Future Here Now: The Problem Here Is Deeper Than They’re Seeing

What happens when you take your paradigm for granted? Everything changes.

You may have seen this Washington Post article about falling productivity and growing employer anxiety:
👉 https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/10/31/productivity-down-employers-worried-recession/

It’s a solid piece. It explores motivation, remote vs. in-office work, and the difficulty of measuring productivity in knowledge industries.

But it misses the forest for the trees.

🌲 The real issue isn’t tactics. It’s a paradigm shift.

What the data actually points to is something much deeper than leadership techniques or where people sit while they work:

⚡ An accelerating mismatch between what workers know they’re capable of doing—and what Industrial Era organizations allow them to do.

That gap is widening fast. And organizations and their people are now standing on opposite sides of it.

🧠 We told people to level up. They did.

For years, teachers, managers, HR teams, and leaders have told employees:

✔️ Bring your judgment
✔️ Collaborate
✔️ Solve complex problems
✔️ Take initiative
✔️ Own outcomes

As work became more complex, more ambiguous, more VUCA, organizations said: We need your knowledge.

And most knowledge workers—especially younger generations—listened.
They developed these skills. They’re ready.

🚫 But there are two fundamental problems.

1️⃣ Organizations aren’t designed to let people use that capability.

A core element of personal agency is flexibility. To exercise judgment and expertise, people need the freedom to get work done in the way their experience tells them will work best.

Yet many organizational demands—rigid schedules, mandatory presence, unnecessary controls—signal the opposite:
🔒 We don’t trust you.

When being in a specific place at a specific time isn’t required for the work itself, these controls feel less like coordination—and more like constraint.

And that’s just the most visible example.

2️⃣ The belief that good work will be rewarded has eroded.

For decades, work systems have focused on squeezing maximum productivity out of each individual.

Too often, the person who rises to the challenge gets:
📈 More responsibility
📦 More work
💸 Minimal additional reward

Meanwhile, employees watch leaders—often tasked with protecting the status quo rather than enabling change—receive raises, bonuses, and recognition that far exceed their own.

Add growing awareness of bias and systemic inequity, and the old employee–employer social contract starts to collapse.

❓ So why are we surprised?

Why are we shocked that Fusion Era–ready people aren’t powering Industrial Era organizations?

This isn’t a motivation problem.
It’s not a generational problem.
And it’s not a remote work problem.

It’s a structural mismatch.

📊 Postscript: Productivity itself must be redefined.

In the Industrial Era, productivity was easy to count:
🚗 Cars off the line
🌾 Bushels harvested
⏱️ Hours logged

But in the Fusion Era, what’s the unit of value?
• Solving a complex problem
• Retaining talent
• Preventing failure
• Building trust
• Learning faster than change

We’re still using poor proxies for value—and then acting surprised when the numbers don’t tell the real story.

Ironically, early results from 4-day workweek experiments suggest something important:
📉 Less time doesn’t mean less value.
📈 It may mean better productivity—defined differently.

⏳ The future of work is already here.
We’re just running it on outdated assumptions.

And we’re going to have to adapt.
Fast.

📖 This is a selection from Future Here Now—a weekly newsletter helping business and community leaders understand and act on the big changes reshaping work, organizations, and society.

👉 Take the next step:

• ✉️ Subscribe to the Future Here Now Substack: https://wiseeconomy.substack.com

• 📚 Explore the books for deeper insight into the Fusion Era

• 🎤 Contact us to explore keynotes, leadership sessions, and workshops that help organizations bridge this gap

🔁 Share if your organization is feeling this tension
💬 Comment if you think productivity needs a new definition