Will tomorrow say, “Yes?”

Bill Jensen, author, The Day Tomorrow Said No, offers new, profound insights into the future of work. He opines, when work becomes the killer of dreams, it’s time to re-dream our work.

- Bill Jensen

MYTH 1: Whew. Glad that’s over! Let’s get back to normal

In the early days of the pandemic, an unknown author in Hong Kong graffiti’d a prescient warning about what we all are now seeking: ‘We can’t return to normal, because the normal that we had was precisely the problem.’

You have lived through a global dumpster fire. A perfect storm of destructive and disruptive forces that few could have ever imagined.

Suddenly, across the globe, everything changed, including our shared future.

How you work, learn, live, play, and socialize were all completely disrupted, and we are just now beginning to get back to ‘normal.’

And that dumpster fire exposed an inconvenient truth—definitive proof that our education, business, and economic systems were designed to leave far too many people behind.

That is the mother of all myths we must face, that the systems that we are all used to, that we once called ‘normal’, truly worked for most of us. They did not!

The eyes of the future are watching us, wondering what we will do next. Will we rebuild what we had, with all the inequities still in place? Will each of us step up, as individuals, team leaders, or organisational leaders, and do our part to build back better? Or will we let others do the building for us, and take our chances with how many inequities get built back into those systems?

The pandemic has created new, once-in-a lifetime opportunities for each of us to rethink our role in creating our own future, and everyone’s future. What will you do? Will you be a Believer? A Breaker? Or a Builder? All three roles are crucial to a new and amazing-for-all future.