“Hello, my name is Maggie Chumbley and I’ll be your facilitator for our virtual sessions this week. What an opportunity this is to practice adaptation to uncertain futures! I’ve been humming along converting and reimagining what was planned as our face to face time for some serious fun, to what is now is a series of virtual sessions that will surprise you!”

This is the text from my introduction email to a company I am working with this week.

I am embarking on something I’ve known for a while was possible but haven’t seen in its entirety yet. Yes, I’m working on the weekend, but I’m amped. I’m focused. I am in the flow. I’ve got goosebumps.

I’ve been part of some epically meaningful discussions with my colleagues these days about why we do what we do. What are the adaptations to the new challenges of Coronavirus. Not to just wait for it to be over, but birth something new. We are watching play out on a large scale the central concept on which base much of our work. Systems are dynamic. They change. Resilience comes from adaptation to changes in the system. It is about stopping the behaviors and activities that don’t allow for thriving in the new system. Coming out right in the middle of all this system stuff, I am catching crystal clear views of how our work is linked to our core values around human happiness, connection, and the earth.

In the midst of writing this, colleague Nancy White put up her freshly penned, incredibly intelligent and heartful perspective in three key insights. (stay tuned on Nancy’s blog. She’s gonna write more.) Just a few words from Nancy snaps it well into focus what we need to stop, how we need to think, and the sustaining bedrock for our work. I’ll just pull the snippet here. Read Nancy’s full post for more context.

“In many online meetings there is this fundamentally flawed assumption that we can automagically do everything together at the same time.”
“Don’t just look at your technology choices. Pay attention to what is shifting. Use something like the Ecocycle to get a sense of what is happening at a systems level. It might help you discern useful first steps and set a direction forward.”
“When your actions are motivated by love, your energy is multiplied and accumulated.

( see? Goosebumps).

Tomorrow, I was supposed to get on a plane in Seattle and fly across the country to facilitate a company’s bi-annual face to face gathering (for things like team building, strategy, and bowling of course). Three days ago the client asked if we could do the gathering virtually instead.

Fresh from facilitating the course Virtual Facilitation last month, I’m totally primed for this. As my colleague Fernando Murray and I did our retrospective on the last cohort, we focused on the values and issues that virtual facilitation forces us to examine; where we physically do our work and how. We named our fundamental purposes for teaching virtual facilitation are:

Human Connection
Wellness and Life Balance (working from home can be a huge boost to our personal wellness and the happiness of our family).
Climate Change

Bill McKibben’s article in the New Yorker beautifully connects my little corner of things to the the global systems we are all entangled with. He powerfully points how nimble we are being now, and asks how we might view ourselves just as nimble with something even bigger than Coronavirus, climate change.

McKibben says,

Still, it’s worth noting how nimbly millions of people seem to have learned new patterns. Companies, for instance, are scrambling to stay productive, even with many people working from home. The idea that we need to travel each day to a central location to do our work may often be the result of inertia, more than anything else. Faced with a real need to commute by mouse, instead of by car, perhaps we’ll see that the benefits of workplace flexibility extend to everything from gasoline consumption to the need for sprawling office parks.

Which of our behaviors and beliefs about work are no long viable and need to be stopped to make room for something new? The Ecocycle structure guides this inquiry. What are we being forced to let go of to nurture new possibilities?

Especially poignant, McKibben’s perspective on human connectedness.

“But the “social distancing” that epidemiologists now demand of us to stop the spread of infectious diseases is actually already too familiar to lots of Americans.”
“But the patterns that produce this solitude in our culture are so ingrained that we’ve come to take them for granted. Perhaps, in an odd way, the prospect of forced isolation may lead us to embrace a bit more gregariousness when the virus relents.”

I would add to McKibben’s thoughts my own hope that with better, more intelligent, efficient ways of working together, we are well tuned into one another and with virtual options, we have the time to be in our own families and communities with more love and energy.

Adapting to Uncertain Futures: What Coronavirus brings into focus