An Eventful 2022, a Hopeful 2023

Firstly I must warn you this is double posted - if, by any chance you subscribe to both newsletters I apologise, you’ll see it twice, so ignore it once -at least :)-

Secondly, I’ve had a bit of analysis paralysis on this end-of-year article no less because writing fervently on my upcoming book every day does keep me in a state of enhanced alertness regarding how well my words stack up over time. That said, I had a look over some other year-gone-year-coming articles of the past and gained a sense of perspective. Neither wrong predictions nor inexact conclusions about what has transpired have changed the world. If you want to see what I mean here are a few and if you read them please try and heed some of that advice, it still 1000% stands today - same old to-do: put people first, audit your HumanDebt, make the human work standard practice, tool your people with the permission, the software, the time and the appreciation and then let them better themselves and therefore your performance.

2022 was an extraordinary year indeed and when it comes to the big picture we saw Covid -nearly- neutralised; we saw inflation become a worry; we saw massive tech layoffs; we saw geniuses veering towards tyrants and destroying entire company cultures and brands; we saw insane political instability -at least in the UK-; and we saw a war in Europe - something most people would never have thought they’ll see again. All of this is weighing heavily on all of us whether we are conscious of it or not. It adds up to what now has an official title of PPSD - Post-Pandemic Stress Disorder- and it makes us tired, weary, stressed, anxious and even depressed. How could it not?

So much so that while this year “the Great Resignation” seems to have slowed down, “Quiet Quitting” swiftly took its place as the trend of the year. Of course, as we are now all clear at long last, quiet quitting is nothing but an extreme form of active disengagement. We have always known we have oodles of that and 1 in 3 employees exhibited it, we simply didn’t have the name or enough social and classical media attention to discuss it at length. As ever more impressed with sensationalist claims, we debated the topic of “quiet quitting” in itself and where it is morally right or wrong more than we stopped to consider that it is just an illustration of this much more terrifying fact: in 2022, lack of engagement cost us collectively nearly 11% of our GDP! That ought to alarm us all and it would have been there in plain sight irrespective of the TikTok trend.

And here’s another terrifying fact that doesn’t seem connected but is fundamentally a factor: