Growth through this program has been mostly a matter of organizing and migrating concepts and ideas I had already had exposure to in my professional life to a more orderly, more data-driven, and less chaotic understanding. In the process, everything I know has become more valuable, more useful, and more intentional, and I am hopeful that I will see professional results quickly. When coupled with my 25 years of doing everything the hard way, with too little time and too little money, I believe I will be taken more seriously as a potential leader. In fact, it’s already begun happening. Just a few days ago, I was taken completely seriously as a candidate for the new executive director position at Ashland’s only news outlet, ashland.news. I will find out in a matter of days if my new career has already started.
Five years ago, my consulting business grew by a factor of three and then, four years ago, collapsed by a factor of five. My personal life was stagnant. I honestly felt I had realized whatever potential I was going to realize, and that there wasn’t much reason left for ambition, and was nothing left to do with the years remaining other than wait. Two different occurrences changed my outlook permanently.
The business decline itself forced a change and made it impossible to try to find another way forward. Without constant reinvention, a business model eventually stops generating its own momentum. After 21 years, I had exhausted the natural potential for the skills I had developed starting in 1999, and I didn’t want technology to be my main driver any longer. The catalyst for acting on that, coming back to finish a degree I’d started thirty-three years earlier, was reuniting with my partner Donna after eighteen years apart. That reconnection also led directly to partnering with her at The Oaks Center. The professional and the personal aren’t separate stories.
Reinvention forced by circumstance, and sustained deliberately rather than left to chance, my personal crisis and radical and abrupt reorientation, is what the program’s material on change kept surfacing in another context.
Almost anything worth calling “management” is actually change management, in one way or another. Everything else is more accurately described as administration or execution, composed mainly of known quantities and existing workflows. That distinction sounds obvious in retrospect, but it changed how I think in basic ways. Kotter’s distinction between complacency, false urgency, and true urgency gave that idea a practical edge: when a small team is facing more urgent-seeming demands than it has bandwidth for (or when an individual is facing bankruptcy as a result of complacency), without good data it’s genuinely hard to tell which fires are real. Deciding to prioritize a STARBASE contract bid (which we won) over continued work on a long project developing a mentoring course (which we are still working on), for instance, was an easier call once there was real data to analyze. A better chance of making a small amount of progress rather than a small chance at making a much larger amount – the return on the course is still mostly a hopeful guess, but we are in operation and surviving.
That same discipline, narrowing to what the data actually supports rather than what feels most urgent, turned out to apply just as directly at a much smaller scale. The behavioral change work in PSY2230 made it concrete in personal terms: picking one narrow, achievable change, going to bed on time for three consecutive nights, rather than trying to fix a lifelong sleep problem all at once, and treating a deliberate “fresh start” as a tool rather than something that either works or doesn’t. Whether the scope is an organization’s competing priorities or a single stubborn habit, the same pattern holds: narrow scope, real data, deliberate reset points, now shows up in how priorities get sequenced across three organizations at once, rather than trying to solve every urgent problem simultaneously.
There are plenty of urgent problems. The country, and the world is in a state that could charitably be called “crazy-making”, and yet we must continue. My multidisciplinary course of study at Northeastern CPS has improved my eyesight and my judgment, sharpened my communications and my analysis, and given me practical paths forward where a little over four years ago, after a business and a relationship faded into daily sameness without the potential of progress, there was really no reason to look to the future at all.