Spring is sprung, the grass is riz.
anonymous, though a favourite of the great Spike Milligan,
I wonder where the birdies is.
They say the birdies on the wing, but that’s absurd.
I always thought the wing was on the bird.
this poem may well have inspired Leonard Cohen’s most famous lyric 😉
The clocks changed for summer on Sunday 28th March here in the UK. This week we are expecting temperatures over 20c (c70f). Birdsong is so loud that it wakes me at dawn (love that!), daffodils blooming. Time to cut the grass, take out the summer cycling gear, remove the liner from my walking jacket. Also, again here in the UK, yesterday, 29th March, the first step of easing the pandemic lockdown began, and with Easter weekend ahead, I’m allowed a small group of visitors in my garden for the first time in, well, so many months I can’t immediately recall how long.
Living in the Cayman Islands for about half of my life, since I moved to the UK a few years ago I really appreciate the seasons, and, with my blood used to warmer weather, my favourite of these is the shift from winter to spring. It seems to mark a lifting of energy and addition of positive momentum for whatever change we are seeking, for ourselves, our businesses, projects, goals, actions.
As for me, this week my writing may be a bit simpler than usual, as everything is under plastic sheeting for the last in a whole series of projects over the winter in updating my house.
This brings me to a note for leaders. Where timing of change is predictable, always look out to the future enough to those predictable markers and then ask yourself what that can mean for your business.
Using my house projects as an example, I could predict that by summer it would be the time to have guests and visitors. I, therefore, focussed this winter on ensuring I planned and executed all of the many trades and projects to have the house ready for those guests.
For your business, if you can predictably forecast key dates or ranges of dates where opportunities will be there for you, are you already looking at that now and investing time and resources for this? One client is running a context of “Be Ready”, as they have a predictable marker in their industry in the second half of this year where they know they will see an upsurge in activity, so everything they focus on now is with that context of being ready when the opportunity comes. What do you need to be ready for?