No matter whether you are an internal or external consultant, project manager, board member or CEO, social distancing has brought a new degree of difficulty to the work that we do. Even with video conferencing and collaboration software bridging the physical divide, gaining feedback, alignment, agreement and consensus is simply more difficult without the face-to-face interaction.

As a result, we’ve all become micro-IT helpdesks – servicing family members, friends and co-workers at all hours of the day. Sometimes it’s connecting parents via Zoom. Other times it’s explaining to co-workers that video dropouts are due to bandwidth hogging-teenagers and not the shortcoming of the technology. And sometimes, at the end of the day, it’s just a craving for social interaction and a general dissatisfaction with the various drop-ins, drop-outs and failures of our personal, business or network technologies.

What it boils down to is a challenge to our very natures. After all, humans have been successful from an evolutionary perspective precisely BECAUSE we are social.

Through the COVID19 crisis we have learned a great deal about the limitations of our connected capabilities. We have learned what works and does not work. And we know that the world has changed – not just how we live and work – but what drives us too.

That means that when we start to return to work – moving from response to recovery, we’ll need to invent new ways to work, consult, engage and deliver for our clients, customers and stakeholders. And perhaps, more importantly, we’ll need to invent a new way to BE.

We are already seeing some clients beginning their journey to recovery. We’re adapting projects to shorter timeframes and implementing new technology to help get there. We would love to hear your stories too.