Flexibility is the Key to Stability

Legendary UCLA Men’s Basketball coach, John Wooden, “The Wizard of Westwood,” imparted laconic philosophy. He taught his players, “Flexibility is the key to stability.”

The coronavirus tremor is shaking our global arena. Millions of people and businesses are responding, and succeeding, with work and life changes that were once unthinkable. 

Disruption is native to sports. Sudden injuries and equipment failures are common. Every stadium, crowd, and opponent is nuanced. Consistent excellence demands alacrity in adaptation. Coach Wooden’s squads won seven consecutive national championships, and ten in twelve years. 

Exponential technologies have caused volatile change. Now computers, networks, and sensors, are utilized to keep businesses, schools, and doctors’ offices running. They will also be pivotal in stemming, and eventually curing, the outbreak. Many new lifestyle experiments that they enable will be the norm after COVID-19 is conquered. What we adapt to today will become common, and necessary for success tomorrow.

The Adaptability Quotient

Recognition of adaptability’s vital role in personal and organizational success came well before COVID-19 appeared. Nine years ago the Harvard Business Review called adaptability “The New Competitive Advantage.”  Singularity University Chair for Finance and Economics, Amin Toufani, has researched and lectured extensively on a measure of adaptability, the “Adaptability Quotient,” or AQ, since 2014. In her popular TED talk, Goldman Sachs’ Vice President, Natalie Fratto, explains how AQ integrates into her investment thesis. Fortunately, she also notes how we can all improve our adaptability. 

Pervasive Flexibility 

In the past two months, adaptability by individuals and organizations has been multifold.  

• Telemedicine is booming. HMO giant, Kaiser Permanente, used telemedicine to reduce in-person visits to specialists by 40% in the week of March 15.
• Globally, students at all levels are attending their formerly in-person classes and instructor meetings online. 
• Do you miss live sports? League of Legends professional leagues are hacking together officially sanctioned matches. It’s serious business. The 2019 League of Legends World Championship had 100 million viewers, equal to the 2020 Super Bowl. Three North American franchises are owned by NBA teams. They understand long-term stability. 
• Alcohol is available for delivery in six U.S. states plus the city of Atlanta and the District of Columbia. (Members of Congress haven’t solved remote voting, but they can have six-packs delivered to their offices to help them figure it out.) Our spirits will be consumed, not broken. 
• News readers and entertainers are making high-quality broadcasts from home. Many use branded, professional backdrops. Working from home, once a privilege for most workers, will rapidly become an accepted norm. (And there is entertainment value in seeing our favorite personalities’ home studies.)

Had COVID-19 descended before widespread technology adoption, including the screens, cameras, sensors, and sufficiently fast networks to connect us, society may have broken down. Financial markets would have shuttered. Logistics, managed with telephones and spreadsheets, would have derailed. 

As recently as the early 1990’s, social distancing’s cost would have been orders of magnitude worse than what we are now sustaining. We may have faced choosing either economic collapse and mass starvation, or the viral culling of 1% or more of our fellow human beings.

Sudden Disruptions Bring Enduring Changes

Disruptions can catalyze permanent change. We can experience both what is possible, and what is unnecessary. Broad adoption of once suspect concepts enables social acceptance.   

The trade show no one really wanted

Do you remember the Comdex trade show (OK, Boomer)? Held annually in Las Vegas it was the second-largest tech gathering in the world. Comdex, or “Geek Week,” was the must-attend event of the year. It blotted out every personal calendar in the industry for the month before Thanksgiving. Until 2001. Tragedy. 9/11. 

Corporate travel from Europe and especially from Asia was suspended. Customers didn’t attend. Somehow, deals and innovation continued without pause. We had a mass awakening. “We don’t need Comdex! And we don’t like going, anyway.” Attendance fell from 200,000 in 2000, to 40,000 in 2003, to zero. Comdex was unnecessary. 

A freeway that blocked the sun

Thirty years ago San Francisco had an unnecessary freeway. Today’s palm-lined, brick-paved Embarcadero waterfront was a damp concrete echo chamber. It lay beneath a towering double-decker freeway. Multiple ballot measures and demonstrations were unable to remove the 1959 edifice of America’s devotion to cars and commerce. 

Rationalized acceptance ruled. Easy city access was vital to local restaurants! The traffic jams! Demolition was too expensive! The San Andreas Fault did not rationalize. 

Damage from the October 17, 1989, Loma Prieta earthquake forced demolition of the “Embarcadero Skyway.” Trade has boomed. Overflowing office towers keep multiplying. The sun beams on thousands taking noon-time strolls. No one wants back what few thought they could do without.

Imagining a different future is a cognitive burden. Most of us will rationalize acceptance of how things are. Maybe we are trying to free up brain space for seemingly manageable parts of our lives. That’s reasonable, but also inflexibly tolerant of the status quo. As earthquakes change the courses of rivers, widespread social distancing programs will enable new flows for our professional, educational, and personal lives. 

Big Changes Will be Permanent

Home-delivered booze will stop flowing, but other changes will remain. Our sense of home has expanded. Tens of millions of workers are never going back to the office five days a week. 

Social barriers to work-from-home are being broken for compelling reasons. A 2015 Citi survey showed that the average daily commute cost in the United States was $12 and 45 minutes per day. That’s $3,000 and 200 hours per year not counting clothes, meals, and honking horn stress. GlobalWorkplaceAnalytics.com finds that 80% of U.S. workers want to work from home at least some of the time.

50% of Millennials would even change jobs for that opportunity. Fewer on-site staff cuts operating costs. A 2019 AirTasker survey supports what many suspect: working from home is more productive. With potentially 45% to 50%, or 60 million to 70 million Americans, trying to work from home during the coronavirus pandemic, broad social acceptance is guaranteed. 

The same computing, networking, and sensing technologies that have supported our stability in this crisis also force long-term social flexibility. Along with working from home, studying at home and getting substantial online medical attention will become accepted norms. 

Soon we’ll look back and wonder how we functioned otherwise. Think about those poor slobs in 1995 using a desk phone, a Rolodex, and Windows 3.1. I believe that’s how 2019 will look to us in 2025.

To be Stable, Experiment 

Mandated lifestyle changes may last for many months. No one can pinpoint a coronavirus pandemic end date. Other unpredictable disruptions will happen in the future: that’s guaranteed. To stay relevant, practice flexibility now. Get good at it. 

When you experiment, discern what works and what doesn’t. Note improvements in client outcomes, student learning results, employee satisfaction, and your own personal happiness. Figure out what you’re going to incorporate post-social-distancing.

Risk accompanies experiments. Coach Wooden also taught, those afraid to risk failure seldom have to face success.  

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Photo by Medienstürmer on Unsplash