The Three R’s of Recovery

Just a heads-up that this post is a bit different — no datasets or links. It’s been a tricky week in America with elections and the annual State of the Union address, reports on jobs and housing and closings; I’ve been thinking a lot about why change is so damned hard for us.

I was on a call earlier this week with a group of folks trying to figure out how to respond to a crippling plant closure in a small town.

What do we do when the factory leaves town, the relationship ends, the job goes away? There’s a pattern we follow. (Photo by Thomas Becher, Unsplash)

The pain was unique and specific – no two plant closings hit the same way – but it was also eerily familiar. Over the course of my work life, I’ve helped a total of 26 small towns that have faced plant shutdowns, so I know these things follow a pattern. This week I was reminded of how similar that pattern is to the ones we face in other parts of our lives, and, perhaps, helps us understand our current national epidemic of fear and anger.

It’s easy to minimize the pain of change unless you are the one who is doing the changing. When it happens to you, it’s terrifying.

Too often those of us NOT going through the change make it sound easy. “Just” come up with a new way of imagining your town – what an opportunity! “Just” find somebody completely new and different to fall in love with – how exciting will that be! “Just” go back to school and get a new degree or learn a completely new trade or new set of skills – you can finally discover your dream passion! “Just” move to a completely new part of the country.

But as the world speeds up, it’s more important than ever that we get better at change. Small towns built around the notion of a small number of large employers can’t count on that in the future.

The volatility ripples outward. Our changing work lives may require radically new ways of thinking about our relationships: our schedules, our location, our mental state, even our location could change. Some relationships can weather those storms, but those kinds of stresses might change.

There’s a process every small town goes through each time a major employer closes shop. I think it’s the same one we go through when change comes knocking at our door -- or clubbing us over the head.

Call it “The Three R’s of Recovery.”

Retain: When something devastating happens to us, we first do everything we can to undo it. Towns look for ways to convince the departing company to stay. They make promises to change zoning, offer incentives, apologies – the same things we instinctively do when a relationship falls apart or a job blows up.

The easiest thing to do in crisis always seems to be to retain the status quo: find a way to keep the factory in town; convince the loved one to stay; convince the boss not to lay us off.

Except it’s seldom that easy. The company has almost always been thinking about the shutdown for a long time – there’s a fundamental market or management or logistics or personnel problem. In the case of the plant shutdown we were discussing on the conference call, the industry was simultaneously automating, globalizing and moving to completely new products.

Similarly, relationship challenges are seldom one thing; they can incubate for months or years before blowing up. Layoffs come after doing serious, tough math on market trends; firings are more likely to be based on a series of incidents rather than a single mistake.

Replace: It takes a lot of time and tears to give up on the idea of saving the company, the relationship or the job. But when we finally do, the next easiest option is to find something else as close as possible to what we had.

Towns look for another company that can use the abandoned equipment or the shell of the same building or the same site, or that needs workers with the same sorts of skills as those who worked in the old plant.

When we seek out our next relationship, we look for someone who “gets us” in the same way as the previous person – our sense of humor; our taste in food; our politics; our pets.

And if we can find a new job that is like the job we lost, requires no new training and pays the same, chances are we’ll take it, even if we didn’t love the old job and the new one it means a longer commute.

Reimagine: What nobody is excited to do, at least not for a long time, is to start over, to imagine a very different future. The factory we were discussing in our conference call this week had been a fixture of the town for more than a century. It was part of the town’s self-image. People grew up assuming they would work there and that it would continue forever.

We are keenly aware of sunken costs. The technical college has spent a lot of money setting up training programs to get people ready for jobs at the factory that’s shutting down. The office supply store down the street and the diner around the corner and the parts supplier just up the road depend on the business from the company and its employees.

Or… we’ve already invested five months or five years or five decades in the relationship. We’ve just gotten the certification needed for the disappearing job, and just bought a house assuming the job would last. Are we really going to wave goodbye to all that?

Change is confusing - and full of possibilities. (Photo Alan Rodriguez, Unsplash)

Reimagining our future means admitting we don’t know everything. It means making new connections with some people we’ve never talked to before. It means taking a hard look at what we care about, believe in and have to offer the world. It probably means longer hours and lower rewards in the near term. It means taking chances on some things that may not work out and having to start over more than once.

But it also means a clean slate. Once the factory is gone, maybe the new businesses you find will bring new energy, cleaner air and water, thirty batches of 10 jobs each and new opportunities for folks who could never get work at the factory. Once that old personal relationship is over, you may be able to dress differently or hang out with different friends or laugh louder. Once you chuck the old job, you may be able to do the thing that makes you happier or makes you more money or gives you more free time.

There’s a lot of change going on in America these days, and I think this frame helps us understand why so many of us are so frightened and angry. The economy is morphing at a speed we’ve never seen before -- whole industries are rising and falling in five years, not fifty. That means when we lose jobs we’re more likely than ever to have to do something completely different. The existing demographic hierarchy is being threatened. Wherever we sat in the previous pecking order, chances are our place is in flux, and even if we are moving “up,” life is going to be different than what we are familiar with.

We’re being asked to give up what is familiar to us and the people who are telling us we need to do that are acting like it is easy. It’s not.  Change is complicated. And even when it makes us better, the process of change generally sucks.

That’s why we try to retain the status quo, to go back to the way it “used to be,” or try to replace it with the closest alternative we can find -- that’s all deeply attractive and seductive. But at some point we have to admit that change has happened: the old plant is closed; the previous relationship is over; the old hierarchy is evolving; the former job is gone. In this frightening, volatile, unpredictable world, we’re going to need to give each other permission, and support, to reimagine.

-Leslie