Until Further Notice - Season One

 In the days after the lockdown was first introduced in Massachusetts a friend came across a Harvard Business Review article entitled ‘That Discomfort You’re Feeling Is Grief’. Over the course of a few days it was widely shared, as we each tried to come to terms with lives that had changed more rapidly than we ever expected. 

The scale of the change differed amongst friends and colleagues. Some were half a world away from parents and spouses. As President Trump announced broad travel bans, they were unsure whether to travel or stay in place, for risk of spreading the virus. For others, weddings were postponed and celebrations cancelled. For my class at the Kennedy School, our year of learning had been disrupted: classes moved online and our connections became more distant. 

My colleague and friend, Beth Fukumoto, and I had been talking about developing a project for some time. We have broad and distinct interests but a similar shared view that the systemic changes facing our generation require new models of participation and leadership. From tackling climate change, to creating pathways for economic mobility, to simulating growth as populations age and productivity stagnates, it’s long been apparent that these problems can’t be solved by businesses or governments in isolation. Echoing Ron Heifetz’s view that leadership is an activity, not a set of characteristics, we wanted to explore how those of us who aren’t CEOs, Presidents or Prime Ministers, can think about creating change, even in small, local ways that can, in aggregate, make a big difference. I wrote this blog before the murder of George Floyd, but the protests that have spread across the US and the ongoing work of Black activists have underlined for me that change requires each of us to act, from whatever position we hold.

We felt like now was the right time to dive into this in more depth, so we’ve launched a new podcast - titled Until Further Notice - where we’ll be discussing these ideas with guests each week. 

We reached out to David Kessler - the expert on grief and the stages of loss who was interviewed in the HBR piece - for our first episode. You’ll hear Beth and I discussing some of David’s ideas in the podcast, but the thing that really struck me was the idea of ‘anticipatory grief’. As David describes it: “that feeling we get about what the future holds when we’re uncertain.” For almost all of us, the world feels less safe and far more fractured than it did just three months ago. David’s approach to naming what we’re feeling has been really helpful in giving me some scaffolding as we adjust to the ‘new normal’.

It took us a little while to get the podcast cleared but we hope you enjoy the conversation. We’ll be publishing more over the coming weeks, and would love feedback and comments as we get used to recording remotely.