What do we do when there’s a big, upsetting thing that nobody wants to talk about? People have different approaches, but for much of the corporate world, the answer is often to tiptoe around it and pretend it’s not happening.

Here are some examples of elephants in a series of questions.

• Is social media robbing young people of healthy childhoods?
• Is online life robbing people of their real lives?
• Do people need to take more responsibility for how they spend their time and use technology?
• If companies are rolling back or expunging their ESG values, did they really mean them in the first place?
• Has tribalism revealed itself as the dominant human state, over collectivism?
• Did printing so much money in 2008/9 destabilise all our futures in the longer term?
• Is it helpful to present a united front or a multiplicity of views?
• What is leadership right now?
• How can you have disagreements in organisations without fissures resulting? 
• How should a country care (or not) for old people of limited means?
• Is AI revolutionary or a diverting sideshow?
• Should people work in offices to benefit the wider team, even if it doesn’t benefit them personally?
• Can we ever escape our binary brains? E.g., Working from home is either good or bad.

Hollywood has its elephants. It doesn’t seem to know how to deal with COVID, for example, with so few of its movies set during the biggest health crisis in living memory. Why?

A few years on, it’s perhaps time to revisit the COVID shift and ask what was temporary, and what was more permanent.

Business is wrestling with elephants. The return to the office is not a done deal. Bosses, managers and frontline workers have seen first-hand that much of work can be done in other ways. No matter how determined the return-to-work policy, those people cannot ‘unsee’ what they have seen, so there can be no going back to the previous status quo.

Stanford’s Institute for Economic Policy Research reckons the typical college-educated worker works at home 1.3 days a week. BUT in Canada it’s a whopping 1.9 days, closely followed by Britain (1.8 days) and the US (1.6 days). At the other end of the scale are South Korea, China and Japan where the average is around 0.5 days a week.

The strongest explanation in the variance is whether a nation is more individualistic or collectivist. An index developed by Dutch psychologist Geert Hofstede helps to visualise this. In more individualist countries, executives are more predisposed to and comfortable with people working from home. From mid-week golf, to residential property price rises further from cities, to converting commercial property space into flats, WFH is having a real-world impact, whatever Jamie Dimon’s frustrations.

The impact on productivity is mixed. America, where WFH rates are high, for example, has seen strong productivity growth in recent years. Yes, younger people are not getting the in-person experience that previous generations had. But those experiences were not exclusively good and if we are looking at a far less “in-person” future, as is (arguably) likely, should they be getting experiences elsewhere? There are major implications and questions to be explored about training, career development, internal communications, creativity and culture. Let’s start asking them more boldly.

So, if we are looking at a future when we spend less time face-to-face, including at work, should we not equip ourselves and others to try to make those interactions as meaningful as possible?

And what are people doing with their new-found freedom and the extra time saved by not commuting? Well, they are not doing more socialising or volunteering. They seem to be relaxing more, which means playing video games and watching Netflix for many. The Economist thinks the average American spends half an hour more a day alone than prior to the pandemic. Our rough calculations say that’s 62,050,000,000 hours of the US population’s time per year.

Nature abhors a vacuum. An age of creativity may be just around the corner.

Credit to Camilla Cavendish, whose article in the Financial Times prompted this piece.

A shorter version of this piece appear in the Collective Content April newsletter. To receive this newsletter, register here.