In the agile community, we have the idea of “Yesterday’s Weather.” That means that what happened yesterday is roughly what will happen today and maybe tomorrow. (We expect small or no Foreign Elements. See Where Are You In Your Changes? for more details about the Satir Change Model.)
As assumptions go, that’s reasonable for progress. However, we cannot use the idea of Yesterday’s Weather when we encounter huge Foreign Elements when everything changes. Those huge Foreign Elements fundamentally change our state, our context.
Fundamental changes are Significant Events. We can’t go “back” because our context changed. Aside from the pandemic in 2020, we experienced two Significant Events this past week: the CrowdStrike fiasco and the US presidential race. In hours, our context totally changed. And not just once or twice in that time, but several times over the course of just a few days.
We can attempt to deny these Significant Events and orient to “same.” That rarely works. Or, we can accept and maybe embrace them. That allows us to learn from them, and then orient to change.
First, we need to accept that change occurs much more often than we might imagine.
Change Occurs All the Time
If you work on your health with good exercise and sleep routines, and you moisturize (and use sunscreen!), you can postpone looking old. But we can’t stop time—we still get older and then “old.” From the inside out and the outside in, we get older. We often can’t see those changes as they occur. Yet, even as we change every day, we might need the perspective of 20, 30, or 40 years to see those changes.
Physical changes feel slow to me, similar to project progress. Yesterday’s Weather works until it doesn’t. Then we reset what these small changes look like.
But Significant Events make us realize change can and does occur all the time.
That’s when we must realize our state, our context, has changed. We can’t go back. We can only go forward. When we choose to go forward, we can accept, and then maybe embrace continual change.
Forward Allows Us to Change
When we hold onto what served us well in the past, we allow the past to pull us backward. That’s why some people talk about “return,” as in “Return to Normal.” We might be able to use Yesterday’s Weather for progress-oriented kinds of change and return to something.
But Significant Events preclude any “return.” There is no reset option. We can only go forward. Backward is not an option.
Instead, we can use all forms of change to learn something. If we have a problem and we see it as a progress-kind of change, we can choose to learn before anything else surprises us. (As an example, even though I wrote this article years ago, it’s exactly the kind of progress-problem we often see. Read “It’s Just the First Slip” over on my main site.)
On the other hand, Significant Events force us to learn. I suspect that most of us prefer to change on our own timetables, in our own way. But these Events push us into recognizing the change and responding to it.
That’s quite uncomfortable for many of us, because we prefer to orient to “same,” as opposed to orient to “change.”
However, adaptability and resilience will allow us to go forward. We take these Significant Events and learn from them. Then, we can use that learning as we proceed to create our New Status Quo.
Learning Allows Us to Change Our Orientation
I have had several Significant Events in my life, and I bet you have, too. That’s the good thing about getting older—we’re old enough to see lots and lots of change. It does not matter if these changes are process-changes where we can reset or Significant Events where we must go forward.
We can learn from each change. And the speed of our learning allows us to choose what to do in the future.
Even better, our learning allows us to adapt to the new state and use our resilience to succeed. That’s why I embrace continual change and hope that you do, too.