The Postnormal Future of Work

Not a blip, but a transition past normalcy.

Every organization must be prepared to abandon everything it does to survive in the future.

| Peter Drucker

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Welcome to the Postnormal

We live in an in-between period where old orthodoxies are dying, new ones have yet to be born, and very few things seem to make sense. Ours is a transitional age, a time without the confidence that we can return to any past we have known and with no confidence in any path to a desirable, attainable or sustainable future. It is a time when all choices seem perilous, likely to lead to ruin, if not entirely over the edge of the abyss. In our time it is possible to dream all dreams of visionary futures but almost impossible to believe we have the capability or commitment to make any of them a reality. We live in a state of flux beset by indecision: what is for the best, which is worse? We are disempowered by the risks, cowed into timidity by fear of the choices we might be inclined or persuaded to contemplate.

| Ziauddin Sardar, Welcome to postnormal times

In 2014, confronted by the fallout of a global recession, Ziauddin Sardar borrowed the idea of the postnormal from Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz. Those researchers wanted to make a delineation between normal science as characterized by Thomas Kuhn in the seminal The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and the institutional model of science-informed policy of the 1980s and 1990s. Funtowicz and Ravetz argued that in many highly critical circumstances we find ‘facts uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent’. Sardar generalized the idea of a postnormal era, enlarging the term beyond being just a context for scientific inquiry and policy making.

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We live in an in-between period where old orthodoxies are dying, new ones have yet to be born, and very few things seem to make sense.

| Ziauddin Sardar

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Sardar was writing about 2014’s economic challenges, not today’s pandemic. However, none of the problems of 2014 have been fully resolved. They continue, setting the context for the current crisis, and amplifying its effects. Again, Sardar:

‘The first decade of the 21st century has been a series of wake up calls’, says an advertisement for IBM. ‘These are system crises — from security, to climate, to food and water, to energy, to financial markets and more’. What is unique about these crises is that they have occurred simultaneously: ‘we have never seen any era when we have been hit by all these multiple crisis at the one time’, says UN General Secretary, Ban Ki-moon. It is not just that things are going wrong; they are going wrong spectacularly, on a global scale, and in multiple and concurrent ways. We thus find ourselves in a situation that is far from normal; and have entered the domain of the postnormal.

In this essay, I don’t dwell on the epidemiology of coronavirus, the political controversies about national and regional responses to the pandemic, or how the crisis is exacerbating the deep tensions and fissures in our society, like steadily rising economic inequality, unequal healthcare, and our apparent inability to counter global climate change. However, we are in a situation, here in May 2020, where those factors are not only central to our capacity to respond to coronavirus, it is becoming more clear every week that the pandemic — for at least the foreseeable future — will disproportionately harm those disadvantaged by patterns of the past, and conceivably — unless we take unprecedented action — the backdrop behind the pandemic’s devastation could make those conditions worse.

As I said, though, this essay will focus on what may happen to the way we work: where we work, how work gets done, what tools and techniques are emerging in this postnormal context, and the nature of the relationship between workers are their employers, and their livelihoods. You will hear echoes of the larger context outside the video conferencing and working-from-home of today’s knowledge workers, the challenges of frontline workers, and the reconsidered workplaces of the postnormal, post-coronavirus business world of the near future.

Leaving the Normal Behind, All At Once

Things that were unimaginable only a few months ago are now the rule, as Jamelle Bouie recently pointed out [emphasis mine]:

In one short month, the United States has made a significant leap toward a kind of emergency social democracy, in recognition of the fact that no individual or community could possibly be prepared for the devastation wrought by the pandemic. Should the health and economic crisis extend through the year, there’s a strong chance that Americans will move even further down that road, as businesses shutter, unemployment continues to mount and the federal government is the only entity that can keep the entire economy afloat.

But this logic — that ordinary people need security in the face of social and economic volatility — is as true in normal times as it is under crisis. If something like a social democratic state is feasible under these conditions, then it is absolutely possible when growth is high and unemployment is low.

The same holds with the changes that are being rolled out in the workplace as an emergency response to coronavirus: if businesses can now accept remote work, video-conferencing, and curtailed business travel, those practices could certainly have been rolled out before the pandemic. However, the will to do so was lacking, or at the very least the benefits were not so clearly highlighted.

A great deal of what we accepted as foundational to the way of work, pre-coronavirus can now be considered as extraneous, or life-threatening. Business cards. Shaking hands. Tightly packed Las Vegas trade shows. While some of these may come back, many may not, or be changed dramatically.

Hanko — a Japanese official stamp

Consider the Japanese custom — and legal requirement — of stamping official documents and contracts with inked seals (hanko or inhan). Along with a generally paper-bound and face-to-face working culture, the reliance on hanko is making it hard for Japan to transition to remote work even during the pandemic. Employees are forced to visit otherwise shut-down buildings to stamp contracts and government forms to make them legal.

This is a stand-in for all the customs and practices worldwide that only a few weeks ago seemed normal, but which now are barriers to functioning in a drastically different world. What is the equivalent to hanko in your country and business?

A colleague of mine had to postpone a call because his company was being evacuated due to coronavirus contamination. They had not yet completed plans for total remote work but were being forced to adopt it in real-time. I wrote about that and wondered about remotely onboarding new employees, given no preparation:

Is your business ready to take human resources online? What would your company have to do about recruiting and interviewing candidates — or even onboarding new employees — when the office is shut down?

When my colleague and I finally connected a few days later and I mentioned onboarding, he said he had attended a virtual meeting of his company’s VPs to figure out that very problem, only a few hours earlier.

In the following sections I will touch on various themes, starting with the drastic shift to remote work today and speculating about the postnormal world of business ahead of us.

Remote Work, Today: Shelter From The Storm

The wholesale adoption of working from home is not being driven by a sudden realization of its benefits, although a great deal of prior research has demonstrated many.

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Clearly, the great majority of companies that have moved to remote work are responding to the immediate threats from coronavirus, and the myriad impacts it is having on society, like the closure of schools and daycare. It’s an emergency response, not an evaluative judgment of the efficacy of remote work.

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For example, in a recent post I discussed research that shows pre-pandemic remote workers were more productive, engaged, and rated their managers more highly than their counterparts working in the office, leading to an insight:

Maybe working with remote workers makes managers better managers.

Clearly, the great majority of companies that have moved to remote work are responding to the immediate threats from coronavirus, and the myriad impacts it is having on society, like the closure of schools and daycare. It’s an emergency response, not an evaluative judgment of the efficacy of remote work. And the intention of management may be to return to the office as soon as possible, at least as an initial premise.

Can we quantify the scale of this precipitous change? MIT’s Eric Brynjolfsson and a group of researchers surveyed US workers and found an enormous swing to remote work in the weeks prior to the report’s publishing on 8 April 2020 [emphasis mine]:

We report the results of a nationally-representative sample of the US population on how they are adapting to the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey ran from April 1–5, 2020. Of those employed four weeks earlier, 34.1% report they were commuting and are now working from home. In addition, 11.8% report being laid-off or furloughed in the last 4 weeks. There is a strong negative relationship between the fraction in a state still commuting to work and the fraction working from home which suggests that many workers currently commuting could be converted to remote workers. We find that the share of people switching to remote work can be predicted by the incidence of COVID-19 and that younger people were more likely to switch to remote work. Furthermore, using data on state unemployment insurance (UI) claims, we find that states with higher fractions of remote workers have higher than-expected UI claims.

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Of the respondents, 14,173 reported something other than “None of the above…” This gives an implied employment rate of 57%, which is slightly lower than the BLS estimate of about 60%. For the rest of our analysis, we restrict our sample to those reporting being employed four weeks prior.

The distribution of answers pooled over all respondents is shown in Figure 1. We can see that the most common response from workers was that they continue to commute, at 37.6% (95% CI is [36.3,38.9]). But the next most common was that they have switched from commuting to working from home.

The fraction of workers who switched to working from home is about 34.1%. In addition, 14.6% reporting they were already working from home pre-COVID-19. This suggests nearly half the workforce is now working from home, significantly more than the Dingel and Neiman (2020) estimate of 34% of people working at home.

source: Eric Brynjolfsson, et al

The researchers looked at gender, region, and age but those factors are less relevant than the stark reality: it appears that those who would otherwise be commuting to work are either a/ working from home or b/ filing for unemployment insurance.

The Future of Work: What Will Be The New Normal?

Again, from Brynjolfsson’s group:

These are a set of preliminary analyses of an evolving crisis. We have documented some early shifts in the economy, and it remains to be seen if some of these changes last beyond the end of the pandemic. For instance, once business and individuals invest in the fixed costs of remote work, including technology but perhaps more importantly in developing the necessary human capital and organizational processes, then they may decide to stay with the new methods. Furthermore, the crisis has forced people to try out new approaches, some of which may be unexpectedly efficient or effective. In either case, lasting changes from the crisis would be expected.

We document some early facts about how the US labor force is responding to COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, we find that in the past four weeks over one third of the labor force has switched to remote work. The state level COVID-19 infection rates predict these switches. If there is hysteresis as people learn new ways to work remotely and businesses reorganize, the pandemic-driven changes may portend more lasting effects on the organization of work. We will continue to track changes to the nature of remote work, asking how pandemic-induced changes transform workplaces in the short and long-term.

The growing consensus is that workers and businesses will find that the benefits of working from home will become established in the new patterns of work, as reported by Protocol:

“We anticipate that approximately 60% of the workforce will shift to some balance of ‘in office’ and remote work,” said Roy Abernathy, executive vice president of global workplace strategy at Newmark Knight Frank.

Zapier recently surveyed over 1200 employed US adults about their perceptions of the change, which could be an indication of where we may be headed:

Among those who have transitioned to working from home in the past month:

- 65 percent feel their productivity has increased now that they work from home.

- 80 percent say they can better manage interruptions from coworkers now that they work from home.

- 80 percent enjoy being able to see their family during the day now that they work from home.

- 77 percent say they’re finding new times to be productive outside of the normal 9–5 hours.

Even if these perceptions are an embellishment of people’s actual productivity, this new model of work seems to be making workers feel more productive, allowing them to see their families more, and more work/life balance, as suggested in the Zapier study.

However, 66% still would prefer working in the office or workplace over working from home. Strangely, only 42% miss socializing with co-workers, so the missing 24% must relate to other factors not explored, perhaps issues like not having an adequate work space at home, slow internet, or worries about lack of face time with their managers.

Ian Scherr suggests that Zoom’s 700% increase in weekday evening use is not just spreading work beyond the normal work time frame:

Zoom said it’s tallied a 700% increase in weekday evening meetings on its platform since February, and a 2,000% increase in meetings on the weekend. While users have flocked to the service and social Zoom calls are now du jour, the numbers could also hint at an overburdened work force pushing meetings to out-of-hours when kids have gone to bed.

Once the kids go back to school, it may be that the historical timeframe of 9-to-5 work may be stretched forever.

The CEO of McGraw Hill, Simon Allen, also reports dramatic shifts in work patterns with the company’s 4000 employees now working from home:

A 32% increase in employees logging on to work weekends as they’ve been freed to determine their schedules — spreading their work hours across more days while taking time to enjoy family and better themselves. When offices reopen, Mr. Allen expects the percentage of his employees that elect WFH to double, from 20% to 40% or more. “We’re not going to go back to what we would define as normal before. I think the shift is going to stick. And that’s good because it’s forced people to think about how they set up their lives.”

But those wishing they could return to the workplace they exited a month ago will have to face the stark reality of a very different workplace once the pandemic burns out: the workplace of 2019 may never exist again. In the following sections, I will explore some of the ways that the workplace and the nature of work are changing, and what we may see in the coming months and years.

Social Distancing At Scale: Dedensification

We actually don’t know what sorts of measures will be needed as businesses seek to reopen, or when that transition will happen. However, J. David Goodman offers up a financial inversion: now that companies are aware that they will need to socially distance in the workplace — at least for the foreseeable future, and perhaps forever — then their office space is worth less, since it can’t feasibly house as many workers as in the past:

Large and midsize companies are beginning to plan for a return to the workplace, in phases. Some are thinking about how to use their existing office space when workers cannot be packed together as tightly, and questioning how much they should be expected to pay for it.

“Because of the need for social distancing, that space is far less valuable,” said Neil Blumenthal, one of the co-chief executives at Warby Parker, the glasses company headquartered in SoHo. “We’re all going to need more space, or use it less.”

“I don’t think ‘reopening’ hits the nail on the head,” said David Eisenman, a professor of community health sciences at UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health. “Reopening has the implication of a return to normal.”

“We anticipate that approximately 60% of the workforce will shift to some balance of ‘in office’ and remote work,” said Roy Abernathy, executive vice president of global workplace strategy at Newmark Knight Frank.

The commercial real estate service firm is working with clients to “decide who comes back first and how they return,” and has offered them a detailed roadmap, with considerations that include how often parts of offices should be cleaned and what should become of common areas.

Other features of the modern open plan office — hot desking, shoulder-to-shoulder work spaces, and crowded conference areas — are going to be reëvaluated. The clever mock phone booths that have sprung up in recent years as a means of holding phone calls without annoying everyone are going to disappear, as hotspots for viral distribution.

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The economic impact of the pandemic will likely force many employers to cut costs. For companies to reduce their rent obligations by letting workers work from home is an easy solution, one that’s less painful than layoffs.

| Rani Molla

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CFOs might run the numbers and realize how much the business could save if the majority of those who can work from home do work from home, especially if they determine that they’d need two to four times as much space to safely house those workers. And as Rani Molla recently observed, we will be trying to return to work in a post-pandemic recession:

The economic impact of the pandemic will likely force many employers to cut costs. For companies to reduce their rent obligations by letting workers work from home is an easy solution, one that’s less painful than layoffs. In [Kate] Lister’s [president of consulting firm Global Workplace Analytics] words, “The investor community is going to insist on it.”

Furthermore, the necessity of working from home brought on by the pandemic has also caused many employers and employees to spend money on new technology, like video conferencing subscriptions as well as new equipment. According to data from expense management provider Emburse, the most frequent employee expenses in the first half of March included computer monitors, desks, office supplies, mice, and keyboards — a departure from the norm. These purchases presumably happened at companies where working from home was a new development.

Many companies were caught with their pants down, but now remote work won’t seem impossible anymore, and they’ve expensed the transitional costs.

And, of course, the pandemic is causing individuals and businesses to question the premise of living in dense urban settings, like New York City:

The prospect of a mini-exodus is a real possibility, said Jonathan Bowles, executive director of the Center for an Urban Future, a Manhattan think tank focused on the local economy.

“New York is the epicenter for this pandemic,” he said. “Everybody knows that, and it’s understandable for people to think maybe a less dense place would be safer the next 12 to 18 months.”

But it is hardly a foregone conclusion, he said. Whether the flight from the city materializes depends largely on how authorities handle the situation during the coming weeks and months. “It’s all about whether people feel safe from another wave of the pandemic breaking out,” Mr. Bowles said.

After 9/11, some predicted the city would see a population decline spurred by fears of terrorism, he said. Instead, the population grew as the city demonstrated its ability to keep residents safe.

The catch: It may require long or repeated shutdowns to address the virus, which could itself spur suburban flight. What’s the point of paying crazy rent on a cramped apartment if you can’t enjoy the city?

So this could be a double whammy: companies may decide to let more people work from home, and use some fraction of their existing office space to support regular — weekly? monthly? — face-to-face get-togethers. Recall the magic 60%-80% working from home percentage where people are most productive, engaged, and balanced, which means that people might spend only 20%-40% of their working time working together in close proximity.

Still, as Ally Bruschi, a New York City communications professional, pointed out, scheduled video calls and collaborative documents will never meet the high fidelity of face-to-face meetings, the ‘interstitial interaction’:

the small, seemingly insignificant ‘water cooler’ conversations, lunchtime rambles and impromptu walks around the block.

Myriad software companies will jump into the challenge of emulating that interstitial or ambient interaction. I saw a new product launched this week that is dedicated to providing the experience of a shoulder tap leading to a quick audio conversation without email, chat, or other overhead, for example.

In the coming months, as the world wakes up from the coronavirus induced coma, the company may want to carefully choreograph who and how many people come to the office on any given day — to best use the available and socially-distanced space — but also to track who has come in contact with who, as a support to contact tracing. And expect companies to start testing temperatures as workers swipe their credentials to enter. [I won’t delve into the security issues surrounding these practices, but we should anticipate a trade-off of individual privacy for increased public health benefits, after a great deal of squawking.]

Some companies may opt to become completely remote, although that’s most likely with smaller businesses. But we should expect more opting in to remote work, partly because once the skills and tools are in place it seems less challenging. And again, once a business has stopped paying rent for a few months, they may be skittish to take on that burden again.

Freed from the requirement to be in the office 40 hours a week, people and businesses may migrate from expensive, crowded, and dangerous-in-a-pandemic urban centers out to the suburbs and beyond.

The New Nervous System: Coordination, Collaboration, and Communication

The shift to remote work has led to revisiting the core distinction between different sorts of communications. Here’s a matrix based on time and space:

Many companies long ago made the transition to tools oriented to the ‘different space/different time’ quadrant, like email (long ago!), collaboration and work management tools (like Trello, Miro, and GitHub), online documents (like Google Docs, and Dropbox Paper), intranets (like Simpplr, and Sharepoint), work media (like Yammer, and Facebook Workspace), and work chat (like Slack, and Microsoft Teams).

The events of recent months have led to an enormous surge into the ‘different space/same time’ quadrant, especially in the cataclysmic transition from face-to-face meetings to video conferencing (like Zoom, Cisco Webex, and offerings from Google, Microsoft, Slack, and many others), as hundreds of millions of users replace all their face-to-face meetings with video meetings. Likewise, we’ve seen a surge in interest for whiteboarding solutions (like Miro, Mural, and others), driven by real-time sessions to compensate for the missing conference room experience.

The migration out of ‘same time/same place’ has many other ramifications, not just a huge spike in the stock of those mediating WFH. [Note: the fund company Direxion is planning to launch a WFH EFT (exchange-traded fund) in June, so investors can make bets on a basket of tech companies likely to soar in the postnormal economy.

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The idea that meetings are ‘work’ and constitute an act of value creation, rather than performative organisational politics, seems to persist even when there is no office.

| Lee Bryant

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Wise observers have noted that we are not required to maintain all the f2f meetings we used to hold pre-pandemic: in fact, this may be a good time to eliminate as many as possible, and shift to better ways to coordinate work. Here’s Lee Bryant, for example:

This is a slightly puzzling time for the first-wave pioneers of enterprise social business tools (or whatever you prefer to call them). On the one hand, we are watching a world suddenly forced to come to terms with online collaboration, remote working and using the internet to connect people and their work. But on the other hand, the ideas, methods and tools we grew up with and which were once imagined to be the future of work are now almost quaint artefacts of a long-forgotten, more optimistic period.

People who spend their lives in meetings and calls have entered the new era doing exactly the same, but from home, using Zoom or MS Teams or another tool rather than meeting face-to-face in a room. The idea that meetings are ‘work’ and constitute an act of value creation, rather than performative organisational politics, seems to persist even when there is no office.

Meanwhile, people who are used to remote work, as opposed to just remote meetings, tend to operate a toolkit that is balanced between real-time synchronous (Slack, MS Teams, IRC), semi-synchronous (online collaboration tools, wikis, forums, collaborative planners and design tools, etc.) and asynchronous deep work (anything from paper to coding tools).

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In other words, don’t just talk — do some work! Write. Curate. Connect. Architect. Build on other peoples’ ideas. Share. Ask. Reflect. Show your work. Accept feedback gracefully. Start to learn the power of real collaboration and distributed work.

I’d like to think that people will take this sort of advice, especially once the initial exposure to an endless stream of video calls takes its toll and video fatigue begins to grow. I predict that those new to remote work will transition — like those who have been practicing remote work for a long time — from the ‘different space/same time’ quadrant of endless video conferences into the ‘different space/different time’ quadrant of asynchronous content-centric work coordination, collaboration, and communication.

Some managers will respond to the wholesale shift to remote work with suspicion. That is why many companies are instituting invasive surveillance software to monitor workers’ behavior. Counting keystrokes, monitoring application use, outright visual surveillance. Some are even using features of video conferencing tools to learn if meeting attendees are running other apps during meetings.

Of course, many companies restricted remote work in the past based on the same distrust of workers: that they would slack off rather than work as soon as the bosses’ eyes weren’t on them. This has been the classic response of managers to new communication tools forever, like those who seriously argued in the forties and fifties against business telephones on every desk because people would call their mothers or gossip with friends.

This is related to the dubious practice of ‘managing by walking around’, where managers believe that their active presence, while employees are trying to work, will improve outcomes. Anota Tucker and Sara Singer conducted an 18-month study on MBWA in hospitals:

They found that, on average, in work areas where leaders used MBWA, employees reported less performance improvement compared with areas where MBWA wasn’t used.

Profs. Tucker and Singer discovered that MBWA was linked to perceived performance improvement only when it was applied to easy-to-solve problems (for instance, moving nurses from a small medication room to a larger one). In contrast, when leaders used MBWA for complex and vexing problems (such as excessive lead times for lab test results), employees reported that chats and meetings with bosses interfered with their productive work and rarely solved the problems. On the contrary: These futile discussions had enduring negative repercussions because they drew attention to their leaders’ failings.

And today, nearly all our problems are complex and vexing. So managers would be well served to realize that in most cases they should either ask what others think or step aside and be quiet. The best management, to paraphrase Lao Tzu, is when others accomplish what is necessary without the involvement of their managers.

Maybe this is an era when we could minimize managers, to push productivity and save money.

The Postnormal Imperative

Let’s accept we have already moved in the past ten years into a world where work is increasingly distributed, decentralized, and discontinuous, what I call the 3D workforce:

Distributed — Laptops, tablets, and, most importantly, mobile phones have allowed the portability of work, out of the office, and away from the desktop-PC-and-company-server of the early part of this century. The shift to mobile devices that are always with us has proven to be exponentially more than just a convenience: it has altered the patterns of work. Note that 60% or more of portable device use is in the home or office, so we are opting to use devices that are close to hand, and where we can be reached without regard to place.

Decentralized — The demand for business agility and responsiveness has driven decision making and innovation to teams and individuals operating at the edge of companies, where partners and customers live, and away from the corporate center. The need for speed has led high performing companies toward a ‘fast and loose’ model of operations, away from top-down command-and-control.

Discontinuous — Workers are involved in many projects at once rather than doing single repetitive tasks, and as a result we find ourselves time shifting and life slicing many times per day. This is true in part because our devices make it easier to switch context, but also a shift toward awareness that team productivity is a greater good than individual productivity, so individuals are willing to accept requests for help rather than working in a totally heads-down mode.

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We are moving from a world of problems, which demand speed, analysis, and elimination of uncertainty to solve, to a world of dilemmas, which demand patience, sense-making, and an engagement of uncertainty.

| Denise Caron

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The rise of freelancers parallels the shift into a 3D way of work. As I wrote a few years ago,

Behind any discussion of the 3D workforce is the looming growth of freelance workers, which many estimate at 25 percent to 30 percent of professional work in the U.S. today and likely to grow to 40 percent or more by 2020. Many choose to work as independents because they enjoy the freedom and variety of work or they want to avoid office politics and commuting. Others take to freelancing out of necessity and would rather have less-precarious work if possible. Obviously freelancers are a critical element of today’s form factor for business and one with the widest variability of motivations, risks, and possibilities for flexible work arrangements. And businesses are turning to freelancers — and creating them — in ever-larger numbers.

Add to the 3D workforce a wholesale shift to remote work during a massive upsetting of established norms for business, and we have new requirements for postnormal management.

One way to characterize our time is the concept of VUCA, a time defined by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.

Denise Caron, the president of In Order To Succeed, says it well:

We are moving from a world of problems, which demand speed, analysis, and elimination of uncertainty to solve, to a world of dilemmas, which demand patience, sense-making, and an engagement of uncertainty.

I put it another way, writing about climate change, but which is directly applicable to our current situation:

The biggest problem is that people’s thinking patterns are stuck in the old days, and I don’t just mean their expectations about ‘normal’ weather. No, even worse is that people can’t accept the reality that in the postnormal we will never have the luxury of time to assess and then adapt. Linear problem-solving approaches will simply not work anymore.

But this is not a call for more old world leadership, characterized by moving fast, and looking for permanent ‘solutions’ to well-defined and researched ‘problems’. Instead, we need leaders demonstrating the ‘VUCA Prime’ characteristics, as Bob Johansen has styled it.

Bob Johanson’s VUCA Prime

Johanson’s prescription is easier to say than to do.

• In a time of high volatility, we can’t depend on the extrapolation of historic trends. Instead, we need a vision that encompasses many possible futures, and imagine how to get to cosmos from chaos. To paraphrase Joi Ito, we need to trust our compass, not our maps.

• Understanding is a counter to uncertainty: focus on developing an understanding of uncertain situations and so develop deeper insight into the risk factors and their interrelations.

• Clarity brings what’s important into focus, and reduces the confusion of complexity through making things as simple as possible, while avoiding the simplistic.

• Agility means keeping options open since ambiguity acts like fog on a highway, so we must willing to shift from one tactic to another while remaining aligned with vision, and remaining committed to always applying new insights rather than falling back into established — and possibly obsolete — practices.

In a time like today, leaders — and organizations as a whole — need to rededicate themselves to the postnormal imperative: to adapt to a VUCA world, one now beset by a global pandemic. We’ve adopted the patterns of remote work tactically, as an initial response to the health threats of Covid-19, but in the medium and long term, we will have to move strategically, investing in the development of new skills, practices, tools, and management approaches.

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In the postnormal we will never have the luxury of time to assess and then adapt. Linear problem-solving approaches will simply not work anymore.

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Anita Williams Woolley, professor of organizational behavior and theory at Carnegie Mellon, offered her insights about how teams can adapt to remote work in an email discussion with Sheryl Estrada:

“It is going to be important that everyone understands and has the same goals and objectives,” Woolley told HR Dive in an email. “Where goals are unclear or conflicting, productive collaborative work will be difficult whether it’s co-located or remote, but there are fewer opportunities to recognize and rectify unclear goals in remote work.” Determining what aspects of the work need to be done together, and what work can be divided up and completed independently, is also important, she said.

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With a completely remote workplace, Woolley said it’s important that whomever leads the team “has a high level of social intelligence and strong collaboration skills.” Social intelligence, the ability to build relationships, is considered a soft skill. It’s also connected to emotional intelligence, defined as the ability to perceive, evaluate and respond to your own emotions and the emotions of others, according to a Jan. 9 LinkedIn Learning report. LinkedIn noted that emotional intelligence was a newcomer to its list, which “underscores the importance of effectively responding to and interacting with our colleagues.”

Companies that place an emphasis on emotional intelligence report higher levels of productivity and better employee engagement than those that don’t, a 2019 study by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services found. “A team that is well designed can handle pretty much any task remotely,” Wolley said.

Managers will need to adopt these skills and promote them for remote teams to remain focused during adversity.

Looking Forward, And Within

The entirety of this essay has been dedicated to the premise that we have tumbled into a postnormal era, which is, as Ziauddin Sardar said,

An in-between period where old orthodoxies are dying, new ones have yet to be born, and very few things seem to make sense. Ours is a transitional age, a time without the confidence that we can return to any past we have known and with no confidence in any path to a desirable, attainable or sustainable future.

It has become clear to many, but not yet to all, that we are not going to return to the status quo ante, and it is too early to lay out a path to Sardar’s ‘desirable, attainable, or sustainable future’.

Adopting a new mindset is the most essential response to the time we find ourselves in, the postnormal. A mindset that is based on Caron’s formulation: patience, sense-making, and engagement of uncertainty. Wise leaders will steer their companies by using a compass, and not the maps from olden days. We need to accept, first, that we don’t know what is coming, or even what we will need to do when it does come.

I have little faith in the certainty of either pessimists or optimists, as Rebecca Solnit spelled out:

Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognise uncertainty, you recognise that you may be able to influence the outcomes — you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists adopt the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It is the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand.

Reflecting on Solnit’s thoughts on the ‘spaciousness of uncertainty’, I wrote to a friend,

So I have joined the third third, neither an optimist nor a pessimist, but a hopist: those who hope, who hold out against despair and disengagement, even in the darkest days.

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Originally posted on Medium, May 21, 2020.