Children have often been regarded as some of the best innovators; that is until growing up and learned behaviour gets in the way. Should we look at this period as an opportunity to rethink all that we think we know and an opportunity to realise innovation?

They said that it would be impossible for the entire workforce to work from home, and yet here we are. Where we are trapped in a corner, as a race we tend to dig deep and find new forms of survival. Away from our base survival instinct there is an opportunity to create new pathways and rethink new ways of doing old things. At UnWork that has always been our global mission. We believe that that we have been doing thing the same for far too long and that impedes our progress. Innovation does not occur in a vacuum, there will always be newer, more exciting, more streamlined, and efficient way of doing things, so we should endeavour to seek these out and apply them where applicable. This period provides an unrivalled opportunity for us to do just that.

Centuries ago we thought we knew that the world was flat, but science and history has subsequently told us otherwise. The time spent at home, with our families, our old and new hobbies and – importantly – our thoughts, provides a key chance to unbundle our routines and learned behaviour to expose any potential flaws in our thinking.  On a personal level, this could be as satisfying as developing a new system for arranging clothes. On a larger scale, this may be a chance for leaders to rethink the ways they interact with their staff. As a much smarter person than me once said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them” and this rings compellingly true. This global pandemic has in many ways been unthinkable. In its unexpected arrival, it has exposed and highlighted a great deal of both strengths and inadequacies of life as we knew it. In order to surmount the challenges we are faced with now we will require an entirely new way of thinking. Creating new frameworks and pathways should be a conscious effort and not just corollaries of survival.