Our Ever-Changing World

A sample from my upcoming book

I’ve mentioned before I’m revising my e-book on foresight. What follows is an introductory section on change from the book, which I build upon and then offer tools and techniques for dealing with change. I hope you enjoy it.

Change

About twenty-five hundred years ago, Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, “The only thing that is constant is change,” and things didn’t change all that much back then. But every decade yields more discoveries and innovations that build upon one another. Once someone cracks the code to a breakthrough, often hiding in plain site, the floodgates open to exponential change across a number areas that accelerate at an ever-increasing pace.

The Industrial Revolution, with its new methods of power and production, brought forth unimaginable change. Since then advances in electronics and computers have transformed every industry and forever altered our personal and professional lives. And the future? As Yoda wisely tells us in The Empire Strikes Back, “Always in motion is the future.”

I was extremely fortunate to know my great grandmother and fondly remember the stories of her lifetime experiences. The life she was born into at the end of the nineteenth century wasn’t a whole lot different than that of her great grandmother. But during her lifetime she experienced women gaining the right to vote. She witnessed the transition from horses to automobiles, electricity and indoor plumbing in her rural community, the realization of airplanes and space flight, refrigerators replacing iceboxes, and the inventions of the polio vaccine, aerosol cans, nuclear energy, Wonder Bread, and the Wham-O Hula Hoop. Since her birth, life expectancy has nearly doubled and crop yields are up five hundred percent. From Little House on the Prairie to The Jetsons in one lifetime.

I grew up in the country. On rare occasions when we visited the ‘city’ (population twenty-four thousand) it was a special treat. We’d pile into the family Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight, and head to Sears for back to school clothes. We’d browse through Waldenbooks and the record store. We might have a grilled cheese sandwich at Woolworth’s lunch counter. These brands, the stalwart companies of my youth, are now gone or barely existing on life support.

In my lifetime I’ve seen the Soviet Union fall; the dramatic economic rise of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan; multiple wars in places few could point out on a map; the dawn of personal computers; humans walking on the moon; and air conditioning so common stores no longer have a sign at the door announcing it. If I attempted this book during my twenties with library research, an IBM Selectric typewriter, and the publishing paradigm of the day, you most assuredly wouldn’t be reading it now.

If you’re old enough to drink (legally of course) you’ve lived in a time before Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, and removing your shoes before boarding a flight. You’ve seen the iPhone become a common substitute for watches, cameras, calculators, paper maps, music players, and more, upending entire industries in one fell swoop.

I say all this not to show my age, make you feel old, or entertain you with a reminiscing trip down memory lane, but to highlight how much has changed over such a short period. This pace of change, driven by an explosion of accelerating technology and evolving social constructs, will continue, if not increase, as we move forward into the future.

To accurately forecast the future we must look for signs of potential change. We must be open to new possibilities and not allow our biases and assumptions to cloud our vision. This can be challenging, as the change may not mesh with what we know or are comfortable with.

That’s it for the book section, but I’d like to add something that might make you think. Everything I described above spans just a few generations. We’re only about ten generations from the founding of the United States around 1776. Considering how different today is from just a few years ago, imagine what it will look like a couple decades into the future.

Photo: Sandy Millar via Unsplash