there’s nothing like a crisis to get you thinking about making a change.just quitting. quitting your job, your marriage — your life as you know it.we have all heard those stories about people who face a sudden crisis — an unexpected diagnosis, a near-death accident or the loss of a loved one — and then experience something akin to being ‘born again.’ they come around to thinking of their survival as a second chance to make better the time they have left on this earth, they go towards the light at the end of what, to that point, had been a dark tunnel of doldrums and let go of what brings them down to pursue what makes them happy.in theory, it’s easy to understand why humans respond this way in rough times. after all, seeing your life expectancy — or that of someone you care about — in terms of just seconds, minutes or days, as opposed to the endless years we all selfishly assume, is often enough to make us get moving on all that we’ve been putting off.
business reshape themselves all the time in response to crisis
we see something similar in the corporate world all the time. a crisis hits, maybe in the form of a failed product, a legal issue or a privacy breach, and suddenly the wheels of change are in motion. the warning is heeded, and industries reshape and reimagine their businesses — conducting smart-sounding press conferences or getting a new legal team, developing a better product or announcing new security strategies. the changes forced by a crisis are not only a way to survive, but they also mean a natural revisiting of goals and endpoints.it’s not all that different from how things have been playing out in most of our lives during this never-ending pandemic crisis.since the beginning, change has abounded as we were forced to adapt to life in lockdown — from online learning to working-from-home to virtual healthcare, we have done it all. and it’s not insignificant that we had been playing with the idea of all three of these concepts for years before covid hit, but progress was slow.employers couldn’t wrap their heads around the possibility that out-of-sight workers could be even remotely productive. that doctors could provide reasonably reliable care by screen was unpalatable, and besides, how could we ever build a platform that met all the needs? and teachers delivering their curriculum virtually? where do we start? yet, seemingly within days of the pandemic, we had the infrastructure for all of these up and running. some have been more successful than others, but still, they happened — because they had to.the same can be said for our personal lives. it wasn’t long into the pandemic that we saw people making good on all the things they had been planning to do but never got around to. there were
shortages of lumber as people fulfilled years-old promises to renovate and redesign their living areas,
divorces hit a high, as did the number of people who left their jobs — out with the old, in with the new and more exciting. in fact, the increase in career switches made enough of a dent to gain its own name: the great resignation.but now as the pandemic continues to steam ahead, pulling us wearily along and slowly chipping away at any shred of resolve to hope for the best, even the great resignation is undergoing its own change.
even the great resignation is facing change
it was texas professor anthony klotz who came up with the term the great resignation, predicting that large numbers of people would leave their jobs after the covid pandemic ends. well, it turns out we didn’t wait until the end (will it ever end?). the great resignation has already begun. in fact, just this past september, the “quit rate” in the united states hit
an all-time high. now the great resignation is known as “
the big quit.”