The new "us"

"If you are a change agent, what will be happening should delight you. If you hate change, you might not be a happy camper in the near future."

It is April of 2020. We are knee deep in our national "pause" with our economy. There are over 20 million unemployed, and there is no end in sight for that metric if we continue on this path. So this is what is going to happen. One way or another, we are going to come out of this "pause" this month, or early next. If we don't, there will not be much to come back to. In fact, the smartest thing we could do, is start bringing the economy back this month or next.

When someone has a chronic disease, and has a bout where they get real sick and then recover, the doctors say they are now at their "new normal", or a new baseline. In other words, the health world in which they left before their bout, and the one they came back to - are not the same. That is exactly what will happen with our economy. When it comes back, it will look different than the one which existed at the beginning of the year. How so? It involves the "new us".

If you are a change agent, what will be happening should delight you. If you hate change, you might not be a happy camper in the near future. What will change? If you are a white collar worker, team meetings, where we all gather around a table, have a power point presentation and hammer out some strategies. I mean, that will still happen, but now the same way. Hello, Zoom or other tools like you. Your commute in the morning, be the bedroom to the home office. 

Blue collar workers (or as I like to say, "touch labor", will also have a different world. These are the folks who make stuff to sell. Mitigation will be everywhere, to keep everyone safe. There will be stations to do the work, where one will still be able to be safely distanced from co-workers. Will that be weird? Oh, yes.

But as much as the workplace will change, it is nothing compared to how our school rooms will change. And I am not talking K -12. I am talking K - 16 or higher. Good-bye to 100% classroom education. Good-bye to living on campus. Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye. We are entering a long delayed brave new world on how to educate our youngins. How is this going to work? Where computers will educate our youth? Ask you local "Wizards of Smart". Why? They will be the ones doing it. They may hate it, but they will be on the hook for fixing it. 

What will the "new us" look like? Stay tuned - I have some ideas, but no real clue. I am only hoping that our "new us" will be a workable world. If it is not, we will entering a dystopian world nobody wants to think about.