# Covid, # Objectives and some musings……# Leadership
The ink surely hasn’t dried up, and won’t for a fair bit of time to come, on the stats and the state of the times we are living in. In that vein, as you read this, my wishes for the safety of your loved ones and in fact everyone around! This too shall pass!
Well this post really isn’t about Covid, well maybe not so apparently. This is about my morning walk! Yeah it is.
We did get freedom a couple of days back from being confined to our houses and being allowed to step out for a walk in the complex that I stay in. A welcome opportunity of walking in the open air, especially given the cleaner environment that we have, though tragically because of the situation.
A suitable set of rules/guidelines, and I use the two words intentionally, were duly circulated laying down which Tower gets to step out when, and all about the precautions to be kept – masks, physical distancing and time slots.
Got me wondering how things would pan out. Stepping out when it is not your time slot would mean being called out, and it sure did happen. It was another matter that irrespective of the time slots there weren’t more than a dozen people out for a walk at any time. Even if there were a couple of dozen more people, the protocol of distancing would not have been compromised.
That is how the guidelines evolve to be a set of rules! and rules guide a process. The issue really is about the objective. Are you achieving the objective of mitigating the risk of infection, even if someone ends up using a time slot that may not be theirs’s? Observational analysis showed that the objective was not compromised, yet the rules dictated so.
That is how processes are governed by rules, and at times, as I am sure we have all experienced, we find them to be mindless and binding, serving no particular purpose. So, the achievement of objective becomes subservient to the rule itself!!!
Please do not for a moment think that I am advocating having no rules or processes. However, we need to keep the objective as the true north, and evaluate our processes in that context, and do that constantly.
Well, you may say what’s new in that, and we always knew what you just said. True that, and I do agree with you. Having said that COVID has meant that we envision a new world, a new normal if it can be called that.
What this new normal would require would be thinking differently and leading differently.
Serendipity, flexibility, Ingenuity, whole brain thinking, and a new mindset is what we need to Lead with. The Status quo’ist mindset needs to perish, since this is a new world, with newer challenges but newer opportunities too, constraints that bind us but endless ideas to envision and translate to reality. That truly is going to be Leadership’s newest challenge – envision the new world !
