I think the answer to that may well be yes. I have had several conversations recently about periodic crisis vs. continuous learning. I seem to be ahead of the curve or completely clueless when it come to continuous learning. I think if we keep our head up, our sensors tuned and learning adept, we can see change and adapt to it, and that, in itself, is a kind of outcome - and it is, for the most part, beyond the edges of our current measurement abilities.

And then in a fruitsofourlabor posting on Productivity and the Crisis of Capital , I read an extended dialog on slacking off. It seems, as people realize their wages aren't in line with their organization's expectations (in other words, raises don't match inflation even and they certainly don't pay for performance) people will slack off, and the capital crisis will just make it worse (wages and productivity).

Well, to my friends looking for crisis, this may be the crisis that causes reinvention. I personally hope that our ability to learn and adapt may win one day - because I truly believe that is the future of work, but in the short term, and in many short terms to come - people will remain myopic to change, seeing it only as it impinges on their local reality - which means they will slack off until we drive some innovation that increases real wages again through some new flavor of competitive differentiation.

BTW, in my learning model, slacking off has a role. Rampant productivity - the need to do the current thing faster and cheaper, doesn't lead to innovation, so you need some down time to recharge the brain's innovation capabilities. If we work too hard, we'll be great at doing the same thing, and completely miss new opportunities, and even worse, be swept away by new threats we are too productive to notice.

(note: think about the productivity of peripheral vision as an idea - the ability to consistently sense that something is coming that you should react to. Reaction can be retreat, or it can be confrontation, but if you don't see something coming, you can't do either - which is why productivity as a strictly linear notion has seen its day pass, but we may not have enough productivity of peripheral vision to notice.)