My day didn’t start with questions. It started with traffic. The main thing on my mind was how to get to Melville for breakfast.

(As an aside, as a Capetonian, I laugh in the face of people from Joburg who complain about traffic. They have no idea. Shem.)

But I arrived at the restaurant in good time to join the BrightRock team and Professor Nicola Kleyn, whose academic speciality is the ever-evolving science of change.

The occasion was the launch of the Change Science Institute, in partnership with Henley Business School Africa, BrightRock’s latest initiative to better understand the nature of change and how all of us can become better at it.

Over breakfast, came the questions. Three of them really stuck with me.

“How does storytelling shift my ideas about who I am?”

“What does being in the soupy dissolution of change mean?”

“Why do children take up more space when there are fences around a playground?”

Things are moving so quickly right now, in good and challenging ways, that we all need to become adept at adapting to change.

That means changing our minds, changing our attitudes, changing our understanding of what is happening to us, and changing what we believe we can and can’t do about it.

“Change is hard, even when we choose it,” said Mandy Collins, a Change Exchange writer who has navigated big and small changes over the past decade.

Regardless of how much we intellectually understand that we are proactively choosing something, it can still paralyse us and evoke existential dread of the future.

This is what the Change Exchange and the Change Science Institute aim to help us understand.

What are the tools and suggestions we can use to find our way through, with compassion and grace for ourselves and our situations?

Stories are the key for me. At breakfast, as a group of writers, we spoke about storytelling and the nature of identity, exploring how we speak and how we write ourselves into being and becoming.

My question as I drove home was, how can I bring more “main character energy” (a beautiful Gen Z phrase) into my life?

How do I reframe, reimagine and rewrite my past, present, and future? I can totally get behind storytelling as a change tool.

Nicola described the process of change using a metaphor of metamorphosis, which is what happens to a caterpillar in a chrysalis as it transforms into a butterfly.

For the transformation to happen, the caterpillar needs to dissolve into nothing more than a soupy mix of cells. The complete loss of the caterpillar is what allows the butterfly to grow.

I was listening to Nicola’s description with side-eyes and a frown, but Suzanne Stevens, CEO of BrightRock, was excited by it.

“Now that sounds like fun!” She said. I think this ability is what makes Suzanne CEO material. Her instinct is to embrace change with curiosity and openness. Mine appears to be to treat it with deep suspicion and fear.

This left me thinking: how do I grow this capacity for relaxing into change, rather than tensing up for it?

Suzanne’s way seems a lot less painful (and she probably gets a lot more sleep).

And lastly, fences. In creativity, there is the idea of the “beautiful constraint”, the belief that we are more creative and exploratory when we have constraints imposed on us.

Infinite choice and possibility make choosing impossible. We may end up doing nothing. This puts us at the mercy of people who are brave enough to do things.

As you can see, the breakfast conversation left me with questions, answers, and a whole lot to think about.

What is clear to me is that I need new frameworks and tools for managing change in my life.

I am excited to see what Nicola and the Change Science Institute learn and share about the nature of change, and how it can help me look into the sparkly soup of possibility and think, “Yeah! Let’s do it!”

To find out more about Change Science Institute, visit www.changescienceinstitute.co.za.