Lessons Learned for the Next Time

Mark Mullaly is president of Interthink Consulting Incorporated, an organizational development and change firm specializing in the creation of effective organizational project management solutions. Since 1990, it has worked with companies throughout North America to develop, enhance and implement effective project management tools, processes, structures and capabilities. Mark was most recently co-lead investigator of the Value of Project Management research project sponsored by PMI. You can read more of his writing at markmullaly.com.

  Career Development   Risk Management  

We’ve all had to adapt. For some of us, it’s been a harder adjustment than for others. For all of us, there has been change and frustration and difficulty.

As I write this, we are a little more than a year past the World Health Organization declaring the COVID-19 virus a global pandemic. Since then, things haven’t been terribly normal. Many are still working from home and haven’t seen their office since. Others have had no choice but to keep going to work, and have managed as best they can under very trying circumstances.

Apart from paper towels, toilet paper and yeast flying off the shelves, supply chains have struggled to keep laptops and webcams in stock as we all get used to having meetings over Zoom and other digital platforms. The virtues of different ring-lights—never a term uttered in casual conversation prior to this—have become the subject of vigorous and opinionated debate.

While this has been a universal experience, it has also been a deeply personal one. We are not all in the same boat. We are in the same storm, but the qualities of our boat—and the experience of those navigating—is very, very different. Each of us have faced different challenges in varying degrees. We have processed it differently, responded differently, coped differently and are carrying different insights and different scars out of it.

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