What Has This Change Made Possible?
The question leaders forget to ask because they're lamenting what they've lost
“The hardest thing in the world is to change the minds of people who keep saying, ‘But we’ve always done it this way.’ These are days of fast changes and if we don’t change with them, we can get hurt or lost.”
For years, when my children were small, I would have loved more opportunities to work from home.
I wanted a working life that let me be both a committed professional and a mother, without constantly trading one against the other. At that time, it was extraordinarily difficult to achieve.
The technology largely existed. The work could be done. What hadn't shifted were the assumptions about where serious work happened and managers trust that people were working.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
There was nothing positive about a pandemic that caused enormous loss. But organisations were forced to do something many had resisted for years. Before the pandemic, the question was often "Why should we let people work from home? Afterward, it became "How do we make working from home work?"
The opportunity had been there all along. What changed was that leaders were forced to become open to it so organisations could keep operating.
It makes you wonder, what are we currently calling impossible, when what we actually mean is that's not how we do things around here?
What we see first
When something they value comes under threat, the natural response of most leaders is to notice what they might lose before they start looking for what could become possible.
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky studied this. They found that we judge a gain or a loss by comparing it to what we already have, not on its own. And losing something usually feels worse than gaining the same amount feels good.
For leaders, that can mean concentrating so hard on protecting the existing business, role, system or way of working that there's little attention left for anything else.
This is where I think we undersell flexibility as a leadership skill.
Flexibility means that leaders can reconsider assumptions once the conditions around them have changed.
The opportunity is there as well as the difficulty. It doesn't replace it. A leader with enough steadiness to widen their view can still ask a different question:
Where is the opportunity in this change?
Don't wait for the disruption
There's an even better time to ask that question: before circumstances force you to.
A leader can use foresight to notice that something might be changing, in technology, customers, regulation, people or the wider environment, and ask what could it mean without needing to have the answer. Then a leader can ask a simpler question:
What might this make possible?
A leader doesn't need to be certain that answer is right before they test it. They can try it on a small scale instead of committing the whole organisation to it.
Saras Sarasvathy calls this affordable loss: a leader decides what they can afford to risk and experiments within that boundary while the future is still uncertain. A leader doesn't need to pretend there's no downside. They limit it.
Try something small. See what happens. Learn. Adjust. Build capability.
That's using Adaptive Stability: a leader stays grounded in what matters while remaining flexible enough to respond to what's changing.
Sometimes a leader only discovers a constraint wasn't really fixed after something forces them to test it, the way COVID forced the work-from-home question. Sometimes they can see that same kind of possibility well before anything forces the issue.
A leader who builds the capacity to notice both has time to experiment and implement with more time. While everyone else is still catching up with a change that is on the cusp of happening, that leader has already tested what might make it possible.
Toyota is a good example of the second kind. It started developing hybrid car technology in the 1990s, years before fuel prices, regulation or customer demand forced other companies to develop electric vehicles. By the time the market caught up, the Toyota Prius already existed.
Leaders who work this way aren't smarter than everyone else. They just started paying attention to signals earlier and began to entertain what’s possible before they were forced to.
Three ways to build the habit
After the next disruption, ask what it's made possible before you finish listing what it cost you or the organisation. Both are relevant. But resist the natural tendency to focus on what you’ve lost.
Set a standing quarterly half hour to call out one or two weak signals with your team, even ones that feel too early to act on. The value is in noticing them before you need to.
Before you commit to testing an idea, decide what you're willing to lose finding out. Set that limit before the experiment starts, while it's still just a plan on paper.
So perhaps the question isn't only: Where is the opportunity in this change?
It's also: What could you try now, before disruption forces you to do it?
