By Jonathan Cherry, futurist, keynote speaker and entrepreneur
The changed world we’re living in has forced many of us to work from home and become instant teleconferencing experts, revealing the true convenience of being able to do your weekly grocery shopping online while sitting in your underwear on the couch.
It’s also had a disruptive influence on other seemingly disconnected parts of our lives. Many things that were true before March 2020 are simply not true anymore; and never will be so again.
Opportunities abound
This is good news for those of us with an eagle eye for spotting opportunities. With any major disruption to the status quo, gaps open up between what is and what should be, creating fertile ground for fast, innovative ideas that solve the problems that are created.
Where are these new gaps?
Here are three to ponder:
1. Nine-to-five
Remember when it was universally accepted that work hours were between 9am and 5pm, with an hour-long lunch break at around midday?
Remote working during times of discontinuity has demanded that people are available whenever they are needed. This has led to unprecedented levels of mental stress and burnout that have been identified as a key reason so many professionals around the world are calling it quits and resigning from their careers indefinitely.
Over four million workers in the US quit their jobs in September 2021 alone, continuing an alarming monthly trend that started during the pandemic. People are seeing work very differently; long-held assumptions about the value of doing work, being paid for that work, security, hierarchy and relevance are falling away. Former employees are taking the risk to become entrepreneurs and freelancers, or are seeing the opportunity to work for international organisations that are welcoming a distributed, remote workforce.
Suddenly it is completely normal to work full-time from a small office in Cape Town for a global technology company based in Silicon Valley, California. This shift in mindset around what we define as work and how it gets done has opened access to global opportunities for individuals living anywhere in the world.
Earning US dollars while living on South African rands was always the dream; it’s a dream no longer.
2. Digital normalisation
The way that everyone so easily and casually uses digital technology now is vastly different to the way it was in 2019.
In South Africa pre-pandemic, e-commerce was so small it accounted for less than 2% of annually recorded retail sales. In the wood-panelled offices of corporate South Africa it was assumed that the only people that shop online were millennials and criminals.
Digitally leveraged business options have rocketed from distant outlier to centre stage so quickly that it’s left many bigger companies red-faced about how incompetent they look in response.
The opportunity for everyone else not beleaguered by outdated IT systems is that customers are now much more willing and comfortable to trust online as a credible route to engaging with a company.
Shopping online? Of course – make it easy and simple enough, and I’ll do it all the time.
Join your newsletter? Yes, please – as long as you provide engaging content and offer me value.
Sign up for your monthly subscription offering? Makes sense – I already have a Netflix account, and that seems to work well.
Digital normalisation has gifted everyone with the tools and, more importantly, the culture that accepts a more efficient way of engaging with an audience for both businesses and individuals. If you are a small company and still trying to get your products listed by a big retailer, or you think that the only way you can get word out is by being invited as a guest on a TV or radio talk show, then you’re not paying attention to the radical shift that we’ve experienced.
There is no need to wait for someone else to save you. Build your own digital future.
3. Travel
Remember how much time we used to waste travelling to work, meetings, conferences and other places that didn’t really require our physical presence in the first place?
On a personal note, at one stage pre-pandemic I wasted at least 15 hours a week sitting in traffic. That’s roughly 60 hours a month. As somebody who earns a living by billing my time by the hour, that works out to a significant amount of utility left lying on the roadside.
Time is an extremely valuable resource – once spent, you can never get it back. We are all now armed with a new consciousness of time and how we spend it.
With 60 extra hours a month at my disposal, I have the freedom to choose to sell that time, go for a run, have coffee with a friend or start a new hobby. Many of us have this freedom now.
2020 and 2021 have been a watershed time in history; we can’t go back in time and longingly resurrect history, but we can look towards the future and reimagine how we may thrive.
