Sunday Story: Disruption hits all of us

Welcome back to Sunday Story, and this one is proof of what we shared in the finale of our Disruption Prep for Leaders series: the most important thing to weather a disruption is the people you surround yourself with!

Our family is fond of big adventures - we take “road trips” to the extreme, and regularly travel wherever we need to go via 4x4 kitted out for adventure. Our truck has a custom cap, a drawer unit, a fridge, a tent, and a full electrical system all designed and built by us so that it would work “just right” when we’re out on the road. Basically, it’s equipped for us to live out of it full-time, indefinitely, which means it’s the perfect adventure companion for us.

And we’ve used it all over North America - from Oregon to Ontario, this little truck has taken us to some incredible places where we’ve spent some glorious time together and with friends.

It’s also how I get to work every day, our grocery getter, and the first vehicle our son was ever in as we gave him a ride from the COVID-filled hospital in April of 2020. A car, to us, is far more than the sum of it’s parts - it’s as if a little bit of the spirit of everyone who put their time and energy into it comes to life and accompanies us on our journeys, which is why, like humans throughout history, we affectionally gave him a name: He is big and silver like an elephant - and elephants have a recurring theme in our adventures - so we decided to pick an appropriately elephant-themed name: Pachyderm, or Pac for short.

This week, though, Pac experienced an unexpected mechanical issue - one we can fix, but not easily - and was suddenly no longer driveable..

We’ve said before that disruption can come in all shapes and sizes. While we’ve written about disruptors as wide-ranging as UAP, solar flares, and housing crises to the more every-day disruptors like manipulation and conflict, and the fact is it’s all the same - these are things that get in the way of your day-to-day life, and require some measure of time and energy to deal with that you would probably normally have spent on other stuff.

A broken car is a great example of a personal disruptor in our society, which has largely been shaped around the ubiquity of the humble automobile. If you are used to having a car, you’ll make all sorts of choices that depend on that car for them to be accessible and easy - where we live, where we shop, and more all are influenced by being able to hop behind the wheel and turn the key. And when turning the key is no longer an option, everything is thrown for a loop.

How was I going to get to work? We live a bit of a distance from town. What about groceries? School and other activities for our son? All this and more were things that our reliable, operational vehicle made possible without a second thought. When it became unreliable, we needed a new plan for all of these things. Rental cars are an option, but at $500 a week that adds up fast. Taxi cabs are not much cheaper. There is a bus nearby, but it’s about an hour walk to get to and from the stop. We have bicycles - but candidly, not the fitness levels needed to rely on them right away and we would need to build into it. At least, I sure would! Of course, there's no time like the present. Regardless of our ultimate solution, it took a lot of bandwidth to make the shift.

Almost immediately though, we confirmed once again that what we wrote about is true - the secret for resilience through disruption is your community, and holy cow are we lucky to have such a great one where we lived. We had not one but multiple people offering us their cars when they were not using them. The rental company gave us a discount. Coworkers and friends offered to come pick us up even though we are no where near “on the way”. What was - and remains a big disruptor, as we’re waiting on parts to get mobile again - has turned into a blip largely because of the people we’re surrounded by.

It’s more important than ever to find your community. These could be people who share a passion or hobby with you, folks you work with, or maybe you can join a volunteer organization with a cause close to your heart. However you find it, the most important thing is to find it and find it before the disruption hits, because when it hits these are the people you will be relying on.

But it wasn’t just relying on our community in a disruption - we also rely on them during a transformation. We recently welcomed our dear friend and collaborator Chris Fukushima to the Authentik team, and we’ve got some amazing in-person plans for events that will download all of our skills and experience in managing difficult behaviours to you. We’re hosting two events - a Managing Manipulation session, and a Handling Conflict Without the Stress workshop. Both of these sessions are building on our incredibly high assessment scores from our previous engagements, and are meant to help you be a better leader. When we launched them last week, we once again relied on our community - not because this was a disruption, but this is a transformation for Authentik and our service offerings, and our community helped us there too with the “likes” and “shares” that helped get the word out. We’re so grateful to all the people who helped bring awareness to this event.

The moral of this Sunday Story is pretty simple - we all rely on others to help us. Community is essential, and we are grateful for ours.

Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next Sunday.