When we talk about 'getting back to normal' we skew the conversation towards returning to a pre-crisis status quo that was both inefficient and ineffective.
When we talk about lock-down, we fool ourselves that we are less free now than we were before. But that's not true, is it?
Certainly not in the service sector which makes up 81% of economic output and 84% of UK jobs. We were locked-down in an unproductive, high-cost, low-benefit, presenteeist, shiney-edifice office culture.
UK productivity is (on average) around 16% lower per person than our G7 competitors (we are 27% behind the US...). Is it coincidence that we have Europe's longest commute times (an average of 1.5 hours a day, rising to 2 hours for London). Turning up is not effective.
And commuting is not fun. It means we often don't get enough sleep, we have additional stress at both ends of the day, we have increased personal costs, our free time is massively reduced. Our choices constrained and our environment damaged.
How free is that? How much are you looking forward to going back to that?
The smart and progressive thing to do is respond to what you have learned about how to work these past few weeks. Already Barclays are concluding big offices may be a thing of the past. They have a network of branches which they plan on repurposing to enable their Canary Wharf workers to change their lives for the better by working closer to home.
That's just one of the dimensions of distribution required in a new and better way of working I raised yesterday - The Space one. In itself it will force acceleration of distribution along the other dimensions - of Leadership and of Time.
The language - used by UK Government and other small 'c' conservatives - is always about returning to the past. This is not only backward-thinking - it is high risk.
It is high risk because going back risks going backwards to all the high cost of maintaining large offices, the impact on productivity of soul-sapping, stress-laden, time-claiming commutes, the business costs of running huge buildings to park people's butts in.
The old ways of working in the old places of working are less productive, less flexible, less resilient, less responsive, a psychological drag on our creativity and leave less space for our well being across the board.
Why plan to add all that to the cost already sustained from COVID-19? That's one risk you could - and should - avoid.
I am grateful to my friend - the very visionary Rory Yates - for the conversation that inspired this post.
Image via (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/commuting-is-as-stressful-as-moving-house-survey-of-european-cities-finds-10210051.html)
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