A simple yet effective practice well known to altMBA alumni: reach out and connect with three people per day.

Catch them doing great work. Catch them after long while. Catch them in the kitchen adjusting to the new rhythms of life.

It doesn’t have to be much. Just consider what you might do if you reached 100 people (three per day times 30-plus days) and said, “Hey — I see you. I’m thinking of you. How are you? How can I be of service?”

***

PS: Today’s a great day to raft up. Plenty of connections waiting to happen there.

If you’re going to call a meeting right now, you’d better be crystal clear about who and what it’s for.

(The discomfort of trying to manage suddenly disrupted operations and dispersed people probably isn’t a good enough excuse.)

As a friend of mine recently pointed out, “keep the trains running on time” — the default message for many leaders — sounds really tone-deaf right now. There just isn’t that much on the trains. Business and life go on, as they must, but not as before.

There are really only two topics worth discussing at the moment: what’s now, and what’s next. In other words, is everyone OK now, and what can we do to set ourselves up to stay OK over the short to long term?

Many leaders are still uncomfortable with (if not in direct denial of) uncertainty, and the inherent uncertainty of these conversations is likely to cause a lot of leaders a lot of discomfort.

Most of the time, most people want to be seen and heard. That’s especially true when under stress and uncertainty. And when there’s only one conversation going on in the world, the only decision is how much time you’re willing to devote to it in any other conversation you might want to have.

The question before leaders is this: how comfortable are you with moving into a more pastoral style of relating to your people? Can you sit with the uncertainty and discomfort of this moment and the future? Can you find a way, as Gen. Stanley McChrystal once said, to put a hand on a shoulder when you can’t be physically present?

***

PSAs for the day:

• Professional persuaders, tell folks to stay home (via IttyBiz)
• Now that we’re all online, what can you do to make the conversation better? (Seth Godin)
• Keep sane by practicing mindfulness — even while washing your hands (Ten Percent)
• Rather than stay stuck at home, now’s a great time to create. Join Scott Perry and me on Zoom at 4:00pm ET tomorrow (Thursday) for a conversation about doing the work you’ve always wanted to do. Details and Zoom link here.

Misneach.

An Irish word. A word I learned from Brian Doyle, who called it “a big word” with “lots of meanings.”

Here are the meanings he gave it in his novel The Plover: “Stay afloat. Don’t drown. Don’t quit. Stay with the boat.”

The Irish, of course, would have a word for “don’t give up the ship.”

Consider adding that word to your vocabulary today.

Misneach.

Now that “social distancing” is a sudden and strong contender for word of the year, it begs the question, how best can social animals keep sane while keeping safe distances?

As a video that crossed my radar recently showed, there are viruses and there are viruses: in the time of Covid-19, a Spanish fitness instructor’s rooftop class has now justifiably gone viral.

Two points are worth keeping in mind here:

First, the initial elation of “working remotely” soon fades. One or two days of pretending to work in pajamas feels like a cheeky return to childhood; much more than a week starts to feel like cabin fever.

Second, we’ve never had better tools to connect during a time of enforced distancing — and, as the rooftop fitness example shows, a little imagination and initiative can galvanize people at home and around the world.

From letters to phone calls to email to Zoom, technologies new and old are available for creating connections across far more than three feet of enforced space.

We might not be able to touch much, but reaching out is still powerful.

***

PS: Limiting or focusing incoming information is also more important than ever. Today’s a great day to sign up for Fredrick Haugen’s weekly good newsletter, Seven Good Things.

In the fall of 2012, during a weeklong refuge from a wildfire, I found and devoured a secondhand copy of Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire.

This week, in a similar burst of affective reading, I picked up and have already consumed the first half of Erik Larson’s latest historical thriller, The Splendid and the Vile.

It’s the story of Churchill, his inner circle, his family, and (some of) his staff during his first year as prime minister, which coincided with the London Blitz and the Battle of Britain. It is neither a history of the Blitz itself nor of Churchill (the man or the politician), but it provides a front-row seat to the year in which “Churchill became Churchill,” as Larson writes in his introduction.

And just how did he do that? Though famously indomitable and indefatigable, energy alone did not accomplish the transformation of the person, the bureaucracy, or the public morale.

In Larson’s portrait, two qualities stand out. As a manager, Churchill knew who ought to take which responsibilities, and he masterfully conducted the orchestra of his cabinet and their departments. As a leader, Larson highlights over and over again Churchill’s ability not merely to turn a phrase, but to deliver even the bloodiest of bad news in such a way as to leave his audience with heightened though clear-eyed resolved.

As Larson writes, “it is one thing to say ‘Carry on,’ quite another to do it.” Churchill did it, and his example, as well as his words, live on because of it.

And, lest we forget, Churchill set that example and spoke those words without knowing the outcome, as we do today. Rather, as he said in his eulogy for his predecessor, Neville Chamberlain (and a phrase that serves as epigraph to Larson’s book), “It is not given to human beings — happily for them, for otherwise life would be intolerable — to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events.”

Some systems are obviously ripe for reimagining or reinforcing in the short term. All the myriad processes of business continuity and telework, for instance, or personal and public hygiene practices and customs of interaction.

But short-term systems are more responsive to short-term, improvisational fixes. It’s the big systems with long-term consequences that really demand focus now and in the future:

• Adequacy and resiliency in the medical system
• Ditto the food system
• Ditto the financial system
• Ditto educational systems (at all levels)
• Ditto government (also at all levels)

Let’s get specific with two examples from New York City.

In the first case, NYC public schools apparently are unable to close because so many students rely on the schools for food. Schools might have been a workable answer to the question of where to get food to hungry kids in normal times, but free and reduced-price school meals are not adequate responses to hunger writ large.

Second, a couple I know is debating what to do right now. On the one hand, they don’t get paid if they don’t work — and they really miss every dollar they don’t earn. On the other hand, they are desperate to get out of a city that’s on the brink, and they’re lucky enough to have someplace else to go. Granted, they’re also lucky enough that they won’t fall into the abyss even if they skip work, but they’re seriously weighing a couple thousand dollars in potential income against the possibility of getting sick, stuck, or both.

They’re certainly not the only people in their situation, but they at least have the option to change their situation.

I don’t have any answers here, but I continue to believe — and insist — that this country can do better than this, both for the fortunate-enough and the many, many others who are truly trapped by circumstances.

I’ve been traveling a lot this week. Enough that it would have felt like a lot at any time, and more than enough to feel like a lot during these nervous times.

And while it was remarkable how many seats on the plane were empty yesterday, and how few people were at the airport, and how picked-over the shelves were at every pharmacy and grocery we tried, those weren’t ultimately the most interesting things I saw.

No: it was the pilot standing in the aisle to personally greet us before takeoff and wish us well on our ways after landing. It was the bus drivers, subway workers, and many retail employees who all showed up for work and carried out their duties — sometimes masked, sometimes gloved, but almost always with a smile to spare.

And yes, it was also the people in the planes, buses, trains, and stores who didn’t panic or pitch a fit when they couldn’t find what they wanted.

Civilization might be an awfully thin veneer, but humanity — and basic, everyday courage — also runs deep. Consider that.

Today had the feeling of an impending blizzard — only with blue skies and sun.

No one knows quite what’s coming or when.

Group panic, though easily accessible, is not helpful.

There’s no reason to restrict the equally arbitrary and strategic practice of goal-setting for the first 100 days to famous people taking on famous roles.

One hundred days is about 14 weeks, or a little bit more than a quarter. In other words, it’s probably not enough time to accomplish everything, but it’s almost certainly enough time to set the patterns that will largely determine what you’ll accomplish.

And, the more unknowns or degrees of flexibility you begin with, the more important it is to set priorities and patterns.

Today starts a new 100 days — as mindfully and intentionally as possible.

***

HT Brent

Different kinds of leaps require different certainty about the landing.

Gymnasts, skaters, and dancers have to know and stick their landings precisely.

Long- and high-jumpers don’t have to land pretty or precisely — they just have to jump as best they can in a known direction.

For most people, landing a parachute within a few football fields is precise enough.

Plan the leap, and plan to land as best you can. But don’t get more hung up on style points or precision than any given jump requires.