I recently received an email note from a CEO who apparently had watched my TED Talk on the Future of Work on a recent Singapore Airlines flight. There obviously must have been slim pickings in the onboard entertainment category on his flight. Nevertheless, his comment, which I paraphrase, was instructive: ‘Amazing how little has changed since you recorded that,’ he said.

And he’s right. In the two years since that TED Talk was recorded in October 2021, the needle showing the degree to which flexible work is being embraced by company leaders has barely moved. Why?

It’s not because there aren’t enough data-driven flex-work advocates. Plenty of deeply knowledgeable people have been getting the word out, including Ryan Anderson, vice president of global research and insights at MillerKnoll; Stanford University professor Nick Bloom; Annie Dean, vice president, Team Anywhere at Atlassian; Brian Elliott, founder of Future Forum; and Robert Sadow, co-founder and CEO of Scoop Technologies, and creator of the “Flex Index,” to name just a few. Yet, many CEOs are still resisting the idea of truly flexible work.

Again, why? There are multiple reasons. But one of the biggest is the fact that many flex-work advocates, including yours truly, have become ensconced in an echo chamber, preaching to the converted, drinking our own “flexible, distributed, hybrid” Kool-Aid.