Surviving, Striving, and Thriving in 2022

by Stephen P. Kelner, Jr., PhD

As we move into the third year of a global pandemic with no obvious end in sight, some of the advice has begun to sound a bit desperate. 

We’ve seen articles about “the post-COVID world” since back in mid-2020. We’ve seen people talking about “moving on,” going “back to normal,” and similar sentiments. This is wishful thinking, but understandable. The pandemic has derailed companies, transformed workplaces, and changed how we think of work. Or so we hope. 

Unfortunately, we keep seeing people ignoring the crisis or merely surviving. Some act as if it will soon be “all over” or everything will go “back to the way things were.” Others evidently have grins plastered to their faces, trying strenuously to find silver linings, to minimize reality. In some sad cases, others simply ignore the reality of the pandemic and try to force people to behave as if nothing has changed – in very severe cases, even denying that the pandemic exists, let alone defenses against it. There’s little we can do for people in complete denial of reality[1], but in all these other cases and many others we see that people are trying to find ways to survive.

However, there are ways to grapple with difficult times – whether immediate crises or longer challenges – which do not fall into either extreme of denial, and offer opportunities to move forward. 

Are you surviving, striving, or thriving?

Surviving (Resilience)

Art by John Tenniel[2]

In the last decade, there’s been a lot of discussion on the nature of resilience. Resilience is defined in a number of ways, but most frequently it is described as the ability to survive crises and overcome obstacles, to stay alive despite the worst of times. This is focused on getting past the past.

We see many companies behaving this way, just going from day-to-day, holding back on strategic plans or desired hires “until things pick up again.” Recently many started to reopen their offices, then suddenly slammed the doors shut again in the face of Omicron. While they do react to real issues, they are still basically treading water. For example, treating tactics like “work from home” (WFH) as a temporary expedient, and maintaining skeleton crews “for the time being.” They’re surviving – but no more than that. 

We think that the Great Resignation, where masses of people have changed jobs unexpectedly, shows the effect of people living with a constant struggle in the face of ongoing uncertainty; after a while, they question if it is worth it, and leave for greener pastures. Even if the new job is no better, it is at least new. Human beings are not well-equipped by evolution to deal with ongoing stress; we’re better at “fight or flight.” As long as people are asked to just survive until things get better on their own, they may well take flight, if only to take action into their own hands.

Fortunately, there are better options than just surviving.

Striving

Some people and companies respond to crises by acting – beating back the crisis by sheer energy and movement. We call this striving. Sometimes they busily make plan after plan, substituting assumptions for data. It’s easy to justify, because you at least have a plan that might work; the risk is that this plan could be future-focused at the expense of the present, spending a lot of energy better used for the here and now. Even with many great plans, you may not to get to use any of them if you ignore your present-day issues, with your head down working on the wrong thing.

Over the past 20-odd years, I have observed patterns on jobsites during a downturn in the economy: Job postings for sales roles increase sharply. Roles focused on long-term sustainability (e.g., HR, management) decrease or disappear, and jobs focused on short-term goals double – mostly sales, but also some finance roles. In other words, companies facing a decline in their revenues are responding by trying to sell their way out of it, and/or tightening their belts through financial discipline.

But when the market has shrunk, it is not all that realistic to think that selling more of the same product the same way will increase sales enough to make up for lost revenue – especially when you are hiring more people to do it. Increasing market share is not something you can do by just trying harder.

Likewise, some companies try to increase productivity not by improving their machines or processes, but by putting pressure on employees to produce more without additional consideration. The resurgence of the US labor movement has come about precisely because people were asked not only to work harder, but also to actively risk their lives against COVID-19 for low wages, poor benefits, and no share of profits. Suddenly going to work became a matter of life and death.

The Kellogg’s strike is likely to generate debates at business schools for decades to come: Management tried techniques that worked against unions in the past, ranging from trying to divide older from newer employees, to the use of scabs as a threat, and everything failed outright. The workers not only blocked the demands of management to cut benefits, they forced additional benefits. In part, this was because the pandemic had reduced available labor, leading to a classic supply-and-demand situation: the demand for labor far outstripped the supply, and the unions knew it, and used it.[3]

These striving companies stay stuck in old processes and ways of doing things because they won’t think forward until past the crisis. By doing that, they lose one of their most powerful tools to get past a crisis:engaging with it in ways that will pay off in the future.

Thriving

A famous strategic consulting company once asked me for advice on companies that were doing a good job circumventing ups and downs. I pointed them to a company I knew well in the Boston area that had integrated Quality-based (and data-based) approaches throughout their business, from top to bottom. They were skeptical – “TQM? Seriously? What year is this?” When I told them it was a silicon chip manufacturer, an industry that is infamously cyclic, they thought I was kidding. I said, “check it out yourself!”

A week later, I received a call: “this company is amazing! How do they do this? They have the flattest curves of anyone in this industry!”

What they did incorporated three elements:

1.     Respond in the moment

2.     Have preset options

3.     Stay invested in the future

First of all, they responded in the moment. They acted immediately when the market shifted. This was greatly facilitated by their second element.

The second element was a list of preset options. In “up” times, they reoriented their efforts towards manufacturing size and sales; in “down” times they reoriented towards improvement efforts and efficiency, such that they could minimize the effect of a downturn by decreasing prices and increasing productivity without killing their staff or even changing it. In current parlance, they pivoted. They didn’t just work harder, they genuinely worked smarter – and only a little smarter at that. Everyone already knew the industry went up and down sharply, so they only needed two overall strategic approaches, and then the executive just decided when to switch from one to the other. Elegantly simple and highly effective: They were never caught off-guard by market changes, because they knew it was either going to be up or down.

The third element – staying invested in the future - kept them from being surprised or disrupted: they maintained state-of-the-art in their technology. They kept R&D funded at all times – sometimes shifting focus, but not downsizing – which meant they were unlikely to be outstripped by a competitor, nor were they only recycling the same actions.

They weren’t just holding on, or striving by working harder. This was dynamic and adaptive, and not even overly complicated.

Extraordinary executives often keep their “eye on the prize” over very long periods of time – years or more. Research has shown repeatedly that the most successful executives can look farther into the future. In practice, however, that is not focusing exclusively and stubbornly on that goal – if that is even possible. It means staying aware of the present as well as the desired goal.

A more realistic approach is to keep realigning as necessary to stay motivated and on track in different contexts. In other words, find ways to reinforce what you are trying to do, while responding in the moment to what you need to do, or just keep resetting yourself. It’s a bit more complicated, but much more effective – and as the chip manufacturer example shows, it doesn’t have to be a lot more complicated. Having two good pitches and insight into the batter is sufficient for many major league baseball pitchers, because all you have to do to be successful is throw the way the batter does not expect — “the other pitch,” in other words — the majority of the time.

It’s a cliché that for some people problems are perceived as opportunities, but there is still truth to it, if we see that as taking a good, honest look at a problem to see what one can do rather than only what one can’t, or ignoring the reality of change. This is what we refer to as thriving – continuing to grow and change even in times of crisis and challenge.

For example: Work-from-home has been added as part of a company’s repertoire to manage staff – a standard operating procedure, rather than a temporary expedient – which has come as a relief to working parents, people with long commutes, and people dealing with disabilities. Videoconferencing has become a norm, and for some managers this has actually increased the amount they speak to their remote employees, which makes a difference to workplace climate.

To take a more extensive current example, for a change I’ll use one I know particularly well — ourselves. Our first cohort in 2018 was designed around a seven-month engagement with a diverse group of CEOs and leaders, which included three in-person meetings, each of which was 2-3 days in length, spaced two months apart. It’s a powerful approach, especially when using unusual and distinctive locations to reinforce the learning objectives. We didn’t abandon people between sessions, either; we followed up with them by phone and email.

But in March of 2020, a similar program we had sold to a client abruptly changed as the client (and everyone else) went into lockdown. 

Realistically, you don’t have all-day videoconferences, which are inherently more tiring. (For some reasons, and some leadership approaches, see our blog from March 23, 2020 – yes, that far back.) This is doubly true when the leaders participating are under more stress and struggling to handle it. 

So we didn’t. We switched from three-day “one-and-done” modules to a series of half-day video sessions per module, spread over the course of a couple of weeks. This actually provided several advantages, including tighter integration of learning with practice, a better learning curve, dynamic management of learning, and easier international work, since we had executives from three continents. 

We’ve known for years that anyone learns better in this way, but who has the time for that? Now that everyone has had to learn to work via video, we could take advantage of it to help people find time, be more flexible, and increase the learning all at once.

Since March of 2020 we’ve done multiple such engagements, and tracked our effectiveness, as we always do. While there are always things we would like to do better, we haven’t lost overall quality, and we have some learned some ways to better it.

Do we miss working in-person? Yes, and we do lose some kinds of learning from that. When we can, we will certainly restore in-person sessions – but we will also integrate new approaches which enhance the overall power of our approach. 

This is just a small and relatively simple example – larger companies have far more complexity than we do – but it is illustrative of a more adaptive approach. We made changes we had to make (moving entirely online) but did not treat it only as an emergency expedient; instead, we took advantage of the situation to explore other options (changing the course structure) that we could leverage in the future, and advertised it as an additional option which opened up new possibilities for us both during and after the pandemic. When we begin to travel regularly again, we will not just drop it and go “back to normal.” We will use what we learned.

In sum, taking action like this is about adapting and learning, not just surviving or striving. And if done well, it means you are thriving, or you will be!

Notes

[1] See Dunning-Kruger Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect).

[2] All images from John Tenniel’s illustrations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, care of https://www.alice-in-wonderland.net/

[3] This is an example where the study of history can provide unexpected benefits. A number of historians, starting with David Herlihy at Harvard, identified the Black Plague as a likely trigger for the Renaissance and even the Industrial Revolution. Pre-Plague Europe maximized people and productivity; once a third to a half of the population had died, suddenly more resources were freed up, but also people had to develop techniques to make up for the lost of expert labor, such as machinery. We may be facing a similar situation here, when we must substitute better thinking and leadership for cheap and exploitable labor which is in short supply (and probably should be).