Collective Chutes and Ladders
One of my favorite games to play as a kid was Chutes and Ladders. The thrill of spinning the number that landed you on the Ladder, the agony of seeing the number that sent you backwards down the Chutes, the complexity that happened further up the board as there were a more and more ways to be sent back down… a fantastic game and different every time we played.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the feeling of hitting that monster Chute that sent you from 87, only 13 away from winning, back down to 24. Being sent back meant you were amongst a lot more ladders than you were up there in the 80s, but it also means that you’re a lot further away from winning than you were before.
But when thinking about this game these past few weeks, it has been in the context that for the first time in my lifetime, we all collectively rolled the numbers that sent us all back down Chutes and are all much further away from what we thought were the wins just ahead of us. The combination of a global health pandemic, with unprecedented unemployment, and the racial injustice in our country being brought to the forefront of our society, everything we thought we knew about the game board and our place on it has changed.
In thinking through this collective Chute that has disrupted so much of what we thought and how we planned, it has struck me that it looks and feels a lot like the S-Curve used to show someone learning stages, going from Unfamiliar all the way up to Mastery first shared by Whitney Johnson in the Harvard Business Review in 2012. Starting at the base of the S-Curve is tough for everyone, but then you hit a moment of Hypergrowth on your way to Mastery.
This is a phase that a lot of us have gone through in the past. This is a phase that a lot of us are glad to have behind us. This is a phase that, like it or not, you are about to go through again.
As we all collectively rolled a massive Chute for what we thought we knew about what lay ahead for us in 2020 and beyond, we’ve all been sent back to a place without that level of confidence in our understanding of what is happening or when and how it will change. Long term planning used to include decades, now it includes months. Short term planning used to include quarters, now it includes daily updates. Whatever we thought we knew, whatever map we’ve had of the world, we need to update it, and quickly.
This has emerged for me as a choice that I am in control of. What kind of S-Curve experience do I want to undergo in the near future? I don’t have a choice about going through it, but I do get to choose what I make of it and where I end up on the other side.
Play It Again
This S-Curve will be the easiest, and therefore the most common choice that people make. It is an S-Curve to reestablish what you already knew, to play the same level of the game over again, and take what you understood about yourself, your work, your network, and your plans for the future, but update it with the new variables that you can see. It will be annoying to have to do things over again, to rebuild and reclaim things that you have already done, but it will be tweaks, not overhauls. The results will be getting back to what you already had and hoping you can hold on to it this time.
Press Reset
While the disruption has been tough and the uncertainty in the world wasn’t in your plans for 2020, this moment in time is the excuse you’ve been looking for to press reset on more than one area of your life and make a change you’ve been wanting to make for a long time. You hated what you were doing before and this global and collective change has given you the space to make the change that was going to happen someday… today. You didn’t like the S-Curve that you’d climbed or the game that you’d been playing and now you are free to jump wholeheartedly into a brand new challenge and pursue it without having to let go of what you were holding onto as it is no longer there anyway!
Level Up
Whatever had given you Mastery in before this moment is no longer enough to continue to claim Mastery going forward. How your Mastery showed up in the world is now in an unfamiliar place, a place that is brand new to you and everyone else who had thought they’d made it through the tough climb. But instead of just reestablishing your previous role with new features or pressing reset completely, this is your chance to level up to a whole new sphere of Mastery and begin to learn what can be built on top of your past work and with that discipline in the new world that we’re discovering. This will be the most challenging S-Curve, but also the most rewarding. The ability to approach this climb with the humility of a beginner will be matched with the joy of discovering something new for and the freedom to move without the constraints and responsibilities of your previous Mastery.
“This is not a moment, it’s the movement!
Where all the hungriest brothers with something to prove went...”
The question is not IF you will experience a surge of growth in the coming weeks and months, it is what kind of growth and Mastery will you choose to pursue. It is who will make the harder choices and pursue the more challenging growth opportunities and who will look for ways to “go back.” You will lose touch with people who choose a different path forward than you, and that is okay. Pursue relationships with people aligned toward your growth, seek out new teachers and ways to understand what could be ahead for you and your story. Become very comfortable with discomfort and change, it is likely to be one of the only constants in the months and years ahead.