In this article, Concerto associate and Change Management specialist Russ Spargo asks whether this profound, shared experience of sudden, non-negotiable, ongoing change and uncertainty has changed the way that we collectively see and respond to change? In short, has COVID 19 Changed the way we view change?

For all of us, the last year has been a challenge! COVID-19 has made huge impacts on the lives that we have been able to lead. Each of us has had to make significant changes to our daily, weekly, monthly, and annual rhythms and make sacrifices that would have been unthinkable only just over twelve months ago. We at Concerto have been asking ourselves a question: has this profound, shared experience of sudden, non-negotiable, ongoing change and uncertainty changed the way that we collectively see and respond to change? Has it changed the way we think and feel about the very notion of change itself? In short, has change changed?

‍Many of you may remember Kurt Lewin’s foundational three-step model of change. Lewin proposed that organisational change requires (1) unfreezing the current situation, (2) changing it in various ways, and (3) refreezing it as a new steady state. This model has influenced our thinking about change for over 60 years, during which time innovations like the internet, smart phones and social media have made adapting to change just part of what we do. Change is much more fluid than it ever was. It needs to be, given the business and social challenges we are facing right now. However, it is only much more recently that we have seen the widespread discussion of ideas that evolved in the emerging technology sector, such as the Agile Leadership approach that advocates building capability to enable much faster handling of our changing landscapes. Was there more rigidity in our change thinking, and our unstated assumptions, than perhaps we were aware of?    

Were we only able to deal with change we could ‘see’? The importance of ‘seeing’ is demonstrated by the origin of the English word “orange”. Before the arrival of the citrus fruit in Britain in the 16th century, the concept of orange as a separate colour did not exist here. It was simply viewed as “red” or “yellow-red”, as echoed today in talk of people as ‘red heads’ or of the robin ‘red-breast’. Several centuries on, it is difficult to imagine orange and red as the same. Is it possible that a sweep of such conceptual shifts is presently underway?

For instance, many of us have realised that we don’t want to go back to commuting five days a week, and that many of the things we thought required us to be co-located can be done just as well via a screen. Some of these things can even be done better. We’ve discovered that messaging and collaboration platforms can make it easier to connect with people, especially with colleagues, friends and family dispersed all over the world. Remote working can benefit productivity, personal wellbeing, and family life. Advantageously it can reduce our carbon footprints as well – and will anyone miss the stress of rushing to pick up the children from nursery or school?

We could have adopted this way of working before the pandemic, but we didn’t. Zoom was founded in 2011 but was seldom used before COVID-19. Skype was founded even earlier, in 2003, but was thought of for nearly two decades as a platform to connect with overseas friends and as a business tool that ‘we really ought to use more’. As we all know, COVID-19 has transformed our attitudes to this sort of tech and showed us that ‘being there’ was much less necessary than we thought. We have made a conceptual leap and in the space of only a few months the entire world accelerated through the first two stages of Lewin’s change model and years’ worth of changes. Whilst we refreeze to the ‘new normal’, however temporary it may be, we can now see the world and its possibilities differently.  

So, as we (thankfully) begin the slow process of unlocking, we will emerge into a changed and rapidly changing world. Artificial Intelligence (AI) will continue to accelerate this and will doubtless continue to enhance our on-screen experience of meeting. But after two or three years, will we have found that people want to be back in the office, at least for a good part of the week, more so than we currently expect? Will our desire to be there in person, with friends, able to meet new people, have a coffee out or nip to the shops, reassert itself? How much? Will we be more flexible or fixed in a new pattern, such as working from home on Friday and Monday? We will have more online meetings. Will that lead to a better work-life balance or, like when the fax arrived in the 1980s, will it speed things up, rip up boundaries and place even more work on fewer, already-busy people? Will organisations that have been quick to promote high levels of home working increasingly find it hard to retain talented people because there is no long-term substitute for being with people to create community? Will they find that their culture fragments or that it is harder to integrate and retain new joiners?  

Will answers to these questions differ by age group, by organisational levels, or by geography? How do we plan for greater uncertainty and change? It is surely not just all about how to configure office space, important though that is. We need to be able to have the Agile leadership skills we referred to earlier, but not just within traditional leadership hierarchies. We will all need to be Agile. How much space is needed now is one practical question for us to address, alongside how we go about making decisions for the future in the face of changes that will likely be continually brought to us via AI, the environment, and global politics. We believe that one of the answers lies in understanding how we effectively connect our people, and connect with our people, so that their work has meaning, and they feel that they belong. If we do that, we unleash the power of their creativity, their brainpower to solve problems and their overarching productivity. We have data to back up our feeling on that too!

There are complex issues at play here and the only thing we know is that the world has changed. But we need to be careful not to extrapolate early assumptions about what this means in the short term and apply it with too much confidence to the medium and long terms. If this has made you think and you would like to talk with us about any aspect of it, please contact Russ Spargo (r.spargo@concerto.uk.com) or Anne-Marie Southall (a.southall@concerto.uk.com).  

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