Lessons Learned

State of Emergency

The premier has just declared that Covid19 pandemic control – “flattening the curve” – requires the implementation of emergency measures. Bars and restaurants must close to patrons, and go to take out and delivery only. All St. Patrick’s day public celebrations have been cancelled today. 

Schools have been closed for the next three weeks. Our own PM is self-isolating, modeling “working from home” for a country of knowledge workers. Specially-scheduled shopping hours are being established for vulnerable populations. Interest rates are dropping to zero. These are strange and unprecedented times.

It’s consuming the news cycle: stories on how to cope; sharing acts of community kindness; collectively watching and worrying about our friends and family scattered around the world, trying to get home. #caremongering is trending on Twitter, as a uniquely Canadian-bred movement to keep the lights shining through the darkness. 

Lessons Learned. This will always be the only real way to learn anything: to try; to make mistakes; to try again. And that is where the magic can happen. It’s a chance to try something different. I am watching businesses, community groups, and social media movements create new and ingenious ways to support each other. Governments, financial institutions, and utilities are opening up their business models to find ways to adapt to a time where people have to just STOP. And we all know there is going to be a huge baby boom in December 2020…

I am blessed, as a public servant in a non-critical role, to be able to work from home. My income, my health, and my ability to adapt to whatever comes are all secure. So I am free to celebrate my proud Introvert, hunker down with my Doodle and my amusements, and watch all of this unfold. And I have to say, I am fascinated, and strangely excited by the possibility for some really creative Lessons Learned. 

I cut my eye teeth in public service delivering stakeholder communications for Canadians and for federal public servants as we prepared government facilities for Y2k. I sat in our emergency ops centre December 31st, watching the world NOT fall to pieces. And for us, that meant success. 

Today, I can’t help but think that this pandemic is teaching us what we will need to know when the next Bug comes along. The next one could be – and if this really is, as I suspect, Mother Earth shrugging us off for the pests that we are, it should be – much more lethal. What we learn now could very well save lives down the line.

I am using this time of forced Isolation to crack open my own business model and do some rewiring. My own existential Crisis is three years behind me now, and I am finally ready to write my own Lessons Learned – and to use those lessons to create a new way of being. It’s going to be an amazing Spring. I am excited to see what will emerge from me – and from all of us – on the other side of this “curve” we are trying to flatten. Meanwhile, I will be sending all my virtual hugs to my loved ones, and most especially to those who are on the front lines today. 

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