The modern world we live in is making ever increasing demands on us. It shows up in the accelerating change and mounting complexity that earlier generations didn’t have to cope with.
A cursory look around reveals stunning advances in communication, medicine, materials, transportation and many other areas in just the last 100 years. Transportation alone has gone from horseback to automobile to airplanes to spacecraft and all their spin off’s. Communication has produced fax machines, the internet and cell phones. Medicine gives us new diagnostic machines, a wide array of drugs and even organ transplants. Materials advances include nylon, plastics, composites and too many others to count. Related products and services outstrip them all. It’s easy to see that change is rapid and accelerating.
Mounting complexity is no surprise when we count the increases in literate people, the massive number of college graduates and the untold numbers of specialists in new areas. Often unnoticed is that there are more scientists alive today than lived throughout history, there are more lawyers today than there have ever been and there are now over 30,000 congressional staffers when there used to be less than 500. Everybody is busy doing something as we can see by the new laws that show up everyday and the doubling of recorded knowledge that happens more often than every 3 years.
Given what’s happened in the last 100 years, forecasting the next 100 years is an overwhelming challenge.
Our historical tradition dating back centuries to the time of Descartes or maybe even earlier teaches us that the world operates like a big machine and if we understand how it works we can do whatever it allows. To deal with change and complexity we historically broke things down into parts and studied them separately to understand how the world works. This process, called reductionism, has been immensely powerful over the years but is now being strained to the breaking point as complexity increases. There are now so many parts it’s worse than a jigsaw puzzle to put them together in any sensible way.
Now comes a shift in the wind. Our historical tradition of big machine predictability is being replaced by a fast emerging new boundless possibility tradition that accepts rapid change and complexity as normal. New perspectives and abilities are emerging that honor independent initiative and recognize that big machine limitations are an illusion. The new tradition we are seeing emerge calls for breakthrough thinking that goes far beyond our traditional improvement thinking and is not at all predictable by the historical big machine concept of how the world works.
The challenge that a shift in the wind throws in our face is to break free of the blindness to possibility that historical traditions give us, to tolerate the risk of thinking differently than we have been taught and to have the resilience to keep on keeping on when our day to day experiences lead us to question whether the world is really changing fast enough to matter
