An Alternative View of Change - 30 Years Later

As a 55-year-old watching nearly everything change before my eyes - dramatic changes in public/private partnerships across the board, techniques of capital formation, restructuring of healthcare and banking, how people make and buy music, new global views and expectations, online connectivity, and on and on -- I've been casting around a bit to see whether anyone truly has a reliable forecasting model.

To that end, I recently plowed through the highly-worthwhile Clayton Christensen tome Seeing What's Next, which is a fascinating read on how innovation models can predict industry change (which, if you haven't read, proceed immediately to your nearest bookstore - unless you're a MEK competitor, upon which forget all of this). I further took a fresh look at the Garner Technology Hype Cycle, which mercilessly lampoons the claims of new "world-changing" tech like the iPad.

What I was struck by is how reactive these models are. They really don't predict or pontificate on potential change until after the change agent is visible and has entered the marketplace or social sphere. So the questions become: how does one truly anticipate change, the appearance of the actual change agent, and the outcome (preferred or otherwise).

Now to be fair (and before your eyes glaze over), considerable attention to finding a truly predictive model has been the obsession of humans for Millennia - from Nostradamus to ancient biblical prophecies to "infallible" prognostications of every economist or social scientist known to humanity -- all with varying degrees of failure, misinterpretation or outright fallacious conclusions.

Do I have the answer? No. Obviously.

What did strike me recently is this: in the Feb. 22 issue of Newsweek, editor Jon Meacham pens a remarkable column about change: "The System's Not to Blame. We Are." In it he speaks of gradualism, the capacity to "leap backwards," and the fact that it is "dangerously self-important" to believe that our current problems are unique. Read the whole thing by following the link.

Meanwhile, what's the point of this blog's title and how does this all fit together?

If we are in a era of "dangerously self-important thinking" (my take on Meacham's column), are we failing to see what is presently hiding out in plain view? If we over-analyze variables upon variables, are we missing the point of possibly forecasting human, business and institutional behavior?

Let me leave you with this to think about. Some 30 years ago, as a twenty-something, I remember being fascinated by a British television series titled Connections. James Burke, a science historian, produced 10 episodes, traveling all over the world for location shots to demonstrate -- with highly effective dry humor -- just how seemingly unrelated events lead up to major moments in human scientific and social history. Based on my current quest to better understand where we are as a community, a nation, and a cosmos, I found Connections was available on NetFlix. So I thought, "I wondered how all that turned out," since three decades had lapsed since I last viewed it. So I ordered it online.

After it came in the mail, I slipped it into my DVD player (which technology didn't exist in 1978), and proceeded to be stunned.

The first episode, titled "The Trigger Effect," Burke begins his series trek atop the Tower One of the World Trade Center in New York City, now of course destroyed in the infamous 9/11 terrorist attack. After warning of humanity's looming capacity to fall into a "technology trap," he chronicles the dangerously high degree of vulnerability of the fragile electrical grid (sound familiar these days?), using real events in New York City as the example. The first episode ends up in Kuwait, where Burke asks how the Kuwaiti people will respond to their new-found oil wealth and the possibility of integrating into Western society of sorts.

Of course, a little over a decade later, Kuwait was invaded by Iraq, setting off a whole new global reaction. What would Burke -- or his audience for that matter -- said if someone had walked up to him in 1977 and said "Oh, the building for your first setting will be annihilated by global terrorist forces from halfway around the world in a decade or two, and second, the electric grid problems will be far more serious in 30 years with new solutions only now coming into view, and by the way, the country where you filmed your last bit will be the site of a near-total global military reaction to the vulnerability of energy supplies."

Order the episode for yourself and see if you don't experience a eerie feeling or two. Then ask yourself: what are we missing today that is right in front of us? Are we in fact in an era of "dangerously self-important thinking" when it comes to achieving real and strategic change?

If you have any thoughts on this (and don't want to log into Google to comment), e-mail me at msnyder@themekgroup.com and we'll continue the conversation about "an alternative view of change."

Fortuna favet fortibus.