I once finished a large design project for a major client, and just as I was ready to hit the send button on my email to deliver the document the telephone rang. My partner for the project told me to sit down for the news he was about to deliver. The client wanted to change a foundation concept for the project, meaning that I was going to have to rewrite the entire document. Later in the day when we were on a conference call with the client, she laughed and said, “welcome to our world, almost every day.”

As service providers inside of organizations or outside, we must be ready to turn on a dime. Companies, leaders, markets, budgets, and products are changing rapidly, causing our activities and jobs to change as well.

One of the best ways to handle change is to be among those who are implementing the ideas for change. But because we know that sometimes it will be handed to us, like my situation of earlier today, we must be prepared to embrace it. Instead of looking at the project as rework, I’m approaching it with a creative mind to see how I might make this new direction work even better than our original one. This is easy when I consider the options: 1) I can feel miserable about having to make the change; or 2) I can embrace the change as an opportunity to improve the outcome of the project.