When Things Fall Apart
How to get your work going again after life knocks you down.
It’s happened to all of us. You’re going along, getting your work done, hitting most of your goals, maybe even feeling pretty good, but then all those plates you have spinning productively overhead come crashing down and splinter into pieces.
Fill in the blank with whatever drama life has thrown at you recently. Sickness, family drama, changes in society that render your entire business obsolete—yeah, I’ve been through that too. Nothing new here.
You can try to glue all the pieces together, but the whole process has lost fidelity. It’s weak and unstable. You’ve lost confidence. Your clients disappear into the fog. Maybe they’ve got their own mess to pick up too, but it doesn’t matter. The truth is, it’s all over and you have to start fresh.
Don’t bother gluing all the broken pieces together. Pick up the pieces that still function and examine the fault line where your business was weak. This is your new focus point.
Perhaps when the crisis was brewing you were focused on only one offering or an inefficiently narrow a target market. Perhaps you’ll be shocked to discover that (gasp!) you were a solution looking for a problem and only stayed afloat because of your top-notch sales team who could sell icicles to Eskimos.
Oh, and they all just quit.
Nothing about the situation is “okay”. It doesn’t ultimately matter if it was cause by fire, flood, volcano, or your own error (well, that one does kinda matter). The fact of the matter is that in order to survive, you must reinvent your work to fit the new situation.
I’m not going to quote Sun Tzu here. I practice compassion with Zen, so in addition to helping those around me who are affected by the collapse, if any, I’m not going not get involved with wailing and gnashing of teeth. It’s just not useful, and more than that, it doesn’t satisfy the craving for things to be like they were. That’s just not going to happen. It’s a new day, even if nuclear fallout is raining down all around you.
Once you’ve got the pieces that still work gathered, if any, take a moment to evaluate your new reality. What is your Ikigai in this moment?
This is one of the things I love about using Scrum. If momentum around a project dies, or your ability to work on it is depleted, you just make a new board. Assemble your pieces. Examine what can be made ready, what you can do, and create a definition of done.
A clear desk can be a good thing in retrospect. It might hurt, but sometimes in the process the garbage takes itself out. Don’t be opportunistic about the distress of others but look for a way to help yourself and the people who look to you for guidance to get back on their feet. But as the flight attendant says, put your own oxygen mask on first. You’ll do the most good for others that way.
It’s not lemonade from lemons, it’s a whole new tree. Water it.