You’re a member of an organization in the midst of change. Perhaps your role addresses change directly. For instance, you may be a business analyst, project manager, IT manager – these roles would have little meaning outside the context of change. You likely wouldn’t have a job, or if you did, your role would be something different, perhaps more static and procedural.
But for better or worse, you are part of a team that is known for creating both miracles and mischief, opportunity and chaos. Everything always gets better… eventually, although there are often speed bumps along the way. Software can never be tested as well as it should, no matter how many iterations of the known, or imagined, possible issues you test for; there are unexpected shortfalls where dependencies are unfulfilled, which create breakdowns in critical processes; people are not trained as well as they should have been, or are simply resistant to utilizing the new procedures you are implicated in bringing about.*
You are not always everyone’s favorite person. Your team may be looked at as pariahs who have set out to ruin people’s careers, end life as they know it, possibly enemy agents of some competitor trying to undermine entire businesses that have taken years to perfect. Yet there are moments, after everything gets fixed, people discover the new ease and efficiencies, and things just get better all around, that you might get a wave of kudos from the people who hated you until just last week. They may even seem to like you, ask you out for cocktails. Until next time.
You are a change agent – something as mythical as it is practical. You need a special set of tools to do your job well, or exceptionally well, and they may not all be things that you can learn by gathering degrees and certifications. You may learn them playing chess or on a high school sports team, playing music, being a bartender, who knows?
One skill you will NEVER be able to do without, if you want to be more than a filler of slots as defined by HR, is to think outside the box. You hear this all the time, but what does it mean? Is it simply about having new ideas? And even when you DO have a genius creative idea, you will often see jaws drop, eyebrows rise, you’ll get hushed by the other twenty folks in the room who just don’t get it. They may even be really smart people who often have great ideas themselves, but they just can’t fathom what you’re getting on about. It might take them time. It might take them years, if you don’t find another genius idea about how to present your idea in a way that is consumable to your audience.
But is thinking creatively actually a skill? No, a skill is a habit, a well-formed process that you have developed over time, and that continues to work for you. Creativity, or thinking outside the box, is exactly the opposite of that. It is the breaking of habits – habits are the box you need to get out of. So how do you perform creatively on a consistent basis? You develop a different sort of habit, on a different level, a habit of changing the way you look at things. You learn constantly, you become a bit of oddball, perhaps. But you’ll be in good company.
*Although at large well-greased software companies, as in my current gig, we don’t have such luxury, and have methodologies in place to eliminate implementation issues down to the infinitesimal.