The Great Reset. It can be if we want it to be.
Imagine this.
It’s May Bank Holiday 2021.
There are barbecues happening all over the country. However, you notice that there is something different. They are not in people’s back gardens, but in streets and local parks. The one you attend has 100s of people there from all walks of life.
You speak to someone. He tells you that he used to work as cabin crew for a budget airline. He was furloughed during Covid-19 and, as a trained first aider, chose to volunteer for the NHS. This experience, along with his growing concern about the impact of flying on the environment meant that he quit his job and is now training to be a nurse. He proudly tells you he was part of the ‘Keep them on the ground campaign’ that encouraged the end of short-haul flights. He organised, with the NHS, for 2,000 other cabin crew to have NHS jobs. So they could all have a secure income. He points to the empty sky and proudly says ‘I helped make that happen’.
He talks about how The Great Reset helped him, and his colleagues and friends, realise what they wanted to let go of and what they wanted to keep hold of from the lockdown. To choose the future they wanted to be part of.
A pipe dream or potential reality?
That is up to us.
In this moment
Much is being written about this moment.
Many questions are being asked about what will happen next?
Will we return to ‘Business As Usual’ and our individualist, high-carbon lifestyles? Or will we step through a portal to another world? Or will it be predominantly State Capitalism, State Socialism, Mutual Aid or Barbarism?
In the circles we inhabit, another question is being asked. What do we call this moment?
In times of confusion and chaos, how you frame things helps people sense-make. It can provide a lens to enable people to understand what to expect, how to perceive and how to act. Take Back Control. The War on Terror. Black Lives Matter.
What is the positive, life-affirming way we can consider and talk about this moment? A way that can encourage us to retain some of the beauty and togetherness that has sprung up amidst the tragedy and heartache? To take forward some of the lived experience that we have had, that we feel really matters to us individually and collectively?
We have a suggestion:
The Great Reset.
Our ridiculous ambition is that The Great Reset becomes a rallying cry. A campaign that lives across the UK and across the globe. A campaign that can inspire children, to cabin crew, advertising professionals to ambulance drivers, to reset our lives and aspirations. To choose the future we want, together.
How do we define The Great Reset?
We will refine this as we progress with the help of our friends, but here is our current best guess:
The Great Reset is a cultural movement to build a new society where community, fairness and nature flourish, based on what we have experienced during lockdown.
The Great Reset will invite people to reflect, discuss and choose what they want their lives and society to look like. What do we want to retain from the experience of Covid-19? What do we want to let go of, that we did before? What do we want to bring back from before Covid-19? Perhaps most importantly, who do we want to be?
Then to act from this choice.
As the Purpose Disruptors, we have funding to start a campaign for The Great Reset, beginning with a launch film in late May. As an organisation, we have experience of galvanising creative organisations around an idea. For example, in 2019 we helped bring to life Create and Strike, where 160 CEOs signed a letter encouraging their staff to join September’s Global Climate Strike.
Can we get The Great Reset made into a TV programme? Can it be taken up by campaigning newspapers like The Sun and The Daily Mail? Talked about by Ant and Dec?
What can you do to help?
Why The Great Reset?
We see many new behaviours are spontaneously arising that encourage community, fairness and nature to flourish. Getting prescriptions for vulnerable people, #clapforcarers, making PPE at home, limited travel enabling nature to return. We believe that these behaviours emerge, and are appreciated, because they are a reflection of our true selves, a truth which is suppressed in our hyper-individualistic, consumerist society. We are getting a taste of who we really are.
‘Reset’ means ‘to set again or differently’. So, out of this experience, We have the opportunity to ‘set again’. On a grand scale. As we emerge from the crisis, which behaviours do we want to ‘set’?
The Great Reset simply provides an opportunity, individually and collectively, to identify and choose to maintain some of the life-affirming behaviours, feelings and relationships that have flourished during Covid-19. To consciously blend these with what we want to bring back from before.
We are doing this because, as free-thinking adults, we have to make a choice.
What is the society we want to shape coming out of the pandemic?
This is our gift and responsibility.
If we don’t make the choice ourselves, it will be made for us, with great pressure. Businesses, government and established systems will encourage us to return to our screens and to ourselves. To begin disconnect from each other and our communities. To return to ‘Business As Usual’. To return to what was, and lose all the wonderful life affirming behaviours, feelings and relationships that have flourished during this time.
Yet, only 9% of us Brits want life to return to ‘normal’ after this is over.
Does that include you?
If so, please get in touch at hello@purposedisruptors.org and join The Great Reset. In this first phase we are particularly looking for people from the creative industries who are up for helping get the message into the public domain.
The future does not need to be a repeat of the past.
The Great Reset. It can be if we want it to be.
Who are we?
We, Lisa, Rob and Jonathan, are friends and colleagues who lead an organisation we helped set up, called the Purpose Disruptors. We all have experience of working in advertising and branding for organisations such as Coca-Cola, BBC, Diageo and Unilever. Alarmed by the climate emergency, we set up the Purpose Disruptors in response. Our mission is to create a visible, large scale, bottom up movement within the advertising and marketing industry, that will act in solidarity to meaningfully contribute to climate change.
Our work has been encouraging the communications industry to become more aware of our climate emergency and take action to help address it. For example, we ran the industries first Climate Crisis Summit. With Covid-19, many changes we would like to see have just happened. Our goal is now to not encourage a change, but to maintain it. Also, we want to provide the opportunity for willing creative communications professionals to contribute, at this moment. Generating The Great Reset is our response. A way for communications professionals to engage in the Great Reset themselves and to use their talents to share the idea into society.
As the Purpose Disruptors, we are lucky enough to have a growing community of supporters and volunteers. If you are up for getting involved, please join our mailing list at www.purposedisruptors.org.
