Business tends to take the human desire for certainty to an extreme.

(Recall Paul Krugman’s writing about business leaders waiting for the Confidence Fairy to arrive before they’d start investing again in the depths of the financial crisis.)

Almost any crisis can be path-determining to some extent, but true leaps generally require that enough people be persuaded enough that conditions are different enough to invest and act as if things really are going to be different over the long term.

Right now, it seems we still hang in the balance: if allowed out tomorrow, we’d likely snap back to “normal” as we remember it as quickly as we could.

If that’s not a good idea — as the climate and the culture suggest it wouldn’t be — how can we credibly set long-term expectations in a better direction such that we keep moving that way even after we’re once again free to move about?

“There is only one sound strategy for crossing the valley” between one success and the next, writes Kevin Kelly in New Rules for the New Economy: “Don’t go alone. …”

“Banding together allows … knowledge of the terrain to be shared [and] the long journey can become a series of shorter hops along an archipelago of small successes.” [pp. 92–93]

Those words were written in the late 90s, several generations ago in the life of the network economy.

We’re entering the valley before another generation. Like the others, it will push the borders (and the logic) of the network ever further outward and downward.

What will work look like two years, five years, 10 years from now?

I don’t know and you don’t know, but if you tell me what you’re seeing and I tell you what I’m seeing — and especially if we invite a handful of others with seriously different perspectives to the party — the chances of any one of us spotting the next island of opportunity and helping the others make the hop go way, way up.

Where are you trying to go? Who’s on the expedition?

The Mighty Currawongs and Other Stories, by (who else?) Brian Doyle.

Via the local bookstore, of course.

Sure, we’ve been enjoying TV along with the rest of the world. (Babylon Berlin, if you’re curious. It’s excellent.) Sure, we’ll keep doing so.

But Weimar noir isn’t exactly an escape from the current crisis, you know?

Sometimes, you just need a collection of 3–5-page ditties about basketball, or chess, or the little bright shards in life that we can’t touch but must nevertheless hold on to if we’re going to make it through in style.

As Brian would have said, “you know exactly what I am saying here.”

Who’s in charge here?

That’s a natural question to ask in an industrial context, like a traditional classroom.

And most classrooms are set up to answer the question by design: the person at the front of the room (the “sage on the stage”) is obviously the one in charge.

Before pressing on, let’s press back for a moment: how did the person in charge get that way — at the front of the classroom, in the corner office, in elected office?

By and large, it’s because they are or were expert in something, or at least presumed to be. The professor knows the material, the boss knows what to do, the representative knows where we want to go and how to get us there.

And then — at last — comes what Seth Godin calls “the question to every answer about the culture: what about the internet?“

Who’s in charge of this Zoom room, this chat room, this press conference? How come?

Universities are physically and habitually set up to transfer scarce knowledge from one person’s tenured head to as many heads as a classroom can hold captive. Trouble is, knowledge isn’t scarce, and now the room’s broken.

And this begs the question, If you’re expert in Plato but not in Zoom, who’s really in charge here? Why shouldn’t I vote with my attention, just as I would anywhere else on the internet?

[“Because someone’s paying $10,000 for this credit hour” isn’t a great answer. After all, how much of the assigned reading was that argument buying beforehand?]

Most of those in charge of our most august (and necessary) cultural institutions are still pre-internet people. And the institutional and cultural moats that have protected them thus far are finally cracking.

Watch closely the arguments they’ll make for why they ought to retain pride of place. The first round will likely be shouting at cross purposes — “Since 1636!” versus “Because 2020!”

But sooner or later, we’ll hear the tree falling in the forest argument: if you know everything that counts except for how to reach the people who need to hear it, does it actually count?

If your authority rests heavily on the enormity of sunk costs, just remember that Hyatt’s did, too.

We all know bad writing when we see it: schlock, puffery, needlessly elongated words and phrases, meandering, poor word choice, corporate ipsum, and on and on.

Bad (or so-so) writing sometimes manages to get through as effective communication, but bad communication can be tougher to spot — especially when it’s well written.

All writing is for an audience. If the writing is purely for your own enjoyment or edification, go ahead and do what works.

But if the writing is for anybody else, the words, the structure, and the format have to be meaningful to the person you’re seeking to change.

Write as well as you’re able, but by all means write as effectively as you can.

I’m the proud product of both some famous colleges and some cutting-edge online and outdoor programs.

And I’ve had to shake my head a little bit at recent weeks’ news that students at famous colleges are now demanding tuition rebates because the online experience isn’t the same (or isn’t as good) as the on-campus experience.

The famous colleges are being hoisted on their own petard: they argued for years that there was something irreplaceable about what they did on campus and in the classroom. Online (or “distance,” or “mediated”) education was inelegantly differentiated from but definitely lesser than the “real” thing.

So the students’ demands are only logical: they’re spending a quarter-million dollars on an experience, a credential, and a status symbol — not for knowledge transfer.

And now we’re all forced to confront different definitions of “better:” pound for pound, a month in the backcountry with NOLS or online with the altMBA was a better education than any given month on campus. But as an acculturating experience, a container for the formative years between 18 and 22, and as a door-opening credential, the college campus experience won hands-down.

We’ll have all different kinds of education on the other side of this crisis, but now’s a good time to think about which kind of “better” you’re looking for — as an applicant, a student, an employee, or an employer.

By now, inclusion and belonging are planted firmly enough in the culture that it’s not too hard to find Very Serious People who’ll aver that differences of perspective and opinion are genuinely better.

(This is not the same as genuine equity of opportunity. Learning to see difference and say the right things can be good steps in the right direction, but they don’t mean we’re doing the right things or getting the right outcomes.)

So, two cheers for the idea in the abstract, when it’s easy.

The real learning — and the real value — is what happens when it’s hard, but we stay committed and curious and compassionate anyway.

We’re acculturated and accustomed to holding a little bit back.

It’s a logical learned response to the expectation of being asked to “give 110 percent” after our first effort.

This expectation is designed into the engine room telegraph: full steam ahead is how you get from San Francisco to Pearl Harbor as fast as possible, but flank speed is the true boiler-bursting sprint speed used to dodge a torpedo.

Nothing and no one can go at flank speed all the time, or even for very long. (Not without risking a real blowup, anyway.)

But we can be mindful and intentional about when to push the throttle to the stops and see what we can really do at full exertion.

And when was the last time human beings collectively made some big, important choices on the basis of clear and compelling evidence?

Plenty (most?) people who have a heart attack can’t or won’t make the lifestyle adjustments required to reduce their risk going forward.

We’ve seen that video is nearly as good as in person for many applications (and there’s no jet lag). We’ve seen the planet take an unmistakable deep breath, and how quickly nature can noticeably rebound when given some space and time to recover. We’ve seen (again) that over-leverage and illiquidity can really, really hurt when the (inevitable, unpredictable) crisis comes.

We could wait for Rational Man, or Economic Man, or even just Powerful Man, to act on the evidence, but that’s like asking the entire planet to stop smoking.

Or, we could get a little more mindful about what the evidence might mean for us, and consider how to adjust our life- and workstyles accordingly.

And we might want to focus on making it cool. After all, smoking didn’t plummet because of the evidence, but because some people, persuaded by the evidence, worked really hard to make it uncool and inconvenient.

My favorite read this week was Alex Danco’s “Positional Scarcity and the Virus” [via RadReads].

Alex takes a hard look at the widespread idea that the virus has changed everything, and, considering the particularly hard-hit industries of business travel and higher education, concludes (reasonably, I think) that in fact, it won’t.

The entire argument is worth reading on its own, along with plenty of other mind-stretching posts on his site.

But if I collapse his argument down to a sentence — There will always be some people eager and able to pay to get to the front of the line — and accept his conclusion that elite universities will still exist in brick-mortar-and-ivy form to issue line-cutting credentials, I can still hope for a change.

Namely, let’s be clear about what’s not different and why. Some schools will still exist to confer status, and they’ll go on doing that. But we can be clear about the contract. Other people and organizations will (to borrow a concept from another of Alex’s essays) effectively unbundle education from the bottom. It’s already possible to find a better lecture, teacher, method, or class than you might find in the most exclusive classroom — it just won’t have the same status benefit.

People are people, and still will be. But we might get better at seeing what this meeting, or this flight, or this particular school or credential is really for.

And, seeing that, some people might start to make different choices.