A STORM IS COMING. WHAT DO YOU DO?

My first storm

When I was a child in my village in south east of Poland, the mother of my friend did not come back from the field. Then I saw her laying on the ground and her neighbors were digging a hole in the ground, covering her with the wet soil as they believed that this is the way to get her back to life after lightning hit her in the field. The lightening has hit actually the pitchfork that she was carrying. The other lady who was walking with her survived and she alerted her family to bring her to the village. At the end, the soil, the digging, the crying of her kids did not saved her. She remained dead.

a storm is an opportunity

Hills

Farmers in my village had fields spread all over the area. The area was spread all over the three hills. You would say: we are going to harvest our wheat on the first hill tomorrow… or my parents are today working in the field on the second hill… or we have to plow the field on the third hill – which was a pain as there were always so many stones in the soil so you had to be careful while holding the plow pulled by our horse. And no tractor – there were two of them in the village back then – would go there, because of the stones… Later on, in the school, I have learned that the stones were there since the ice age when the hills were moved by glaciers across the country. Not everything was negative about the stones. Our house was built on fundaments made out of those stones. And our road throughout the village was built out of those stones. I still remember the guys with hammers working inch by inch in our village to lay down a road with the small stones. And only decades later, I could see how the Romans did it by using the huge stones to build the Via Antica. I thought – wow! What an improvement. And how pity we did not know about it in our village. Despite that it happened more than 2000 years before.

Here comes the storm…

A storm is created when the center of a low pressure develops , surrounded by high pressure. These opposing forces create a sucking power that sucks the low pressure in the center up. By the high pressure around.

Now, when you think about it, a storm to become a reality, needs a low pressure, something or somebody down in the center. The destructing energy of a storm can only develop when there are two energies: one pushing down and one pushing up. You might say, a storm start when there is a conflict, two extremes, a tension. What a storm does then, is it tries to regain the balance. Bringing back the stability in the system. So it lets the upwards energy work with the downwards energy for as long as need to. Eventually, they reach a balance.

The storm is over…

When the downward energy in the cloud become stronger than the upward one, the storm starts to weaken. Since warm moist air can no longer rise, rain can no longer form. The storm dies out with a few rain drops as the cloud disappears from bottom to top. The storm dying takes about one hour for an ordinary thunderstorm.

Most of us react to the unexpected by protecting our belongings. We protect ourselves, our family, our house. In business, we freeze and hold to our business models, structures, and processes. We build fences not to lose our assets. It is human to avoid losses.

Yet, some of us react differently. More like an Aikido fighter. They welcome the energy of the unexpected. They turn it into an opportunity. The unexpected drives their imagination and it produces positive outcomes. The destructive wind becomes a wind of change. The past assets become the building materials of the future.

A STORM CAN DIVIDE. A STORM CAN UNITE. A STORM IS AN OPPORTUNITY…