When we agreed to write this article, in the autumn of 2021, the working title was ‘how to stop falling back into the old normal’. That made perfect sense because the world, double-vaxxed and freshly boosted, was returning to the workplace. It was time to find practical ways to preserve the lessons learned from nearly two years of remote work and to create a new, more flexible normal. How naïve we were.

Our premise was that, even before the pandemic, the working world had been labouring under outdated rules about where and when work takes place, rules derived from the industrial era. The pandemic was therefore a wake-up call, an opportunity to forge a new normal, a hybrid way of working that acknowledged the nature of work and life today. We knew that smart leaders were bravely beginning to craft the policies and procedures to rule this new, hybrid world. As we sit down to write this, however, in December 2021, something has taken us by surprise: Omicron. Yes, just as everyone had started polishing their dress shoes – or, ahem, finding their dress shoes – the First Minister of Scotland, followed closely by the Prime Minister of Britain, has urged companies to keep people working from home. Travel restrictions are getting tighter. Even Christmas may be cancelled. Suddenly, a new normal is on hold… yet again.

By the time you read this article, of course, you will know how it panned out. You will know if Omicron turned out as bad as we are fearing now. You will know if Christmas was cancelled, if it proceeded merrily, or if Santa turned out to be a Super Spreader. Perhaps COVID will have become just a minor respiratory illness. Or maybe there will be a new, more dangerous variant. Or a new virus. With this much uncertainty, the only sensible thing we can say right now is that humans should consider weaning ourselves off the very fantasy of normal. Let’s remember that COVID is not the only thing nibbling at normality these days. That this is a ‘time of unprecedented change’ has been said so often it has precedent. Life has been changing fast since the Industrial Revolution, faster since the Sixties, and even faster since the Technological Revolution. The way we live, work, and spend our time now – pandemic or not – would be unrecognisable to our great-grandparents. Even the way we use our thumbs, those great evolutionary leaps forward, has changed more in the last twenty years than since thumbs began. In the last two years, there have also been epoch-defining social and political changes such as Black Lives Matter and the radical rethinking of gender. Even the climate – the bedrock we rely on for normality – is changing, and it’s not changing in a nice, gradual, way: global warming is global weirding, and that weirding is worsening.

In short, it’s hard to know what normal is anymore. Perhaps we are entering an age of so much change and so much uncertainty that the very idea of normal will soon seem, well, abnormal. Of course, we humans are certainly adaptable – this is precisely how, according to Darwin, we managed to get where we are. But we were probably not designed to adapt to this much change this quickly. And yet humans may never again enjoy another long period of stability – a time without major disruption. To survive these changes, and survive them with our mental health intact, people may have to adapt to being more adaptable. Leaders will have to do something more radical than just plan for a new normal. Rather than writing new policies and procedures – which is just rearranging the deck chairs on the sinking ship of normality – leaders should focus on building capacities, and specifically, those capacities that enable people to thrive with no normal at all.

Chief among these is the ability to be both centred and flexible. ‘Centred’ means having your feet on the ground. You know who you are and you’re not easily distracted. ‘Flexible’ means being open to learning and changing. You can have goals, but you refine them constantly based on new information. The person who is centred and flexible can see clearly what is happening, assess it accurately, spot novelty, and respond appropriately.

We call this being in-the-moment. Being in-the-moment is always timely because, by definition, it is always on time. No matter when you read this, no matter what new insult your normality is suffering, no matter what is happening with COVID, when you are in-the[1]moment you are up to date. Organisational systems that support being in-the-moment are light on rules and regulations but high on listening, resilience, and trust. Policy is not fixed but under constant review. Think more about core principles. Think about removing barriers to decision-making to encourage fast adaptation. Foster an organisation where everyone has a strong sense of centre and a lot of room for manoeuvre. With these qualities, your people will be able to find the appropriate response. They will create – indeed they will constantly create–whatever is truly needed. Remember that even the idea of ‘hybrid working’ may soon seem old[1]fashioned, a quaint reference to a brief transitional period in the history of work. In the future, perhaps, work will just be work, wherever and whenever it happens. The smart money will not be on where we work or even when we work. It will be on how we work… and who we are.

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