Intentionally Creating a "New Normal"

I just returned from the ASU+GSV summit with a brain full of new ideas and a sense of relief knowing that coming back together is possible with the right planning and protocols for safety.

The words “new normal” are being thrown around regularly, but between overbooked calendars and burnout, we will need time and intentional space to co-create the kind of normal that will help each of us thrive.

Priya Parker (author of "The Art of Gathering") recently shared: “Asking employees if they want to “return to the office” is asking the wrong question. Instead, managers should ask: What did you long for when we couldn’t physically meet? What did you not miss and are ready to discard? What forms of meeting did you invent during the pandemic out of necessity that, surprisingly, worked? What might we experiment with now?”

Over the years, we at the UIA have consistently found that we need to carve out intentional space for the important things we want to happen between and among our campuses, such as brainstorming, improvement work, ideation, process improvement, and trust-building. (This is why we always include “team time” in all UIA convenings.) We know how busy people are, and regardless of our best intentions, if we don’t create space for faculty, staff, and administrators to reconsider and examine the ways our systems impact the lives of our vulnerable students, it simply won’t happen.

As we rethink how we gather and which meetings to keep or leave behind, consider planning your events and meetings based on how you want people to feel at various moments in the experience. Doing this small but meaningful exercise is an essential step in the process of creating effective gatherings. Before your next planning process, start with brainstorming how you want people to feel at specific moments in time:

• when they receive the invitation?
• leading up to the event?
• when they arrive?
• at the end of the first day?
• at the beginning of the second day?
• as they leave the event?
• two weeks after the experience?

Your answers should determine everything: the event design, the communication strategy you develop, whether there will be pre-matching experiences or virtual events leading up to it, and the kinds of material or welcome gestures you will share. We have one opportunity to rethink how we come back together after these 18 months apart, and we owe ourselves the gift of learning from our experiences to make our future gatherings as fulfilling and uplifting as possible.

August 27, 2021