“There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen.”
I’ve kept in a corner of my office the white board we were using to plan library services in the days running up to Jersey’s first lockdown on the 23 March. The mess of scribbled notes charts what was a chaotic and unsettling time for everyone, as national and local developments relentlessly tugged away long held assumptions. The quote at the head of this column has been variously attributed to Saint Peter, Karl Marx and Lenin, all of whom were reinventing (for better or worse) the world in which they lived. In our own way we are all now working in uncharted territory. The definitive guide to managing and leading during a 21st century pandemic has yet to be published. Instead events have prompted us to read more widely and deeply than ever as we seek to find answers to immediate problems and carve out a sense of what the ‘new normal’ could be.
We have all had to rapidly adjust to a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environment, as described by Rob Elkington et al, in their book VUCA, Visionary Leadership in a Turbulent World.
The pandemic has provoked an encompassing and rolling change management process since early March 2020. Comfort zones have been completely swept away, with operating rules often changing by the day as we adapt to new public health guidelines and changing customer demand. It should perhaps be unsurprising that books like John Kay and Mervyn King’s Radical Uncertainty have been a constant fixture in the bestseller lists.
One change that may well have wide-ranging consequences that out last the pandemic is the number of people who are now working from home. This sudden change to working arrangement gave rise to a number of challenges that are addressed by Penny Pullan in her 2016 book, Virtual Leadership: Practical Strategies for Getting the Best Out of Virtual Work and Virtual Teams. Pullan sets out practical approaches to leadership, motivation, virtual meetings and team building. While technology has outpaced some of the tools Pullan recommends, the basic principles and practices are as relevant as ever as we work to keep teams ‘together’ and focused.
Grace Paul’s The Ultimate Guide to Working From Home offers a compact primer for those who may still be getting to grips with home working. With chapters titled ‘What to do when you’re having a bad day’ and ‘How to stay sane’ alongside ‘What technology will you need’ this is a readily accessible book that can be dipped into for advice. Paul includes a short chapter on working from home with children, a subject expanded on in The Book You Read to Teach Your Children: 8 Ways to Keep Learning at Home Fun by Katie Tollitt. Practical and judgement free this indispensable book offers helpful insight into the learning process and useful tips for engaging activities for young people
With the rapid rollout of vaccination programmes and the publishing of ‘reconnection roadmaps’ there is a sense in the air that the pandemic is coming to an end. The question now is very much ‘what comes next’? In many ways the economy and the way we work has changed irrevocably over the past year. While it could be suggested that previous pandemics such as the Spanish and Asian Flu pandemics had little long-term impact on our societies, we are in a very different place socially and technologically now than we were in the 1920s or ‘60s. The conversation of how we build-back a more cohesive society that can better accommodate new developments, like the move to home working, alongside the pre-existing challenges of automisation, AI and climate change, is already happening in books such as Post Corona: From Crisis to Opportunity by Scott Galloway and Post-Pandemic: 12 Lessons in Crisis Management by Jonathan McMahon. The reading list for 2021 is incomprehensibly different to that which we expected in 2020; a year spent at home as decades went spinning past.
