What if disruption is where you thrive?

Raise your hand if you were the kid in elementary school who loved a good disruption. A fire drill? Great. An assembly? Even better. A field trip that threw the entire schedule out the window? Best day ever.

I was one of those kids. Anything that took “routine” and tossed it upside down.

We've been talking this month about building resilience in the normal, the routines and ordinary spaces between the big dots on our timelines. For most people, routine helps us rebuild capacity. Knowing what comes next reduces some of our cognitive load and gives our brains room to recover.

But here's the thing: not everyone experiences routine, or disruption, the same way.

There's a small group of people, around 7%, who actually feel more energized by disruption. They're happier when something changes. They see possibility where other people see uncertainty. Give them an unexpected problem to solve, and they get more engaged.

That can be an incredible quality in a leader. But what happens when that leader is working with a team that doesn't experience change the same way?

Maybe you walk into a Monday morning meeting excited about a new idea. You see the opportunity immediately. Meanwhile, someone on your team is thinking, “Seriously? Again??”

Neither of you is wrong.

The person who values routine may see risks you don't. Their caution isn't necessarily resistance to change. Their expertise may be exactly what keeps you from grabbing a tiger by the tail without realizing what you've gotten yourself into.

But there's a downside for the person who thrives in disruption, too. If you're known as the person who always wants to try something new, people may start

discounting your ideas before you've even finished explaining them.

Now your idea isn't being evaluated on whether it's good. It's being evaluated based on what people already believe about you.

And this is where our conversation about resilience in the routine gets more interesting.

It's not enough to know what strengthens your resilience. We also have to recognize that the people we live with, work with, and lead may respond to routine and disruption very differently than we do.

How do you lead change when disruption energizes you but drains your team? How do you make sure the people protecting the routine aren't automatically labeled resistant, while the people challenging it aren't automatically dismissed as disruptive?

That's what we're going to explore at our next Think Tank on October 27 at 12:05 PM ET.

We're going to talk about - and to - the outliers, the people who thrive in disruption and push them about how to respect the people who depend on routine, and what happens when all of those people have to navigate change together.

Because resilience isn't about getting everyone to respond to change the way you do.

It's learning how to navigate change with people who don't.

All my best,

Dr. G