If not now, when? A New Year’s Resolution for 2020
A new decade. One hundred years ago we entered into the Roaring Twenties, a decade of change and wild highs that ended in catastrophe. Despite the many statistics showing how things have improved in the world over the last 20 years, the future feels tenuous if not downright dangerous.
What to do?! Can any individual really make a difference in these fast-changing times?
People will continue doing what we’ve been doing: we’ll keep our heads down, we’ll show up to work to do the work we’re assigned, go home and enjoy friends and family, and hope for the best. A lot of what I see in the media about personal resolutions and change centers around our private life: live sustainably, reduce consumption and waste, eat and act healthy, spend time with friends. Those are good suggestions and not just for our times. But those suggestions make a critical assumption that if we act primarily as individuals we will then collectively affect the change we want. I think we need to turn that assumption on its head.
I’m coming at this from two points of inspiration. The first is a provocative article written by Björn Lomborg titled Empty Gestures on Climate Changewhere he argues that most of our small individual actions have a very small impact. Instead, Lomborg argues, what we need is a vast and significant push on our governments and businesses to invest in green energy and wean ourselves off the fossil fuel teat completely. Anything else is window dressing. Go big, he says, or go home (and die).
My second inspiration point is smaller. It comes from a conversation with a client and their innovation team. One team member grew frustrated at some of the suggested solutions. “Why” the team member asked “are we always suggesting ways of changing our customers’ behavior instead of suggesting ways of changing OUR organizational behavior?”
For me, both of these get to the challenge of change and our individual roles in change. We can ask individuals to change or we can try to change our systems. We can keep our heads down and tinker around the edges, or we can push for significant and positive change that really makes a difference. The former demands compliance, the latter bravery.
So I suggest that your/our New Year’s resolution for 2020 (and again in 2021, 2022 and throughout the decade) should be this:
“At work, to continue to ask the difficult questions and challenge the assumptions that significant and positive change is too hard or costly. To advocate for change that makes a difference rather than one that fits into a project schedule.”
That is not an easy task. That is a commitment that doesn’t end. It is much harder than committing to going to the gym this year.
That resolution will put you at odds with your workmates who just want to keep their heads down. It will put you at odds with your managers who don’t really know how to make things better but who know how to manage a budget.
This resolution answers the question: “How do we do the right things?” After you answer that question, your organization is probably good at figuring out “How do we do things right?” Typically, organizations spend 95% of their time trying to figure out the second question and 5% on the first question. You need to help shift that.
In the first 20 years of this century, we experienced a huge amount of change, not all of it good. We now live in an ever-increasing digitized world. We started 2010 with the Arab Spring and the belief that social media could bring down dictatorships and repression. We end the decade with mass manipulation of our politics through the same social media, with increasing hate and violence as the result.
Australia is burning. We’re filling the sea with our plastic garbage. The rich get much richer while everyone else muddles through.
If we want things to get better, and most of us do, than we have to ask ourselves, what we, as individuals, are willing to do to disrupt this status quo. We have to ask ourselves whether we are brave enough to make things better and not just go along with the crowd.
Bravery, like fear, is infectious. When we see it, it empowers us. Your New Year’s resolution should be to shoulder that bravery and infect others.
As the famed scholar, Hillel wrote “If not now, when?”
Make 2020 the year of Now.
