I saw Lloyd Robertson and Craig Oliver on the news last night. Those guys have been doing what they do, forever. Even Lloyd's "big change," when he moved from CBC to CTV, was decades ago, now.
Reminds me a bit of my last place of employment where among the cadre of senior executives there was a pride that most had done nothing else career wise, known no other employer in their work lives. Indeed, several of the employment spans measured easily into multiple decades, with no change in sight.
Lloyd and Craig are not required to run their organization, so such continuity as theirs does not run smack dab into the face of what every organization has faced since the culture of the '50s faded in the '70s, which is the pressure to change, driven by whatever it is that does the driving -- the requirement of constant fiscal growth or perhaps the usual suspect, technology.
The first speeches I ever wrote for the FP 100 crowd were about change and the refrain, growing cliché even then, was that the only constant was change itself. Imagine then organizations run by individuals who are themselves so utterly resistant to change that there is a train wreck of a collision when that hesitancy and the now almost universally accepted reality (meaning it's pretty invisible and just is) that things aren't going to be the same from one day to the next in the "business (for profit or not) world." What makes it pathetic (and frankly from the outside looking in, entertaining) is that the status-quo-from-a-few-status-quos-ago" crowd are informed enough that they know they need to change but are so incapable of doing so or even trying they construct change paradigms designed precisely to keep change on the other side of the moat. Train wreck doesn't begin to get at it, especially for those who are employed by those in denial and have to experience a work day filled with the contradictions of an approach that takes the language and behaviour of change we must by changing by not changing so that it looks like we're changing because if the organization doesn't change we'll fail....
But that's Corporate or organizational or marketplace change, which is a great source of course of upheaval to those people (just about all of us) who work, who are those organizations that are changing as standard course. But that's a requirement of work these days; to change. What makes organizational change an issue at all is, I figure, the fact that at an organic and individual level, we as people don't want change. I don't think we're hard wired to choose change (although we've got all sorts of innate psychological and physiological mechanisms to deal with it when it occurs on occasion versus as a constant) with its stresses and uncertainties over the sense that what worked to feed and shelter me and my cro magnon buddies one day shouldn't be toyed with lest it lead to being hungry while sitting out in the open rain and cold the next.
Which brings me to Edmonton. Not the cold and rain, but the change in that here I am. I'm here and no longer there -- there has been change. The answer to the question "how am I doing with the move?" comes down then to how I'm dealing with change. As a young man I made significant moves (geographic, career, psychological) often and with ease. This change not so easy.
I just read this morning a reference in a book, which cited profoundly obvious research findings that as we age, especially, we reject novelty. Hilariously, one study found specific ages after which it is unlikely one is likely to get a body piercing, change our taste in music, or move across the country, I'd add. I like the language of novelty, it's, ah, new. I have been using the term, comfort as this move has proceeded, but pretty much as the opposite of novelty.
I am excited about being in Edmonton, both in terms of being back in Western Canada, and for what it represents on the career front -- it's a good job! But there is, at 50 years of age, a very strong desire for things this Friday morning to be the same they were on any given Friday morning of say six months ago. Why? Well, it was comfortable. There was no novelty, beyond perhaps of learning what stupidity might have erupted overnight in the minds of my supervisor at the time and the change that would erupt paradoxically in the name of protecting the status quo at all costs.
But just thinking that, of writing it, that the default seems to be comfort, resistance to novel experience, just makes me drive in the opposite direction. It doesn't erase the desire of keeping with the familiar, but it angers me with myself enough that pining for the now in response to the tomorrow (and its change) makes change the more welcome outcome. Not any easier to leave people and things and places so distant physically, but we've just moved, we haven't died and darnit the good of the before does not poison the good to be had in the new now.
It is also the fact that the current status of here being the away, was 20 years ago both the here I was leaving AND years earlier the there I was moving to. So, when I retire in this job in 10 or 15 years where we've left this month will be the new there, difficult to move toward from the comfort of here, which at the moment is the there :)
Home is of course defined by people and relationships. This province was once home and there is a strong positive sense of a homecoming for me. But change has a before and after which is its very definition and my home of the past 20 years is now behind me and the difficulty of this change in homes is of course the people who are there when we are here. To that I say, I miss you, already.
He Who is Now Landed and Ruby the Portuguese Annoyance Dog arrived at Edmonton International airport on Saturday. Here (the photo, taken with my CrackBerry) Ruby relaxes wtih an imported beer (none of that crap she got at my brother's place). HWiNL and Ruby were welcomed to Edmonton by a wind storm that blew the town apart -- apparently, according to the weather office, it was simply luck that the storm did not become tornadoes. It WAS wild. Ruby could have cared less, HWiNL had a shower during the powerful electrical storm and I was chased inside by the fear of a tree falling on me when trying to take Ruby for her night walk. I didn't walk on one street on Sunday or this morning that didn't have a tree down or major tree limbs torn from trees and littering the streets. I never think about how much I love trees until I see them blown down in storms.
