Based on reports that 40 percent of think tank employees who think from home are thinking about things they’re not being paid to think about, many outside clients have been terminating their thinking contracts. To stay in business, some think tanks are changing their focus to include both thinking and doing.
“How can you tell what they’re thinking when they’re doing it from home?” asks Peter Regus, CEO of Washington DC-based Wondering LLC. “When they’re in the office at least you can check.” The most common method of doing this, he says, is to sneak up behind someone and shout, “What are you thinking about?”
Wondering has lost over 50 percent of its client base since April. In August, the company introduced “doing” – a concept employees had a hard time adjusting to, says Regus. “We’d never asked them to do anything before,” he says. What they do varies from month to month, but has included such tasks as re-formulating pre-dispositional concepts instead of just thinking about how to re-formulate them, and assembling pencil sharpeners for a Pittsburgh office supply manufacturer.
“Think tanks have bills to pay like any business,” says Regus, noting that over 12,000 US think tanks have introduced similar strategies in order to stay afloat. He’s confident the situation is only temporary.
“Someday soon we’ll be back on site again thinking as a team,” he says. “We’ll never have to ask our employees to do anything again.”
