Workers have slowly gained leverage to demand better wages and conditions, she said. And the pandemic has led to a labour crunch as some have left the industry. Restaurant staff who were making $18 per hour pre-COVID can now demand $25 to $28, restaurant owners say. Even with higher pay, many restaurants are short-staffed, leading to shorter opening hours and slimmed-down menus.
“Fine dining is going to completely change. It’s going to become casual fine dining. … I just had a management meeting, saying we have to be more accessible to people,” Mr. Vij said. “Allow them to come to the restaurant maybe once a month instead of every three months, or we won’t survive.”
Vij’s being forced to innovate perfectly fits in with my last post about people needing to let go and unlearn the way things used to work, so they can have the space to think up new ways of working. And this requires perceiving all of the multitude of issues around this complex problem and addressing them all at once, so it creates a win-win situation for the restaurant, employees, and customers, all at once.
Over email, Subramanian insisted that the positive effects of vaccines are not in any doubt: “Other research has clearly and definitively established that the vaccines significantly reduce the risk of hospitalization and mortality.”
Despite the misinterpretation, anti-vaxxers and vaccine skeptics like Horowitz have held up and shared Subramanian’s paper as vindication on an array of platforms that have struggled to fight false anti-vaccine information. Horowitz’s own column has been tweeted out to at least half-a million users. Posts bringing attention to the paper have done well on anti-vax and right-wing Reddit groups; a summary was posted to over a dozen subreddit communities with over 34 million followers.
This article validates my last point that many people like anti-vaxxers are misunderstanding the meaning of things relating to the pandemic because they don’t have the cognitive and psychological capacity to make sense of the greater complexity around it. Because of this, they often jump to conclusions or make beliefs about things that are completely untrue. Often it’s because they want a simple answer to the complex problems they’re facing but there isn’t one.
It should be stressed though that people who don’t have the capacity to understand the complexity of these things are not “stupid.” In effect, the problem isn’t their intelligence. It’s actually their perception.
In fact, the more educated you are, the more rigid your perception and beliefs will probably be. This is as I noted before. If your beliefs, values, and way of life have successfully gotten you to where you are today, it’s unlikely you will want to give them up, regardless of the newer, more complex problems you encounter. In effect, you’re “hardwired” to want to continue to use them.
This is why unlearning is one of the greatest skills required for the future. It’s not about unlearning old job skills. It’s about unlearning beliefs and previous ways of doing things that are engrained within us because they will more than likely no longer work with the complex problems we face today. In fact, by using older ways of doing things, we will be amplifying the problems before us.
In trying to understand the psychological effect that the pandemic is having on people, I’ve recently realized that the number one thing that’s happening is that people are often misunderstanding the meaning of what’s going on. And the main reason for this is because it’s not a simple or even complicated problem but rather a highly complex one. In a sense, it is a “wicked problem” because people’s own beliefs and values are actually standing in the way of resolving it. Yet many are unaware of this.
Much of our suffering comes from wrong perceptions. To remove that hurt, we have to remove our wrong perception.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Why are people misunderstanding the meaning of things? It’s because they are having wrong perceptions of what they are perceiving, as Thich Nhat Hanh notes above. As I noted before, we don’t see reality directly but rather a map of it, a worldview, which helps us make sense of it and navigate it like a GPS. But when that map becomes outdated, like it is for many today, it causes us to navigate and make choices that can potentially lead to deadly consequences.
Whenever we see another person take an action, he notes, we must remain aware that there could be a number of invisible motive forces behind it and we must be willing to listen in order to better understand them — not only out of the vain self-referential transactionalism masquerading as the Golden Rule, in the hope that others would be just as willing not to misunderstand our own motives by their perception and interpretation of our actions, but because correcting our wrong perceptions is a basic and vital form of caring for ourselves.
Maria Popova
When you make the effort to listen and hear the other side of the story, your understanding increases and your hurt diminishes.
Thich Nhat Hanh
As Maria Popova articulates above though, even though many of us can see the wrong perceptions that others having with reality, not many of us have the emotional capacity to listen to them to not only help them but help ourselves. For myself, I’m still struggling with this because it’s hard for me to see people I’ve known my entire life and for them to talk in a such distressing way that makes me think “Who are you? I don’t even know who you are!”
Yet at the same time, I realize that their wrong perceptions are probably being caused by the suffering they’re experiencing from their cognitive dissonance because their worldview is inadequate in helping them navigate a reality which requires them to deal with two opposing challenges at once.
Having said that though, we seriously need to figure out a way to help people level up their perception of their world though, updating their “internal GPS” if you will, because if we don’t, many more people will suffer even more so when climate change begins affecting us even more so.
The largest group of young people is struggling to adapt itself to the prevailing values of society. Without much enthusiasm, they accept the system of government, the economic relations, the property system, and the social stratifications both engender. But even so, they are a profoundly troubled group, and are harsh critics of the status quo.
This pretty much described me in the 1980’s when I had my first professional job. Things about the way people worked seemed unnatural to me but I assumed this was the way work had always been done, so I just tried to accept it and adapt…albeit someone frustratingly. When the Dot-Com Bubble burst in 2001, I finally had enough with accepting the status quo though and realized the system needed to change.
In this largest group, social attitudes are not congealed or determined; they are fluid and searching.
This is a common theme for The Future of Work in that the work and people themselves will be more fluid, thus without clear cut boundaries like “jobs” previously provided. What I find fascinating about this is that it is now being applied today to gender as well (ie transgender, non-binary, etc). So the future will be one of living and working within the in-between spaces that previously divided or categorized us.
The radicals… range from moderate to extreme in the degree to which they want to alter the social system. All of them agree that only by structural change can current evils be eliminated, because the roots are in the system rather than in men or in faulty operation. These are a new breed of radicals.
This is why we are encountering wicked problems today because people don’t realize that the roots of these issues are caused by our outdated beliefs. And until we learn to outgrow our beliefs, seeing our world with a broader perception and mindset, these wicked problems won’t be solved. In effect, they are systemic in nature. So changing the leader won’t solve or change anything because it’s the system itself, with its outdated beliefs cultivated within it, that are the problem.
It is fair to say, though, that at present they know what they don’t want rather than what they do want.
Love this. All change doesn’t occur with a roadmap but rather with a initial period of getting lost before finding yourself. So you first have to question your existing reality and beliefs, stepping away from them, before you can open up a space of possibilities within yourself which newer, broader beliefs can emerge to replace them. As the Zen saying goes, “Empty your cup.”
When culture is degraded and vulgarity enthroned, when the social system does not build security but induces peril, inexorably the individual is impelled to pull away from a soulless society. This process produces alienation — perhaps the most pervasive and insidious development in contemporary society… Alienation should be foreign to the young. Growth requires connection and trust. Alienation is a form of living death. It is the acid of despair that dissolves society.
This is really the greatest plague we are encountering today, one of alienation due to disconnection and distrust. And not even with regards to each other but with our very sense of selves as well. How can we begin to trust others when we don’t even trust ourselves? Again the problem here originates from our existing beliefs and values which are dehumanizing us in the process (ie advertising, social media, culture, etc). We need a new way of seeing the world and ourselves. Only then will we begin to trust ourselves again, as well as each other.
The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inert, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it.
We never see the world as it really is. It’s literally impossible to see the world accurately. In fact, you’re brain doesn’t even care about seeing the world accurately.
It evolved to see the world usefully which means whenever you open your eyes, you’re seeing not what’s there, nor are you even seeing the information that your brains receiving. You’re seeing a history of the meaning that you put on to information in the past. You’re seeing your history, and not only your history but the history of your culture, the history of your ancestors.
This is why I often chuckle when people wonder if we are living in a simulation created by an advanced civilization like as seen in The Matrix. Yes, we are…but one of our own evolutionary creation. That’s because our psychologically constructed worldviews are effectively just simulated maps of reality within us that helps us navigate reality around us. And as the saying goes, “the map is not the territory.”
And this has a direct correlation as to why there is so much conflict in the world today. It’s because we are in a period of rapid change where so many people are using different worldviews to navigate with, often times conflicting with each other. So it’s like two people in a car using different GPS, with one telling one person to go left while the other tells them to go right.
Never before in human history have we had people operating from so many different paradigms all living alongside each other
Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations
What we need is a perspective and worldview for the times we are living in today, not for the times two or three decades ago. This is also why I think “The Future of Work” title is an inside joke because what we’re needing is a new way of working for the present because our current way of working is actually outdated and from the past.
We are approaching a point where those denialist efforts are more than cynical, irresponsible and self-interested: they are starting to look like crimes against humanity.
This is very much a personal account of one climate scientist’s journey, with little analysis or synthesis. Climate-change deniers appear merely as a succession of obstacles to the truth, not as a phenomenon that needs to be understood. It is not hard to fathom the motives of the oil companies, nor those of the conservative thinktanks they have funded, such as the George C Marshall Institute or the Koch Foundation. But in the UK such denialism is kept in the public eye by a small band of professional contrarians including James Delingpole, Sherelle Jacobs and Peter Hitchens via outlets such as the Telegraph, Spectator and Mail on Sunday – the same people and media that have argued against life-saving measures to prevent the spread of Covid-19. The Venn-diagram overlap on these two unrelated issues is so complete that we’re clearly looking at a psychological issue – a phobia, perhaps, of anything deemed to constrain personal liberty. Perhaps some “sceptics” are genuinely in denial, in the psychoanalytic sense of refusing to accept or confront aspects of reality so as to avoid potential feelings of discomfort. The pandemic really is scary, and climate change even more so.
Already, Covid sceptics and climate sceptics are converging. These trends can’t be tackled just by more and better information, but by an understanding of the psychology involved.
I remember asking myself a questions a long time ago. “How do you help people who don’t want your help?” It was in relation to the problems I was seeing culturally within organizations and how most management didn’t see that their approach to work was part of the problem.
Today, the context for this question has gotten so much bigger to society itself. How do you help people who don’t want your help because they’re undergoing a mental health crisis and are denying reality itself? Wicked problem indeed. In fact, I think this is THE WICKED PROBLEM. Why? Because solving this one transforms the perception of what’s possible for ever other one (ie pandemic, climate change, inequality, etc).
…explorations of what it means to be human is The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning (public library) by Cambridge neuroscientist Daniel Bor in which, among other things, he sheds light on how our species’ penchant for pattern-recognition is essential to consciousness and our entire experience of life.
Still, our capacity for pattern-recognition, Bor argues, is the very source of human creativity. In fact, chunking and pattern-recognition offer evidence for the combinatorial nature of creativity, affirm Steve Jobs’s famous words that “creativity is just connecting things”, Mark Twain’s contention that “all ideas are second-hand”, and Nina Paley’s clever demonstration of how everything builds on what came before.
Consciousness and chunking allow us to turn the dull sludge of independent episodes in our lives into a shimmering, dense web, interlinked by all the myriad patterns we spot. It becomes a positive feedback loop, making the detection of new connections even easier, and creates a domain ripe for understanding how things actually work, of reaching that supremely powerful realm of discerning the mechanism of things. At the same time, our memory system becomes far more efficient, effective — and intelligent – than it could ever be without such refined methods to extract useful structure from raw data.
“Americans have traditionally demanded coherent and simple national stories,” she has written. “Now many of these stories no longer make any sense. But so far nothing has replaced them. We are in story limbo, and for a storyteller this is an intensely interesting place to be.”
Anderson’s stories tend to be broken and fragmented, unfinished, nonlinear, elusive, pointless — stories about the impossibility of stories. They are often gender-fluid. (She appears, sometimes, as a character called Fenway Bergamot, a male alter ego with thick eyebrows and a mustache.) In place of coherence, in place of the machine logic of propaganda, Anderson inserts dream logic, joke logic, the self-swallowing logic of Buddhism. She likes to hollow out triumphant national stories and fill them with doubt. She once summarized “The Star-Spangled Banner,” for instance, as “just a lot of questions asked during a fire.” (“Say, isn’t that a flag?” she asked, pointing into the distance. “Couldn’t say,” she answered, “it’s pretty early in the morning.”)
She is the American heartland affectionately alienated from itself.
Imagination is intrinsic to our inner lives. You could even say that it makes up a ‘second universe’ inside our heads.
Contrary to this interpretation, I want to suggest that imagination, properly understood, is one of the earliest human abilities, not a recent arrival. Thinking and communicating are vastly improved by language, it is true. But ‘thinking with imagery’ and even ‘thinking with the body’ must have preceded language by hundreds of thousands of years. It is part of our mammalian inheritance to read, store and retrieve emotionally coded representations of the world, and we do this via conditioned associations, not propositional coding.
Lions on the savanna, for example, learn and make predictions because experience forges strong associations between perception and feeling. Animals appear to use images (visual, auditory, olfactory memories) to navigate novel territories and problems. For early humans, a kind of cognitive gap opened up between stimulus and response – a gap that created the possibility of having multiple responses to a perception, rather than one immediate response. This gap was crucial for the imagination: it created an inner space in our minds. The next step was that early human brains began to generate information, rather than merely record and process it – we began to create representations of things that never were but might be. On this view, imagination extends back into the Pleistocene, at least, and likely emerged slowly in our Homo erectus cousins.
The imagination, then, is a layer of mind above purely behaviourist stimulus-and-response, but below linguistic metaphors and propositional meaning.
The imagination – whether pictorial or later linguistic – is especially good at emotional communication, and this might have evolved because emotional information drives action and shapes adaptive behaviour. We have to remember that the imagination itself started as an adaptation in a hostile world, among social primates, so perhaps it is not surprising that a good storyteller, painter or singer can manipulate my internal second universe by triggering counterfactual images and events in my mind that carry an intense emotional charge. Fantasy that really moves us – whether it is high or low culture – tends to resonate with our ancient fears and hopes. The associational mind of hot cognition – located more in the limbic system – acts as a reservoir for imaginative artists. Artists such as Edgar Allan Poe, Salvador Dalí, Edvard Munch and H R Giger can take controlled voyages to their primitive brain (an uncontrolled voyage is madness), and then bring these unconscious forces into their subsequent images or stories.
Similarly, evolution built a crude imaginative faculty before language and culture refined it into a sophisticated one. The raw system (dominated by emotional and perceptual associations) is still alive and well in the basement of our psychology.
Business leaders are “holding on to the remnants of the past” by failing to recognize fundamental shifts in the workforce — leaving them with a potential talent exodus on their hands.
This disconnect between employer and employee preferences risks being entrenched into new workplace policies, researchers found. Two-thirds (66%) of executives reported they were designing post-pandemic workforce plans with little to no direct input from employees -and yet 94% said they were “moderately confident” that the policies they had created matched employee expectations.
What’s more, more than half (56%) of executives reported they had finalized their plans on how employees can work in the future. The survey said the disconnect between employers and employees was largely a result of the fact that bosses tended to have a far higher level of job satisfaction than those below them.
“While executives are banging down the door to get back to their corner offices, nonexecutive employees are demanding flexibility in where and when they work.”
“The desire for flexible work is strongest among women, working parents and employees of color, who have shown gains in employee experience scores while working remotely,” the report noted.
