The Great Resignation

Context: The Great Resignation

I’m not sure we should be entirely surprised to observe these changes as the recombinatory arrival and cascading transformation through minds and cultures or sociotechnical and economic systems of an inevitable metamorphosis in the ways people work and live. There have been factors which invoke a large-scale change in work culture and behaviour but I honestly don’t think we can fully or only blame the toxic work cultures that exist in so many places. Something bigger and more significant is happening here.

Complex dynamical systems are prone to dramatic reorganisation when significantly and persistently perturbed. When the perturbations (COVID, for instance, as something of a Global socioeconomic “supernova”-level event) do not recede in time-frames that cognition, communication and culture might be more well-tuned to manage, systems tend in the gestalt towards new configurations and constellations of behaviour, value and, contextually, motivation.

The template model as analogy of system perturbation is Le Chatelier’s Principle.

Of course, human lives (and the life of our socieconomies) are vastly more complex than the relatively simple “spherical cow” of idealised or reductive mathematical abstraction, regardless of the power of such systems. We are all negotiating (and, here, analysing) complex, multidimensional systems that often enough bootstrap themselves up into new configurations and, having gained enough momentum and recursively generative self-propagation, never return to their previous configurations. Evolution, in a nutshell.

Related: Lying Flat