The Right and Left Brain Blog

The “catch 22″ of “Be all that you can be” is the environment. We all learn and believe that we can succeed at anything and be anything with training, hard work, experience and a pursuit of excellence. Unfortunately, we live in a very complex personal, organizational and external world.

A critical current impact of the environment is, presumably, surprise external events. The first decade of this century has already experienced more of these than probably any time in history. 9/11, China, housing boom, financial crises of 2008, Katrina, Google, aging of baby boomers, global warming , are simply examples of events that have dramatically affected our society . I am not arguing the causes, solutions or impact of these individual events. What is important here is that they seem to be happening at an increasing rate and dramatically affect our daily lives and society. Rather than be shocked by each one of these, we need to recognize that they are occurring, are unpredictable and that we need to develop mechanisms to cope with them on an individual and social level.

Dealing with the changing environment is highly complex but has some fairly simple prescriptions:

• While we are frequently surprised by environmental factors, many are somewhat predictable and can be prepared for. On a number of different levels, factors like global warming, aging of the population, product life cycles, technology changes, and the Internet are highly predictable. What is frequently missing is recognizing and dealing with them.

• For those that aren’t, we need to recognize that they will happen and remain calm. Rudy Giuliani will always be remembered for his efforts to keep the country calm and get back to normal during that tragic period. Similarly, with job loss, takeover etc. doing one’s job or starting a search is frequently the best strategy rather than just panicking or taking drastic steps.

• The next recommendation is to recognize the change and develop speedy solutions. The increase in security precautions after 9/11 is an example. Similarly, developing a plan and understanding changes are critical to long-term success. Car companies and financial institutions have simply been abysmal at describing the issues and developing new solutions

• Finally, environmental changes frequently require much greater collaboration as they involve a number of parameters. Two different aspects are particularly needed. One is the need to recognize potential negative factors in a situation. The second is to recognize how different factors of a decision can be affected. While the severity was much less, the collaboration on Gustav in New Orleans compared to Katrina is the kind of collaboration and planning necessary to deal with these events.