Be agile, and let us prevail!

If we are honest enough to admit, today’s world is confusing for most people. In such dynamic world (…and some prefer to see it as volatile world), change and sustainability are like two face of the same coin. The two are inseparable with each other, yet they never be able to face each other. It’s a world that challenge us to keep changing in order to adapt, as a way to sustain our existence. Yet, many have failed in this, and by changing, they were disorganized instead of prevail.

How exactly can we change to sustain?

In my line of work, I’ve seen how businesses believe that staying all the same is the best way to cope with increasingly changing business world. This may work well in the past. But, not today, not anymore. Today’s business is very competitive and innovative. That means, more people see themselves as active players, therefore more people initiate change. Consumers change from time to time. Products have their life cycles, and another products will replace them. Services has their trend, before the newer trend remove them from attention. In organizations, people come and go, no one stays for a long time.

Change doesn’t mean we never stop. In fact, change requires few stops in its process to be effective.

Sometimes, staying with the same policy and not making any radical changes are necessary. It’s because by staying the same for sometime, we can reflect on why we must change and how we must change. Change is not always changing everything all at once. In most cases, changing everything all at once is counter-productive, or even suicidal. Change needs moments in which we withdraw our self into a some sort of reclusive state, where we look at clearly what have we done, how did we do it, why did we do it, and how we move forward.

This ‘stop’ or ‘staying still’ moments is actually dynamic in essence, as we reflect on what we were actually doing at the moment. The result of this process might be in a new behavior or action, which apparently a change others may observe. It may also end up with a situation where it seems that we don’t change, or we seem to do things we always do. But ,we do it for newer reason, we do it out of different state of mind.

These stops for reflections is like stepping-stones or rocks we use to across a river stream. It’s probably impossible to cross the river in just one leap, or to cross it by swimming. Therefore, we need to find which rocks or stones we should step on, so we can move forward in the midst of the seemingly unfriendly stream. From one rock to another, albeit is about leaping, each of leap is different to another. The rocks or stones are different in terms of shape, surface and the distance they have with one another. Obviously, we have to do at least a slightly different leap every time we move to the next rock or stones.

Instead of being sluggish, we need to be dexterous in moving from one rock to another. t the same time, we must pick the right stepping rocks or stones. We need to be agile!

In this unreasonable world, I don’t think there is any reason to guarantee that things around us will stay the same. There are many stones and rocks with huge variety, and they can move to any direction at anytime. The stream may also not just hard river, it can also be a mysterious ocean. Thus, I think the most reasonable response is to be agile.