a concern. They were collated and diverse so I did spent much time watching, listening, and reading about them. However, they weren’t tied to the technology I was working on – except for the ML/AI whose fundamentals had been corrupted early on, before my time.

The shop I work in took extreme measures to correct this, as well as educate us on how this/that was not a good thing. I got it. Other folks took the lead on this and sorted it out. I still see vendors in my space that didn’t pay attention – and it pisses me off.

All of that was a bit of a distraction from where and what I wanted to be coming out of the lockdown. I didn’t have effective leadership during and post-covid lockdown. We had lot of time to figure out so much stuff and we didn’t, or at least I, didn’t get the right clues and hints from my leadership on how to capitalize.

During this time we kept the lights on, and made them brighter anticipating when the business would begin to shine again. I say that for every engineer, BA, architect, content and designer for how the world looks and interacts with the UX we created prior to the lock down. We all tried really hard to get all of this right during a time when we had ample time to think and rethink what we had decide and promoted before the lock down. Who knew we’d ever have that much time to recreate and create better solutions and ideas for an an world that was about to change forever, or at least during my lifetime.

The kicker during this time was the shift in leadership. In my space, there were many folks who left and joined at different levels of leadership. They brought different ideas and focus to our organizations – most of them were “money” and well received. With what was proposed and suggested was acute, and not always understood. Understanding it was something with which worked somewhere else well. Even though it was another enterprise, some of them in the global marketplace, they had joined from it was, at times, too much to ingest/digest to walk the shift from where we were sitting/positioned to where their vision was supposed to take us.

Their ideas were fresh and crisp. We do like ideas that walk in the door and it’s like “Hey, we’ve never looked at that angle before. It felt compensatory that we did, and should. Like an infomercial, when you see it and hear it in action it just makes sense. There was never a reason to push back on this new direction.

During a town hall, we received a book to review and understand how to help make our business future ready. After the first two chapters I realized this was what the business was focused on during the lockdown, and subsequently put into production when the business was lit up again. It made sense when I read each paragraph. Intentional and random. It’s going to work for many of our segments, some aren’t ready because of resources but most are poised and pivoted to be poised to make the leap.

The digital world is vastly different from what we recognized before and during the lockdown, someone once coined the phrase so I won’t plagiarize it here… “There is nothing new under the sun.”

My goal has been, over the decades, has been to recognize and respect this new light when it embraces me. Yeah, sometimes it causes a sunburn – but that is just the affect of change. Never a bad thing, just necessary sometimes when the world pitches a change-up, curve, or slider to us we need to measure and swing at.

Watching, listening, and paying attention to the shifts in our world and the businesses we support can teach us very much. It’s what we do with it that makes the difference in our lives. Might be stressful for some, maybe not for others. We just need to embrace change like never before, that will be in the mix for most things we touch in our careers – and that’s okay.

j@s