COVID-19: Making the Impossible Possible

If you asked NASA on April 12th 1970 the probability that three astronauts could survive a trip to the moon and back in the flimsy lunar module after a catastrophic failure and explosion in the oxygen tank in the control module, I'd bet they would put it at 0%. On April 13th that is exactly what happened.

Before March of 2020, many businesses told employees that working from home was "impossible." IT departments told executives that running an internal application from remote sites was "impossible" to secure. Executives told each other that maintaining productivity with a work-from-home workforce was "impossible." Working from anywhere but the the office simply was not an option... Then, all of a sudden, one day in March or April everything changed.

What happened that one day? How did "impossible" change to "difficult but doable?" Did technology take a drastic step forward? Did security cease to be a concern?All that happened was a shift in mindset. The prior day, we approached the problem like NOT doing it was an option. Once we changed our outlook to remove failure as an option, the way to success became clear.

When approaching a problem or assessing a new idea, we think of all the ways that something can go wrong, blow up in our faces, or just plain fail. We are too busy trying to predict doom to even see that there is a path to success. It turns out, when we change the question from "Can we...?" to "How do we...?" nothing is impossible. Things can be difficult, inadvisable, or even unreasonable but not impossible. Don't wait for the next crisis to shift your mindset--start now.