6 June 2026

The comfort crisis runs businesses too

Michael Easter's The Comfort Crisis makes an argument about people: modern life has engineered out discomfort, and with it much of what makes us capable. We are warm, fed, seated and endlessly distracted, and we are weaker, more anxious and less alive for it. His prescription is deliberate difficulty, taking on the hard thing on purpose, up to what he borrows from Japanese tradition as a misogi: a challenge hard enough that you might fail, undertaken to find out who you are.

Businesses have comfort crises too, and construction businesses have acute ones.

Comfortable and eroding

Organisational comfort does not look like laziness. It looks like the familiar. The reporting process everyone hates but everyone knows. The folder structure from 2019. The Sunday-evening spreadsheet ritual that a director has done so long it feels like diligence. The quiet decision, re-made every quarter, not to look too hard at how much skilled time the business burns on admin, because looking would oblige someone to act.

None of this feels like decline while it is happening. That is Easter's whole point about comfort: the cost is invisible day to day and enormous over years. In business the cost has a name, margin, and a mechanism: competitors who chose discomfort are getting structurally faster while your processes stay warm and familiar.

The discomfort is the moat

Be honest about why AI adoption stalls in most firms. It is rarely the technology and it is never the price. It is that adoption is uncomfortable. Learning a tool in front of juniors is uncomfortable. Admitting the current process wastes a hundred grand a year is uncomfortable. Fixing ten years of SharePoint is dull, hard and thankless. Changing the habit of a twenty-year site routine is friction, every day, for weeks.

So the comfortable business waits. For certainty, for the market, for someone else to prove it. And here is the strategic irony: the discomfort is exactly what protects the reward. If adopting this well were painless, everyone would have done it and the advantage would already be priced in. The difficulty is the moat. The firms willing to be temporarily worse at something, clumsy first pilots, awkward retraining, honest process surgery, are buying an edge the comfortable cannot copy without paying the same toll.

Choose a corporate misogi

Easter's rules for a misogi translate cleanly: make it genuinely hard, make failure possible, and do not die. For a business, do not bet the company, but do pick something with real stakes. Digitise the site records across every live project. Rebuild the bid library and halve production time by year end. Take the whole commercial team through AI training and retire three manual workflows by Christmas.

The point is not only the outcome. It is what the attempt does to the organisation: a business that has done one hard modernisation properly stops being afraid of the category. Capability compounds exactly like comfort does, in the other direction.

Spend the discomfort where it counts

One clarification, because it sounds like a contradiction: we spend our days removing difficulty from businesses, the drudgery, the re-keying, the 7pm diary. Easter is not against comfort everywhere; he is against misallocating it. Drudgery is not the noble kind of hard. It is friction that exhausts people without growing them.

Automate the drudgery precisely so your people have the capacity for productive discomfort: the harder bid, the awkward client conversation, the new capability. Comfortable processes, uncomfortable ambitions is a losing combination. Reverse it.