A new era: the life-centered economy
An optimistic look into 2023 & update on where Out of Office is heading.
As an optimist and strategist, I love to uncover macro shifts that are happening in the world, and dream up and explore new possibilities to broaden our imagination.
Coming from a week of learning and exploration on how to make organizations more regenerative at Schumacher College, one of the many things I take with me is that next to a climate and humanitarian crisis, we have an imagination crisis.
Our current productivity-, growth- and success-obsessed business-as-usual, has become exploitative and extractive leaving many with a sense of “joyless urgency”, disconnected, burned out, and “quiet quitting”.
To shift away from this way of working and living, we need imagination. Imagination is key to giving us hope. It offers us the ability to dream about new possibilities and opportunities, and with a healthy dose of optimism, believe in the potential to design a better future.
So as we step into a new year, my optimistic self tells me that we’re in a period of profound transformation, shifting the center of gravity toward a much broader definition of who we are and how we’re operating in this world.
I’m hopeful that we’re shifting away from classic rationalist corporatism and work-centered lifestyle to a life-centered lifestyle and economy – one that embraces nature, and well-being, and as HBB writes so beautifully, “one that values all life and living systems on earth, and, furthermore, understands business as a life-affirming and life-like force.”
This is supported by many, such as the Doughnut Economics, or the New Economy movement, who both consider that the current economic system needs to be restructured, and are based on the assumption that people and the planet should come first, and that it is human well-being, not economic growth, which should be prioritized.
Where do we start?
My mission with Out of Office is to scale a culture of well-being by making work, life, and the interplay between the two, more regenerative 🌱🐚
With that, we're taking a fractile approach, starting with reimagining the way we work and live by changing our ever-evolving relationship with work and continuing with building the ecosystems that help us scale a more human culture of work in our workplaces and beyond.
Here are some signals that drive this mission:
Redefining our relationship with work
On an individual level, people start making active lifestyle choices that are based on acknowledging that life should not revolve around just work but around our full spectrum of life – which includes work but also includes nurturing our health, our hobbies, our planet, our relationships, our capacity for wonder and joy.
This “great contemplation” (as Paul Millerd called it) is fueling a cultural shift:
“While increasing prevalence of 4-day work-weeks, piquing interest in ‘Degrowth’, capitalism being remodeled at elite business schools, the death of ‘girl-boss’, the growing acceptance of remote work along with the normalization of ‘good-enough’ and ‘career-breaks’ are all signs of this evolution — at the heart of these shifts is the craving for a future where rest, care and balance are interwoven into the fabric of professional growth, and where ambition and success can reflect a more holistic spectrum of life-goals than work titles and salaries alone can capture.“ — From RADAR’s resolution report.
🐚 Emerging questions 🐚How can re-redefine our metrics of success, and design a future, where rest, care, and balance are interwoven into the fabric of professional growth?
If hustle culture is dead, what replaces it? What does it look like? What are the components and rhythms of a regenerative creative life?
Making work itself more regenerative
On an organizational level, we’ve removed a human-centered approach and replaced it with a prioritization of constant efficiency and growth, which left us feeling depleted and burned out, so an important part of shifting to a more nourishing and regenerative life that is oriented towards our well-being, is transforming how we work.
While last year was defined by words like “great resignation”, and “quiet quitting”, where we removed ourselves (literally or emotionally) from workplaces that felt toxic, or not aligned with our values, Adrianna Huffington writes “quiet quitting is a response to a very real problem — the global epidemic of stress and burnout — but accepting a lack of joy and engagement is not a solution.” I agree: Ultimately, we're spending about 50% (or more) of our waking hours or in different numbers, 25% of our life, working, so rather than trying to entirely escape work, we might want to embrace a principle Paul Millerd calls “design for liking work.”
My hope is that with this next iteration of work, we will focus on how to make work regenerative and with that, nourishing, joyful, and feel more like play.
In order to make work regenerative, we need to take an active approach to put the well-being of our people and planet into the purpose, strategy, and culture of our organizations and use the knowledge of this interdependence of our system in our strategic decision-making.🐚 Emerging questions 🐚How might we create ways of working and ecosystems that allow us to live a slower, more joyful life?
How can we $$ fund periods of rest and exploration? (sabbaticals, parental leaves, paid leaves, learning fellowships, etc.)
How might we shift our organizational structures to make space for different modalities of work? What models already exist?
What can we learn from different countries (e.g. from Europe, where many people opt to do part-time work and “choose a lifestyle that helps them be more present for the multitudes in their lives - kids, hobbies, aging parents, health, fitness. They choose balance over the extra income. They design life to be unhurried.”)
What different forms of “play” exist in the world? What are the conditions for play? And how can we apply different forms of play to our work?
What are models or case studies of people and organizations who found ways to create time for exploration and play in their business (Think Google’s 20% model)? How did they make the case for it?
If play is the practice without emphasis on the outcome, and the emphasis on outcome was removed from work, is the future of work then one where play = work?
How Out of Office is emerging to explore these questions and contribute to this vision in 2023 ✨
Out of Office started out as a monthly newsletter sharing ideas and resources to “inspire your day job with the things in your downtime”, and is now evolving into a community-powered life-centered research and design lab committed to scaling a new culture of work by making work, life, and the interplay between the two, more regenerative 🌱
Through playful imagination, research & education (interviews, tools, guides, and resources — maybe a book 🙊💭) and experiences (workshops, retreats, community-oriented programs), we make space for exploration and play in and out of the workplace 🎨✨
Collective Imagination & Publishing
To better understand how we might work and live differently, we are gathering and publishing perspectives, stories and resources to help people imagine a different way of working and living as well as find new models and systems of work that allow for different modalities of work.Creative Life Design Retreats + Work & Play City Guides
Change starts with yourself. In our community-oriented programs, we’re applying the lens of creativity to how we live our lives and are using playful imagination to start the process of designing how we can live a more creative, nourishing life. Living creatively means taking a playful, active approach to how we engage in our life – and shaping our (work) days around what brings us joy and sparks our creative energy, finding more time in life for play, and not letting work overtake life. More creative life design retreats are coming up this year (the next one starts in April yay!)
Community Lab – Join us in exploring these big questions in community!
To better understand how we can cultivate a culture that fosters well-being in our workplaces and daily lives, and explore the above questions collectively, rather than in silos, we have started to form a co-learning + playing community that gathers to collectively imagine, explore, and co-create (with co-ownership) new ideas and practices for more human, lighter, and playful ways of working and living. I believe that if a critical group of people that reimagines how we want to work and live comes together and forms a community around a shared set of values, that’s ultimately how transformation happens and how we can shift a different kind of culture, and a different kind of life.
Our first exploration will look at what a more playful approach to work & life could look like, starting by exploring what different forms of play exist in the world, and better understanding the conditions for play.
If you’re interested in joining, apply here!
With all of this, I hope to empower individuals to more actively design their own lives, and scale these efforts by collaborating with a group of “future of work/life” optimists across the globe to bring these practices into teams, organizations, and communities.
If you’re keen on joining this mission, please get in touch! hello@alicekatter.com 🌀