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About 35% of current jobs in the UK are at high risk of computerisation over the following 20 years, according to a study by researchers at Oxford University and Deloitte. Go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-34066941 and type your job title into the search box below to find out the likelihood that it could be automated within the …
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Every June, my coaching conversations change. The leaders I work with are still talking about strategy and succession, but underneath, a second operating system is running. One client described her summer as “a staffing plan involving three camps, four children, three pickup times, and one car.” Another scheduled our session for her car, in a parking lot, between a board call and a camp release that happened at the exact same instant as her other child’s, twenty minutes away.
The American school summer runs roughly 10 to 12 weeks. The standard American job offers nowhere near that in vacation. Into the gap, working parents pour a privately assembled patchwork: multiple camps with different hours, different locations, and different start dates. Securing even this patchwork is a competition—registration for the most sought-after programs opens in January and many fill within hours.
Most workplaces treat this as a personal logistics problem. It isn’t. It’s a predictable, recurring operational reality affecting a large share of the workforce, and the way organizations handle it—mostly by pretending it doesn’t exist—costs them more than they think.
The work you can’t see
Here’s what makes the summer gap different from ordinary busyness: the labor is cognitive, continuous, and invisible.
The parent managing summer—still disproportionately the mother, even in dual-career households—is holding eleven (or so) weeks in her head as a single optimization problem. Which weeks are uncovered. Which child falls apart without structure. Whether the 9:00 a.m. drop-off survives the 8:30 call. Seven programs means seven registration portals, seven packing lists, seven sets of pickup rules. None of this appears on any org chart, and its output looks like leisure, which is precisely why it goes unrecognized.
What organizations do see is the performance of seamlessness: the employee who never mentions the logistics operation she’s running, because she has learned that visible parenting reads as diminished commitment. That performance is itself a tax on focus and energy. And it lands unevenly. When summer planning defaults to mothers, the cost shows up in exactly the population many organizations say they’re trying to retain and promote.
This isn’t a law of nature
Other wealthy countries face the same structural fact—school stops, work doesn’t—and treat it as a public infrastructure problem rather than a private failing.
In France, municipalities run centres de loisirs: leisure centers, typically housed in school buildings, open through the summer for children roughly ages three to fourteen, staffed by trained youth workers and priced on a sliding scale tied to family income. In Paris, a full day including lunch tops out around 25 euros. In Sweden, the Education Act requires municipalities to provide care for children up to age twelve to the extent necessary for their parents to work or study; the leisure-time centers known as fritidshem operate during the times of day and year when school is closed. The system is built on the assumption that parents have jobs in July. Germany simply shrinks the gap: summer break is about six weeks, and the states stagger their holiday dates.
None of these systems is frictionless. But where the answer to “who watches the children while parents work” is public and assumed, employees don’t have to engineer a private solution—or apologize for needing one.
American employers can’t build municipal childcare. But they’re not powerless, either, and waiting for policy to catch up is not a strategy.
What leaders can actually do
The interventions that matter most cost little. They’re mostly about converting an unspoken problem into a planned-for one.
Treat early summer like late December. Most organizations already plan around the week between Christmas and New Year’s as a known slowdown. The last week of June and the week of July 4th function the same way for working parents—every camp transition and program gap clusters there. Plan launches, offsites, and deadline-heavy sprints around it, openly, instead of forcing parents to perform full availability while running a logistics operation from their cars.
Make the gap discussable. The biggest cost of the summer scramble isn’t the hours; it’s the concealment. Leaders who name the reality—”camp transition weeks are chaos; flag your constraints and we’ll plan around them”—convert hidden stress into a schedulable fact. This costs nothing and signals everything.
Audit your meeting culture against camp hours. Many summer programs end at 3:00 or 4:00. A standing 4:30 meeting in July is a recurring crisis for some portion of your team. Moving it is a small act with outsized retention value.
Protect predictability. For working parents, a schedule that shifts with 24 hours’ notice is more destabilizing than a heavy one that holds. In summer, predictability is the benefit.
The deeper point
We already accept collective responsibility for children 180 days a year. Then summer arrives, and American work culture quietly reassigns the gap to individual families while expecting output to continue uninterrupted.
The organizations that handle this well aren’t being generous. They’re being accurate: acknowledging a real, recurring condition of their workforce and planning for it the way they’d plan for any other seasonal reality. The ones that don’t aren’t avoiding the cost. They’re just paying it in distraction, attrition, and the quiet exit of people—disproportionately women—who concluded that competence shouldn’t be a debt the workplace collects every July.
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Some of us treat creativity like a reward. Something we’ll fully inhabit once a major milestone is reached or when the weekend comes around. Through years of working with leaders, I’ve realized that this deferral isn’t a personal flaw; it’s an epidemic. And it may be the single biggest drag on organizational performance today.
Jess Ekstrom, founder of Mic Drop Workshop and author of the new book Making It Without Losing It, has been studying this trap and the neuroscience behind it. When I sat down with her recently, she offered three insights that every leader needs to hear right now.
1. The gap is not the problem. It’s the creative possibility.
Ambitious people will always have a gap between where they are and where they want to be. Ekstrom argues that the gap itself is neutral. What matters is how we interpret it. We can read it as a “discouraging absence,” a net loss, proof that we haven’t arrived. Or we can read it as a field of creative possibility: endless winning scenarios, experiments not yet run, questions not yet asked.
This maps directly onto what I call the rigor of ambiguity: the discipline required to stay productively in motion without a guaranteed outcome. I’m reminded of something a dance teacher told me in junior high during an élevé, with arms extended high above my head: “You never arrive. Always extend.” Artists understand this intuitively. They don’t freeze at the gap; they build inside it. The organizational question is: Do your leaders help their teams reframe the gap as creative fuel, or as evidence of failure?
2. Dopamine doesn’t live at the finish line.
Here’s the data point that stopped me cold: Ekstrom shared that a Vanderbilt University study found that we don’t get our dopamine hit at the ribbon cutting, the launch, or the closed deal. We get it in anticipation and in the process of building. Ekstrom’s prescription follows directly: Make the process the goal. Fall in love with the problem.
This is what I mean when I argue that motivation is a form of sentient intelligence, our embodied, meaning-driven cognition that separates human creativity from anything a machine can replicate. Burnout isn’t primarily a time-management crisis. It’s a meaning crisis. When people are only oriented toward outcomes, they hollow out the very process that replenishes them. The leaders who sustain high-performing teams aren’t the ones who celebrate only at milestones. They’re the ones who make the work itself worth showing up for.
3. Audit your success fingerprint—then ask if you actually want it.
Ekstrom names our largely unexamined beliefs about what success must look like the “success fingerprint.” We inherit it from watching parents, absorbing social media, or internalizing career day messaging. Her challenge is deceptively simple: Audit where those beliefs came from. Are they still accurate? Are they even yours?
I call this building your inventory of courage: the accumulated evidence of small acts of agency that compound, over time, into a willingness to take bigger leaps. But Ekstrom adds a critical third question beyond comparison and inspiration: “Do I even want this?” Not every metric of success you’ve inherited belongs on your list. And as a leader, the most powerful thing you can do is extend that same inquiry to your team.
A Penn Wharton School study she cites found that call center employees doubled their numbers simply after meeting the scholarship recipients their work had funded. Meaningful work isn’t abstract. It’s knowing who your work makes better off and making sure your people know it too.
The takeaway
Creativity isn’t waiting for you at some future finish line. The Imagination Era demands leaders who can help their teams find meaning, build inside uncertainty, and author their own definitions of success—not inherit someone else’s. As Ekstrom puts it: There is no “done.” There’s only the endless, generative question: What’s possible from here?
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