Stumbling Around in the Fog — Where Turnarounds (and Ideas) Begin

Someone once said for a brand to be “on,” to be thriving, it must first be “off” or moribund. For the phoenix to rise there must be ashes.
But long before there are ashes there’s fog.
You’ve experienced it. Within corporate organizations the fog feels like confusion, hesitation or, at worst, even apathy. Meetings for the sake of meetings. Research without end. It is the status quo to beat all status quo.
Before a turnaround is obvious or galvanizing, it is thick with palpable risk. Effort in any direction can feel pointless. Better, it might seem, to stand still. And if you’re not careful, this fog can actually become quite comfortable.
The upside? At least you’re not managing a pile of ashes.
But you are also not growing.
Unless you see the fog for what it is: Opportunity.
This place preceding a turnaround — uncertain, uncomfortable, foggy — has a lot in common with the necessary realm where great ideas come from.
When artists (by which I mean the broadest definition, from the gritty loft to the endless cube farm) venture to claim new thoughts, new insights, new expressions, we willingly enter a fog of the unknown. It is our duty to walk into the risk where both nothing and something might occur.
Creative people may return from the fog empty-handed. Or we may return with ideas too challenging to contemplate. What matters most within that continuum are our willing, continuous steps into the unknown; a deliberate embrace of opportunity, detached from outcome.
It is in this hopeful fog that, as author Robert Grudin puts it,
“One must cultivate a leaning for the problematic, a chronic attention to things that do not totally fit, agree, or make sense.”
It is in the fog where we willingly stumble upon glimmers of new thinking, as well as others who think like we do. It is in the fog where we first touch a turnaround, and sense its potency.
The fog is the birthplace of turnarounds.
In we go!

