When London was hosting the 2012 olympics, the city authorities had to change traffic routes and metro access. Locals hated this as it meant forcefully changing routes to work they'd gotten used to over the years. While done begrudgingly during Olympics, after the event ended and the traffic routes went back to usual, something curious happened.
A significant percentage of the locals who were forced to change work routes stuck to the new way of travelling i.e. the way discovered because of Olympics, as it turned out to be more efficient and/or time saving. They just hadn't, until then, had a reason to consider an alternate route. A rare event like the Olympics was needed to make them look beyond habit.
With the rapid spread of Coronavirus we may be seeing something similar when it comes to remote working and education. For years, both have been proposed for mass adoption, given the common sense value in each. Only habit and norms have held back organisations from making the leap.
A rare pandemic may just usher in an era where we move beyond avoidable mental-physical stress of employment travel and limited access to quality education.
Let's just survive Covid-19.
That meeting that could have been an email, will hopefully just be a video call now :)
