The Great Reset: What Will (Need to) Change after the Crisis?
Insights from a House of Beautiful Business Living Room Session
by Tim Leberecht A lot has already been written about the world after coronavirus. Right now, it’s hard to imagine that there will be a new normal and what it might look like. But since “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste,” as the Stanford economist Paul Romer once noted, it is worth discussing what we can already learn from the crisis at this point, in order to reshape our economies and societies, redesign our organizations, and improve the way we work, live, and love. The pandemic has exposed what Otto Scharmer calls the three big disconnects: disconnect from our planet, disconnect from the other, and disconnect from ourselves. We can use this crisis as an opportunity to overcome these divides. In this spirit, the House of Beautiful Business hosted a virtual Living Room Session called “The Great Reset” to reflect on all this. If this is indeed the Great Reset, a fundamental disruption of all our systems, and the biggest change management program in our lifetime, then what are we going to do after this forced period of behavior change? Which changes will last, which will fade? And what is the change we really want? Focusing on business and the economy, our three guiding questions for the discussion were: It’s a privilege, of course, to have this conversation in the first place, from our comfortable living rooms around the world, while millions of people, among them many vulnerable populations, suffer acutely from the virus, and medical professionals and others are putting their own lives at risk to save others. All of us are affected by the uncertainty of this unprecedented situation, so thinking about a post-corona world may serve to help alleviate some of our anxieties. Projecting future scenarios might relieve some of that tension on our collective and individual psyches, already exhausted by the pace and complexity of what is happening. To prove the point, the interest in this session was huge, with 450 people joining and many actively contributing to the conversation via live-questions or chat. They also appeared to be an optimistic bunch: in our opening poll, 80 percent responded “yes” to the question, “Will humankind seize the pandemic crisis to make the world a better place?” It’s a sentiment they shared with our four panelists: Ciela Hartanov, head of next-practice innovation and strategy, people development, at Google; Jessica Orkin, CEO of SYPartners; Gianpiero Petriglieri, associate professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD and a Thinker50; and Guy Standing, development economist, author of Plunder of the Commons, among many other books, and founding member of the Basic Income Earth Network. Will the world be a better place after all this? Orkin concurred with “a giant yes,” while cautioning that “we must confront our darker demons. But I think that the better angels within us will prevail.” Hartanov agreed because “we simply must.” Petriglieri, a self-proclaimed “skeptical optimist,” nodded as well, but reframed the issue: “The world will be a better place, yes — but, for whom?” There will be winners and losers, as after any historic event — from the Great Depression to the 2008 financial crisis — but, as Standing underscored in his remarks, the great reset is not the great equalizer. Sure, it may make us all feel more connected in battle against a common enemy, but those already vulnerable, weak, and marginalized are much more exposed than knowledge workers who can afford to leverage it as a prompt for professional and personal reassessments. Nonetheless, we started our discussion with (knowledge) work as the one aspect of our lives where many of us experience the current crisis in the most immediate fashion. “Everything is either too slow and too fast at the same time,” Petriglieri observed. We are forced to act swiftly — bypass bureaucracy and formality — and improvise. On the other hand, we are also dealing with vast amounts of unstructured time and have been gifted an opportunity, outside of 9–5 and corporate protocol, to reflect and contemplate, at least those of us lucky enough not to be overwhelmed by immediate financial woes. Now that we are mostly inside our box, out-of-the-box is the new default. Many are thus experiencing a crisis of self: “It’s not discomfort that we’re feeling, it’s grief,” Scott Berinato put it in an article. Petriglieri coined the term “panic-working”: Those of us forced to find out what’s left of us without work are resorting to “workaholism” in an attempt to stave off a kind of “ego-death.” Who are we if not — or when not — successful and productive? How do we discover other parts of our identity outside of work? How can we learn to do nothing again? Referring to Freud, Petriglieri, a trained psychiatrist, suggested that panic-working was just a more exaggerated manifestation of what drives us to work in the first place: fear of mortality: “Our kindness to each other and work at best can both allow us to sort of prolong our life and build better communities.” He observed himself “really desperately trying to hold on to everything. I mean, I’m not going to let this crisis, you know, ruin me. I’m not going to let a pandemic damage my productivity! You could call this ‘internalized managerialism,’ with work as a ‘manic defense’ against uncertainty and anxiety of everything.” He said he only shut off this “internal managerialism” when he put his to-do list on hiatus and started compiling a to-care list: “I made a list of people or groups I care about and then organized it, day by day, by doing things that actually benefit these people or groups. I found that was a much more pro-social way to deal with my anxiety.” Ciela Hartanov, who helps Google leaders become future-ready, believes that big companies can help accelerate positive societal transformation: “It’s not always the choice that’s made. But I think what’s happening right now is there is no other choice.” Like Petriglieri, she observed a bifurcation at work. On the one hand, colleagues who want to “solve and fix,” are stepping up and volunteering to be on the crisis-response team, and on the other hand those “people who are stepping back and watching and taking this as an opportunity to notice and reflect.” One was not better than the other, Hartanov said, but “if I really do want to make this a moment of transformation, we need a groundswell of folks who want to go inward and question what is really possible, and how they are individually showing up in this moment, and whether it’s going to get us that transformation.” Hartanov foresees a shift from “knowledge work” to “perceptual work”: “We’ve been talking about vulnerability and brave leadership for such a long time and at this moment, there is no other choice. And I am seeing people step forward in that way. But we also need to actually perceive the world differently before we can behave differently long-term. And because of that, when I think about developmentally what’s required for leaders going forward, is that they need new perceptual capacities.” She believes for too long we’ve over-indexed on individual outcomes: “If we look at organizational cultures built on OKRs and individual achievements, it has been so exacerbated that basically there is no other way in which to be in an organization. But as a leader, personally, I must be honest about the fact that I don’t have the answer. And that we’re going to figure out the answer together, because that’s the truth of this current situation. Those leaders who are able to communicate and live that will thrive.” It was an unexpectedly soft and humble note coming from a tech executive. Big Tech is having a post-techlash moment indeed: the COVID-19 crisis reminds the Silicon Valley firms of their idealistic roots. While some observers fear a further consolidation of their already enormous power, we need these companies to step up now more than ever. How they will wield their power post-corona will have an outsize influence on how great of a reset we will see — and who will benefit from it. Jessica Orkin, CEO of SYPartners, advises Fortune 500 companies and their leaders on transformation. She wondered if what we’re witnessing is less a Great Reset than a Great Accelerator that amplifies existing trends and widens cracks in the system. “Business was broken before this happened,” she said, and now would be the time to actually acknowledge what is broken in business and what is broken in our society, and then build a better set of systems, build a better way of working: “For many of the leaders whom we work with, who are mostly CEOs and executive teams of Fortune 100 and 500 firms, and also often older economy companies, this pandemic is the remover of illusions. It is a sudden opening-up of the windows and seeing what really is. The winners will be those who are already building new systems; shifting from multi-stakeholder capitalism to more distributed leadership and management systems; shifting from top-down authoritarian control both in civic structures as well as in business.” Orkin said she hoped the crisis would help leaders design their organizations as organisms whose output is whole and healthy people, not just financial returns or consumer value. This current moment is a pivotal one regarding the role of business in society. While many companies deserve praise for responding to the crisis with concrete support measures and voluntary help or generous donations, we should be cautious, Orkin warned, not to delegate too much authority to business, or grant them more influence than it already enjoys. In a similar vein, Siva Vaidhyanathan warned of a new “economism” that might further devalue anything that is not quantifiable. It’s another paradox of this crisis: Never before was the importance of the economy more evident. For some, the pandemic is a numbers game, and we’ll likely see a massive surge of dataism, of analytics and science-based decision-making, with a fierce impetus to quantify everything so we’re better prepared to catch deviations, and to ensure we don’t have any fat in the system. In the worst-case scenario, this will result in a near-total surveillance society. Petriglieri pointed out: “For the tech industry the question now is: can it really show support for democracy, safety, and freedom,” or will it further propel (digital) Taylorism, “which tends to take these things away.” On the other hand, it’s never been more evident and more important to consider what it means to be human. We are all alone together now. We appreciate that we are indeed all social animals. We are more forgiving, more tender to one another. We allow ourselves and other more mood swings. We allow ourselves a broader range of emotions, both positive and negative ones, in the face of the crisis. Orkin insisted that the “internalities,” or our interior lives, are as important as the economics, that we need to tend to all that which is inside, both as individuals and organizations. She views the current crisis as an opportunity to recognize the multiple selves that we are at work and beyond, which are now converging and coming to the fore (as knowledge workers sit on Zoom client calls with children in their lap, or chefs forced to shutter their restaurants start writing again). She concluded that any conversation erring too much on the side of the economics, while neglecting the “internalities,” would waste a massive opportunity. Guy Standing, the economist and activist, however, insisted on the economic context for any discussion about change, rejecting to reduce the crisis to a mere management or leadership issue. Real change, he argued, must be led by the young, the members of the precariat who are going to push for it. “I think one positive outcome of this crisis could be the emergence of new social movements that will form the agency that we need to pressurize the system,” he said. The plutocrats, in other words, tinkering around the edges with corporate social responsibility programs, aren’t going to save us. As Standing sees it, our problem to date was that we just have not been putting enough subversive pressure on the system to make fundamental changes. He asserts that we moved from neoliberalism to rentier capitalism, where more and more of the income and wealth goes to people who have physical property, financial property, or intellectual property, while the share of income going to labor has gone down all over the world. He further pointed out that in the UK, care work, for example, was valued at 1.24 trillion pounds — more than the total value created in manufacturing and all non-financial services. “But we don’t value that in our economic growth marbles. We don’t value it in our talk of GNP.” Have we entered what Karl Polanyi, in his seminal 1944 book The Great Transformation, called the “disembodied phase of transformation”? Standing believes so, and that the ramifications of this crisis are much worse than they would have been had they happened in the past, simply because the economic system is chronically fragile: “We’ve had a new class structure with a plutocracy ruling and manipulating laws and government institutions and this emerging precarious. We had a tremendous fragility. The current economic crisis was just waiting to happen for a long time, and it’s a bit itemized by the fact that we have more debt than at any time in history. At the time of the Spanish flu, in 1919 and 1920 — exactly 100 years ago — U.S. private debt was less than 50% of GDP. Now it’s over 150%, so with just a slight downturn, you’re going to have a cascade of homelessness bankruptcies, suicides, and rising morbidity, as well as rising mortality.” In his book, Battling Eight Giants: Basic Income Now, Standing calls for battling inequality, insecurity, debt, stress, precarity, populism, automation, and extinction. For him, Universal Basic Income (UBI) is not the only way, but a very promising way to get out of the current crisis. He’s been making the case for UBI for several decades and believes the coronavirus crisis will give it a huge boost. He argues that UBI presents a virtuous cycle: “Universal Basic Income would enhance freedom. It would enhance basic security, which is a public good and a human need. And it would be a matter of common justice, so that we share public wealth. We’ve seen that it in fact leads people to make better decisions, have less stress, improve their education, work more productively and cooperatively, and have better altruistic views and be more tolerant of strangers and so on. It has a wide range of positive qualities.” “Like the kind of very bad flu that reveals the frailty of an ailing global body, this crisis strips away the illusion of immortality that characterizes our youthful moments,” Petriglieri further suggested. “And that can be a good thing. Or it can be terrifying and devastating. And a lot of it depends on the resources you have.” Mortality re-occurred as a theme at the end of a session. A key part of any major economic and societal reset will be how and what we ascribe value to. “Imagining New Value” was the title of a workshop that SYPartners hosted at the House of Beautiful Business annual gathering last year in Lisbon, and it served as a springboard for a whole workstream on this topic. Jessica Orkin’s colleague Thomas Winkelmann, principal of creative direction and partnerships at SYPartners, presented the preliminary findings in the Living Room session. Under the theme, “From Endings to New Beginnings,” Thomas and his team had used the “top five regrets of the dying” as the basis for reflecting on emerging shifts happening in society, and translated them into six themes relevant for businesses and their leadership: time, identity, growth, freedom, connection, and community. What qualities would we strive for, how would we express ourselves, and how would we design and run our companies if we based it on those regrets (as cues of what we find actually valuable, what truly matters in our lives)? A forthcoming Living Room Session will invite you to engage with these questions more closely. When we closed the session by asking the panelists about immediate next steps and the quality most needed now, Petriglieri said: holding. As leaders, professionals, and humans, we tend to over-emphasize vision and assertive decision-making, but we under-value “holding.” It seems that if we’re serious about using this crisis for a Great Reset, we need to start by holding for a bit longer — holding this space, this conversation, these ideas, our own, and holding each other. ### The world after the coronavirus Coronavirus will change the world permanently. Here’s how. Eight Emerging Lessons: From Coronavirus to Climate Action How the World Will Look After the Coronavirus Pandemic What if we stopped pretending? Post-Techlash Tech: Will Technology Become More Humane? The three cleavages This economist has a plan to fix capitalism. It’s time we all listened. Coronavirus Capitalism — and How to Beat It COVID-19 is a litmus test for stakeholder capitalism Life on lockdown in China How do you shelter in place when you don’t have a home? 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The world will be a better place after the crisis — but for whom?
From “panic-working” to “to-care-lists,” from knowledge to perceptual work
Work cultures, and the mindsets and skills, are changing fast.
The crisis as a remover of illusions
A new economism or a new focus on the interior?
A collective mid-life crisis
And finally, holding
Further readings
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Living Room Sessions are part of a Residency at the House of Beautiful Business, a global think tank and community with the mission to make humans more humans and business more beautiful. In response to the global coronavirus crisis, we’ve opened up Living Room Sessions to the public until the end of April.