Leading Change Risk & Resilience

Dancing Through Chaos

Shellye Archambeau

11.20.21

How can dancers spin in circles and move elegantly to the next move, while a 4-year-old will fall flat on their back? It's all about focus - what are you focusing on amidst the spinning chaos?

Summary:

How can dancers spin in circles and move elegantly to the next move, while a 4-year-old will fall flat on their back? It’s all about focus – what are you focusing on amidst the spinning chaos?

Thuy

How can these resilience lessons be applied in the current environment of accelerating change?
Shellye_Archambeau

Shellye Archambeau

Yes. It's not really that dissimilar, believe it or not, even though it is. But it isn't in terms of what you need to do. When chaos is happening around you, which was happening, chaos, right, companies are folding, people don’t know what's going on. It's chaos. What's most important is focus. It's focus. The analogy I like to use is spinning around, when you have chaos, you're spinning around. Well, when you see a three or four year old, they get up there and they spin around, and spin around the next thing you know, they end up flat on their back. Typically giggling, but flat on their back. Well for a dancer, right? You see a dancer, they get up, they spin and they spin and they spin and then they elegantly go into the next thing. What's the difference? The difference is a focal point. Dancers pick a focal point, right? Their eyes stay glued. They spin, then they whip their head around to come right back to the focal point. That focal point and that focus, it's the same thing we need to do in business. And frankly, even in our personal lives, when there is chaos going on, all these things happening that could pull you from one thing to the next, right. It's really important to stay focused on the strategy. What are you trying to achieve? How do you go get it done and making sure that there is alignment all the way through the team, no matter what size of team you have.