You're on mute! (and have been for a while)

2020 was the year Covid-19 hit and with it came lockdown, restricted movement and restricted overseas travel. At the same time, we saw a change that will likely be with us for longer than the virus, that of the video-enabled meeting.

We’ve gotten into a rhythm with video meetings, and with the rapid increase in the use of this technology a new set of protocols has developed - join the meeting on mute, turn on your camera (or not) and make sure if you are parallel processing by responding to emails at the same time, you don’t make it too obvious that you are not listening.

Video meetings also brought us closer in strange ways, because we often gained a peek into someone’s home life (or at least got the chance to comment on their latest background). But most significantly, we all learned a new phrase that has a wonderful tinge of humor and irony – You are on mute!

We cry these words with a sense of glee to the colleague who we can see is in the middle of a wonderful monologue. However, because they haven’t turned on their microphone, the far-sighted insight they are providing is lost. A loss made evident by our colleague being slightly crest fallen after they have fumbled to turn themselves off mute. Wherein their subsequent utterances are more resigned and less enthusiastic. While the remaining meeting participants offer platitudes and appropriate linguistic balm, the originally muted eloquence is lost and laid asunder by the lack of design friendliness of software engineers. And so, after the rise and fall of the muted participant, the meeting continues with a little less enthusiasm.

This metronomic and almost perpetual motion of business doing business has been laid. The pandemic has revealed to us that so much of what we do in business is just doing business for the sake of it, the monotonous banality of keeping on, for the sake of it, with purpose being unclear. While the monotony of business is nothing new, working from home and losing all our distractions such as evenings out and overseas travel has provided a clarity on our muted nature that we had previously been distracted from.

Once lockdown eases and ultimately the pandemic ends, we are all very likely to rush back to our distractions - evenings out, sporting events, travel, buying things - the distractions that had previously made us myopic to our muted selves. In this context it is relatively easy to envisage a roaring decade ahead where we’ll spend our time travelling the world, catching up with our fellow humans, cultures, families and friends. We will be back to doing the things that are important to us but in the past have also distracted us from the fault lines beneath our societies . Furthermore, we will be so eager to spend our time planning these distractions and trips, going on them and talking about them before planning the next one, we will likely ensure our muted nature returns but with added emphasis, while, at the same time our work will keep on, keeping on. In this way, the challenge of the pandemic is twofold. Will we hear what the silence of being on mute has revealed? And, post pandemic, will we allow ourselves to remain on mute?

The larger problem is that being muted has stopped us from asking meaningful questions about our organisations. Questions such as, what do they stand for? What is their purpose? What are they doing and why? Are they perpetuating a world that is meaningful to me? The pandemic has revealed that so many businesses literally stand for nothing more than making money. A pointlessness laid evermore bare through our being on mute. Our organisations could be so much more, but they are not, they are just monotonous money makers with no meaningful purpose to enable human flourishing.

If we return to our colleague on mute in a video meeting, perhaps now is the time to recognise and hear the eloquence of their utterings while on mute, and to actually bring those utterances into the narrative of our organisations more fully.  So even though we may spend our post pandemic lockdown time drowning ourselves in roaring distractions, we could at the same time ask ourselves what we expect the future normal of our organisations, our economies and our working lives to be? Is it one where we are muted by distraction and ask nothing more of our organisations than they monotonously keep on keeping on? Or is it one where we ask them to be meaningful contributors to our future? Wherein all those who are muted have a say.

We are not alone in this muted phenomena. Future generations are also muted, as we have failed to consider the impacts of our decisions on our children and children's children. We have muted the atmosphere through the addition of carbon and pollutants, making it difficult to breathe. Likewise, we have muted our waterways and landscapes, polluting the water we drink and the land that nourishes us. We have muted so much.

We must ask what is the Future Normal of our organisations? Surely not a return to normal that is muted and of the past, but rather a future normal that aims for wellbeing. In this context, start the conversation within your organisation and ask, who is muted and why? Then ask how can those that are muted be brought into the conversation. In so doing, your organisation might just escape the monotony and begin to move towards operating in a way that aims for wellbeing and sees money as a means not an end.

Nick is a professor who lectures and researches in strategy and sustainability. His core purpose is to help organisations develop their sustainable mindset and begin the journey of transforming their organisations to becoming FutureNormal.  Nick works at Griffith University where he teaches sustainability and systems thinking on the MBA and researches and provides professional development courses in the same area. Nick also has a role at the university as Dean and Director of Learning Futures and Griffith Online. Prior to academia, Nick worked as a Senior Executive in industry and was a Strategy Consultant for EY.