Against the normality blues, let’s put our ideas into action!

And you, how is the back-to-school treating you? For most of us, our Made in France holidays have almost put us back on track to normality. We would like to believe that the bad dream is over: back to business as usual. Moving on, we are picking up where we left off!

Still, part of us remembers the creative chaos of lockdown with nostalgia and thinks that everything should be reinvented.

What is this strange feeling? It is the normality blues. Faced with this potentially pivotal moment in our shared history, we are torn between the primary need to regain stability and the irrepressible urge to rethink everything.

So, to chase away old unmasked habits, let us dare the idea! To rediscover this springtime spirit that forced us all to step out of the status quo, let us dare a new way of working – a humbler and more collaborative way.

What we will take back from lockdown is the courage to face the facts, to start from the real, all while retaining the peace of this unique moment. It has given us our “new commandments”:

Favor a new dialogue, human to human. Neither client/provider, nor judge/candidate, nor boss/subordinate: lockdown has placed us all in a new horizontal position, at an individual level. Barging in on our intimacy, redefining work codes, demanding (skillful) improvisation: we have learned to work together differently. This had the effect of boosting debates, enhancing feedback, and bringing us together around the same essential.

Defend the free flow of ideas, intuitions, and emotions. From constraint sprang spontaneity, from urgency, the sincerity of speech. All of this has redefined the notion of governance, leaving more room for initiative and collaboration to meet new business challenges.

Strengthen network intelligence. We have learned (sometimes with great difficulty) to use new technologies to establish and deploy our intelligence as a network. These “enhanced” exchanges have given birth to new cultural corporate communities and awakened local identities. The goal is to preserve and develop these new forms of business sociability.

Awaken your awareness. Is this the end of established dogmas? Unbridled consumerism? Growth for growth…? One thing is certain, more than ever, it seems impossible to continue this “insanity”, which consists of “always doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”, to use the famous words of Albert Einstein.

Privilege reality. In the face of adversity, a return to reality seems inevitable. The reality bonus offered by designers and their concrete solutions to the crisis has accelerated the implementation of strategic and operational solutions. And this victory of creativity and change has passed through each of our hearts.

Cultivate peace. Driven outside our comfort zones, we have rediscovered how lucky strikes, risky accidents, and off-screen curiosity have become key assets in transforming companies and brands.

In this period where daring ideas rage, it is a question of refining them with extreme accuracy and implementing them with relentless efficiency. Let us dare the idea as a catalyst for getting out of this crisis, and let us not neglect its implementation so that by the start of the 2021 school year, we can all be proud of the work accomplished and the meaning we will have given it.

The Lonsdale Change Designers