Preparing For A World That Doesn't Exist-Yet
I fell again, hitting the water hard.
What was I doing wrong? I was surfing exactly the way I did yesterday. But the wind had changed.
I was trying to surf yesterday’s waves.
Am I prepared for a world that doesn’t exist-yet? Are we as a society prepared for a world changing as fast as one can read this sentence? Most of us say “yes”, yet many folks resist change and attempt to do things in the same old way they’ve been doing things in the past.
We are living on the edge of a tsunami of change: a new era in human history that will be increasingly fast paced, interconnected, interdependent, and complex. How do we keep our balance in this emerging world?
In an age where so many things regarding the planet seem to hang in the balance, the more of us who become intentional about personal and community transformation the better. We need to learn to do more than one thing at a time and try multiple things when engaging complex issues…the best thing we can do is to fail fast and learn quicker. Some people double down on a failing project because they have only imagined one solution.
The way we did things in the agricultural and industrial ages fit their time in response to seasons for planting and harvesting or factory line predictability. The Internet age we are currently living in is a transitional one. It will give way to a longer epoch bringing production and design closer to consumers and communities. Change is no longer linear; it is not even exponential. It’s going to be technologically fractal: markets, trends, investments, currencies- even the climate veering swiftly along trajectories that will seem frighteningly unpredictable. Yesterday’s answers won’t solve tomorrow’s crises. What will be the market equivalent of a bomb cyclone? We have to learn how to recognize and respond to unfolding complex patterns in real time.
Most of the people I know embrace the notion that we are connected, by working in concert together we help each other succeed. Scratch my back and I’ll get yours- this is nice but it is small minded. A world that is increasingly complex and interdependent requires that we see ever larger non-linear connections. If a dam is built in one state creating a thriving community but reduces the flow in another- drying up towns and farmlands downriver, we have solved one problem and created multiple others.
Chaos is not necessarily a negative thing; it is a sign that something different is percolating, waiting to emerge. For example, just as technology speeds our pace of change, it also offers new paths of convergence and interconnection. Our ability to adapt and co-evolve with the tools we have created will make the crucial difference. We will have to meet this new world differently than we did in the past.
A new wave is already rising under us; I am ready to go with it.