Are you ready for your extinction?

When you get down to the core of it, I believe change is where problems and opportunities come from. I’m most interested in root cause issues, and this is as root as they come. This change could be in the physical world, or just your mindset or perspective about something. My love for the Adizes Methodology is mostly due to the tools and frameworks that provide real pathways to managing the changes life throws at you.

However, change doesn't occur at a constant pace in many environments. In today’s business environments change is accelerating, and I believe the value we offer is accelerating at the same rate. Here’s why.

Change is accelerating.

I recently watched a documentary called ‘Singularity Is Near’, and some of the information in this article is referenced from there. I have been keenly studying the Singularity, because I personally feel it’s inevitable.

The ‘Singularity’ is a word borrowed from Physics to describe a future period where technological change will be so rapid, and its impact so profound, that every aspect of human life will be irreversibly transformed.

I’m less concerned about the uncertainty that this rapid change brings, but rather being ready to respond to whatever problems and opportunities any future change presents.

If we go back five hundred years, nothing much happened in a century. Now, there is huge technological change in just one year.Even young people today can see the rapid rate of technological change within their lifetimes, let alone someone at retirement age.

The power of the phones that are now in our pockets, self-driving cars and reusable space ships. Anyone not excited to be alive needs a new perspective.

Technology and change will not slow down- it is speeding up. Technology feeds on itself and grows exponentially. We use the latest technology to create the next technology. With each new generation of technology building upon the last, the speed of the process accelerates over time.

Ray Kurzweil and many scientists in the field believes that in 40 or so years the pace of change is going to be so astonishingly quick that you won’t be able to follow it unless you enhance your own intelligence. It is primarily due to the law of accelerating returns.

Kurzweil describes the ‘law of accelerating returns’ in the following manner. If you count linearly, eg 1, 2, 3 etc, 30 steps gets you to 30. But if you count exponentially, eg, 2, 4, 8, etc, 30 steps gets you to 1 billion! Technological change behaves in this manner and we will be entering a period of significant change to the world of which we live.

When you look at computers, we went from something the size of a building to something that fits in your pocket and thousands of times faster, in 40 years. In the next 40 years we will have technology that goes from your pocket to the size of a blood cell, and will be far more powerful.

Even biological evolution shows the same phenomenon.

The very first paradigm of biological evolution was DNA which scientists believe took one billion years. The evolutionary process adopted DNA and has used it ever since. This led to the next stage being the Cambrian Explosion which was when body plants and animals started to evolve at a rate one hundred times faster than DNA, only taking ten million years.

After a few more steps, homosepians, the first technology creating species evolved, which only took a few hundred thousand years.

Whilst biological evolution continues, it is now overtaken by technological evolution from a speed standpoint.

It took tens of thousands of years to evolve stone tools, control of fire and to create the wheel. But, because we always use the latest technology to create the next technology, the whole pace of technology has accelerated leading to incredible paradigm shifts. With a few leaps and jumps in just a few hundred years, we have the incredible world we have today.

These shifts include things such as search engines with all the world’s data accessible at your fingers evolving in a few short years. With all the world’s data easily accessible, we can already see rapid technological change leveraging off this technology at an exponential rate.

Another example is power storage, which is going to revolutionise transport and energy in the next 10 years as well. We are going to go from dirty combustion engines and traffic gridlock, to 80% less vehicles that are clean and autonomously driving around on demand.

If you think the above claim is fanciful, Tony Seba has a great presentation which you can see here, which shows the 1900 Easter Parade on 5th avenue in New York, with a sea of horses and one single car. Only 13 years later at the same event and camera position, there is a sea of cars and only one horse. Once technology has reached affordability for the masses, the change explodes.

Given this year will see electric autonomous vehicles hit the market at a $35,000 price point, it’s going to happen, and happen fast. The average price of a new car in America is about $30,000 so we are not far off mass affordability. 2018 and 2019 will see similar technology in the $25,000 price point.

An electric car has about 20 moving parts, compared to over 700 in a combustion engine. It costs approximately 10 times less to run, and 10 times less to maintain. It will be more powerful and be able drive itself. It can drop you off and drive home.

And most people will just sign up to a ‘car on demand’ service and just access a fleet of vehicles for about 10% of the cost of owning one.

If you’re a taxi driver or Uber driver, are you ready? If you’re a mechanic, are you ready? If you own car parks, are you ready? If you own petrol stations, are you ready? If you’re a country that solely relies on oil, are you ready? If you own car dealerships, are you ready?

The electric automated car is essentially the combination of historical exponential growth in power storage, supercomputing, and visual technology that has evolved to disrupt and revolutionise transport ownership, access, storage and infrastructure.

This example is simply only one industry, but I believe it is an example of what is happening in many other industries. Multiple technologies coming together in a single product or service, that then revolutionises multiple other industries around it. If you think your company or industry is different, your end may be near.

Key Message: Are you ready for a world of accelerating change? Is change one of your central focal points, and is your organisation primed to respond? You can’t forecast exactly what the problems and opportunities are going to be. You can predict there will be change, but not exactly what. So your organisation needs to be primed to catch the ball irrelevant of which direction and at what velocity it is thrown at you.

Separate decisions from implementation.

At the risk of being repetitive, all problems and opportunities come from change. If there is no change, there are no problems and there are no opportunities. Change only stops when you're dead. So until then, best get used to it.

In the world that I outline above, change is accelerating and therefore the need to be focused on handling that change, and the problems and opportunities that come with change, accelerates as well.

Problems and opportunities mean you need to manage. To manage means you need to decide what to do on one hand, and then implement that decision on the other. They MUST be separate.

An accelerating world means faster decisions and faster implementation. If you’re too slow, you’re gone. As soon as you've implemented something, this in turn creates new change and the cycle starts again. If you can get really good at this, you will be long term successful.

You need to have a broad set of different styles, experiences and perspectives to make really great decisions based on the information available. However, these differences create conflict and unless you harness this conflict, it will not end well. The Adizes Methodology harnesses this conflict.

Once the decision is made you need a singular and dictatorial focus on getting it implemented. However, implementation also has conflict because different divisions, teams and individuals have different interests. Unless you create a single common interest, it will not end well. The Adizes Methodology helps creates the common interest.

Once you have finally implemented the new decisions, you create more change and the cycle starts again.

So think about your organisation and ask the following questions;

• Are you primed for the rapid changes occurring outside your organisation that are only going to get faster?
• Are small groups in your company tasked with trying to predict the future, or does your entire organisation focus on interpreting the signals of change, and respond to those signals as one cohesive group?
• Does your organisation solve its problems swiftly and efficiently without wasted energy?
• Does your organisation capitalise on opportunities rapidly and faster than all other competitors?

If you answer no to any of the above, we are here to help and provide you with the tools and capacity to answer yes and remove extinction as a possible outcome.

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