Resilience
Resilience — the ability to recover from setbacks, adapt well to change, keep going in the face of adversity.
We are engaged in a battle for our livelihoods as well as our lives. The life we lived and the way we did things on a daily basis will not return — not by Easter, not in six months — not ever.
Those of us who were living in the digital, dispersed working world have experienced little to no significant change in our daily lives since the COVID-19 outbreak We live, collaborate, and contract in Slack, Trello, Asana, Zoom, Skype, and countless other digital collaboration services.
We have spent a great deal of time enthusing about the expanded capabilities of collaboration with former colleagues who had little to no interest in learning about, much less embracing new methods and tools.
This is the dawn of new opportunity for innovation, advancement, and collaboration, the likes of which we have never experienced. There is no telling what useful and remarkable new products, methods, and knowledge we will see in the coming years, as a result of being forced to adopt new paths of communication.
We now see artists and musicians, deprived of their normal physical venues of performance, grasping and manipulating their mobile phones to perform, solo and in groups, with their self-isolating colleagues on Facebook.
Other forward-leaning arts organizations are streaming video recordings of their past performances, ensuring that their patrons remain connected to them and their mission.
Professionals who eschewed digital tools as being unsuitable for their organization are now grateful for their general availability and surprised by their usefulness.
As a longtime proponent of these technologies, I encourage you to move forward with us during this time of discomfort, physical disconnection and disruption of conventional social interaction.
We will not return to the world left behind. However, if we devote our energy to learning to adapt to the present, our future promises to be richer than our past.
