If I ever had a dollar every time I heard those two words.
“We must embrace uncertainty!”
“Embrace uncertainty – if there’s one thing that’s certain, it’s change!”
“We must accept that this is the future – embrace uncertainty to survive!”
“Helen, you don’t embrace uncertainty well do you?”
*Yawn*
I’m slightly behind the Rhizomatic Learning cMOOC readings and activities simply because of my workload but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been mulling over the concepts of how we ’embrace uncertainty’ in our own workplace context.
I’m used to these two words. I hear them ALL THE TIME. So much so, they’ve lost their sense of awe. Now it’s a catch cry of managers who use them to rally up their staff to be inspired and excited of yet another change in the workplace because they simply don’t know what else to say. However, there’s been so much change in our corporate workplaces that at times I feel that there’s if one emotion that personifies this statement it’s the long “eye roll” followed by an inaudible groan of “here we go again”.
I’ve been accused of not ’embracing uncertainty’ but in both cases it was used as a convenient excuse for people like me who had openly expressed their dissatisfaction to their managers on how that change was managed. I dared to be say what I thought.
What can I say? I wear my heart on my sleeve.
For those who know me, I hate routine. Every project I have worked on in the past has involved some level of excitement or initiative but once it becomes transactional or as we call it, “business-as-usual” and integrated within the business as a workplace program, I have moved to another project and let those who have the skills to keep it going and maintained to manage it.
Much has been written about change in the workplace and I don’t wish to rehash it again here.
It’s a given. I know that.
The time now has come to be less complacent and not revert to our typical behaviour response which is to look to our managers and leaders for direction or an expectation that they will solve our woes. They won’t. In my experience, I have seen that they are in the same predicament – maybe in a worse position – because they simply don’t have the answers anymore.
Sometimes I even have the feeling that they’re waiting for someone in their own teams to just ‘take charge’ and ‘do something – anything’.
Maybe we’ve just all run out of ideas?
Maybe we’ve been burned in the past so we don’t offer ideas anymore when our experience shows that they’d be quashed?
Maybe it’s harder to be proactive and change our mindset and behaviour – and take personal responsibility?
I don’t have the answers for how we can make all this uncertainty in our workplace and in our role as learning professionals comfortable for us. What I do know is that I cannot look to the organisation to provide it but instead, lead the change by adopting an open and curious mindset.
Australians have a wonderful phrase of “Giving It a Go” and I believe this is what Learning and Development need to adopt and face an ever changing world.
Let’s just give it a go and see where it takes us. We may be pleasantly surprised.
Click on the image below to take you to the YouTube page (for some reason my YouTube Editor in WordPress isn’t working – or it’s user error – so I’m creating alternatives…)
An Awkward Embrace
nice one Helen ! What a great idea to contextualise your reflections in a workplace video – inspires me to to the same as I consider the similarities and differences between corporate L&D and university ‘Learning Development’…. as universities increasingly model themselves, o so problematically, on corporations, the number of times we get referred to by other staff across the institution as L AND D has shifted for me from the annoyingly rude to the rather funny! I think our roles are very different, but I’m very interested to get a bit of a window into your world 😉 I think the most obvious point of similarity is at that macro level of managing the interface and relationships along the fault lines, where the dissonances are severe, as globalisation of the HE ‘industry’ brings teachers and learners into contact who literally don’t speak the same language, in disciplinary contexts where the nature of ‘literacy’ and language learning is pretty wildly misunderstood sometimes
Thanks for your reply, I greatly appreciate it. Yes, we live in interesting times and for the last few years I’ve been actively observing the ‘disruption’ that seems to be gripping the HE world but I don’t think our corporate Learning and Development teams have had the same level of urgency although we are starting to feel it now. Maybe we are lagging behind because L&D clients are business internal clients whose only experience of learning has been the traditional model so they expect the same. I believe that once we get more people into our organisations used to new more connected ways of learning, they’ll start to put the pressure on us. Some people in the business are already bypassing L&D and going directly to vendor solutions who can provide them more quickly and using new technologies as we simply don’t have the expertise to build these internally (nor may it be our core business to). So what this results in is that L&D teams start to question their role, value and contribution in the corporation. Or whether there is a role for them – or if their role must be changed to suit the new environment. Like I said in my video, I have no idea what the future holds anymore, I can’t seem to plan for anything anymore and all I’m doing is trying to keep an open mind and just experiment with different tools and network with the people who have that knowledge so I can draw upon my network for assistance and support when I need it.