I had a premonition once that my grandmother had died. Thirty minutes later, my housemaster’s wife came to find me to tell me just that. I have no explanation of what had gone on here.
The world is about to blow up in our faces, and I know why. This is not a premonition. This is based on data, but not data as you know it.
Change causes disruption, and disruption is the opening that change needs to succeed. Change and disruption are symbionts.
But not all change is the same. Some change is very gradual, creeping up on you until one day you suddenly become aware of it and, boom, now you see the difference. You only notice it as change when it reaches a tipping point. Before then, you had no idea it was happening, or if you thought something was happening, you had no idea what it was.
Then there is rapid change. Overnight the landscape is different. A tsunami of change. Sudden, devastating and completely disruptive. It came out of nowhere, or so it seems.
But that is all a myth. Change is happening all the time. It is constant, and it is emergent. Whatever changes today, in the next hour, minute or second will influence what changes in the next second, minute and hour.
People only notice change when they can see the data as evidence. They then have awareness, and the change influences them in some way.
Change is about to get very noticeable for everyone. The data is all around us, but we are blind to it. There is a level of abundance and comfort in the world hiding the data from most people.
The reason we are not connected to the data is due to the way we are organised, in business, in society and in communities.
We are organised to prevent surprises, We are organised to be predictable. And we are organised to stay the same. We have institutions dedicated to keeping things the same. We are hoarders of what has already passed. We think we can learn from history. Actually, all we do is wrap it up in cotton wool and reverently protect it.
For what purpose? The purpose of our own comfort, familiarity and the perception of safety.
I once had a guy who worked for me, and we had a secret code. When the team was too stressed or too worn out, he would tell me that the rubber band was going white. When you stretch a rubber band, if you stretch it too much, it starts to go white. If you stop, it is ok, and will go back to how it was, almost. If you keep up the pressure, something in the rubber band changes and it loses its elasticity and becomes useless. It was our code to get people rested before the next wave of pressure.
When you organise for comfort and you try to keep things the same, you don’t notice the rubber band is turning white until it’s too late.
However, It’s not too late yet although the rubber band is turning more and more white every day.
And here is the data.
- The advance of technology is increasing exponentially.
- The gap between the very rich and the very poor is getting wider.
- There are more people in poverty, destitution, displacement and famine than ever before.
- Nations are becoming more and more divided.
- National Unions are breaking apart.
- Organised crime is rampant.
- Corruption and dishonesty in those entrusted to lead are blatant and unrepentant.
The world is out of balance.
There is an increasing disenfranchised youth who see the distorted world previous generations are leaving them and wonder why they should listen to the “old farts”. There is an air of both rebellion and resignation, which is a dangerous mix ready for manipulation. We have seen that already at work across the globe.
Every day, the coming explosion emerges before our eyes, and we do nothing about it because few people see it, and those that do are called scaremongers by those who want to maintain the status quo.
And you think that it is not impacting you yet! You need to look through a different lens.
The mantra of today, thanks to our abundant world, is “celebrate the things we have.” That is great. Yet what have we lost?
Health, wealth, relationships, community and environment.
The industrial world has brought so much greatness at such a high cost. Progress costs!
Compare a beautiful country village or rural town to a city.
Compare a small fishing village to a commercial harbour.
Villages became towns and then became cities.
Small businesses grow to be bigger businesses and then became corporations.
As things grow, they need to be organised differently. Since the industrial revolution, that has meant hierarchical command and control - the bigger you get, the more control you need or so the theory goes.
The result has been increasing disconnection between the people doing the work and the people giving the orders. The people at the top of the hierarchy have no clue what is happening at the bottom, so their decisions are to serve the top of the hierarchy and often cause damage at the bottom. And this is not new.
In the book “The Tyranny of Distance - How Distance Shaped Australia's History’ by Geoffrey Blainey, it described how the distance between the top of the hierarchy, the British Government and the bottom of the hierarchy, the Governor of Australia, shaped the history of Australia in those first decades of colonisation.
Today we have a new belief.
‘Ongoing technological improvements will continue to reduce the tyranny of distance and make it possible for the process of globalization to go much further.’
The myth is that technological improvements will solve this problem.
Technology in and of itself is not the solution; it can only serve human endeavours. First, we must address the challenge of communication and set new structures that match social interaction and connection capacity.
To avoid the world blowing up in your face, first, you must free yourself and your organisation from the constraints of the historical hierarchical command and control structures that exist and create a truly free human experience for all employees, which may seem radical. Many will say unnecessary because they do not see the danger ahead that will result from more of the same old ways.
Technology and its exponential acceleration is something that will continue to provide a rich source of disruption and enable human interaction to become more and more impactful if we organise ourselves and our organisations to be innovative.
And the place to start is with how we organise our organisations to cope with the changes that are constant.
We need to measure success, not by how many billions we created but by how few lives we damaged along the way. Instead of, first, do no harm, it should be, first, make it better. And technology applied well can serve us all.
