Future Here Now: Change is the new status quo

Signals

In this issue:

• The Resilience Myth

• Three horizons of AI work and workers

• When generational cycles need to break

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We’re not built to like change. But we’d better get used to it.

Our evolution as a species heavily emphasized pattern recognition. Our ability to predict what would happen based on past experience – ours and people around us – became one of our most important strategies to compensate for our lack of pointy teeth and speed and claws and anything resembling armor. We survived the Ice Age in part because we learned to recognize patterns and adapt.

But pattern recognition becomes less valuable when everything changes all the time. When we’re in a period where old patterns are dissolving and new patterns aren’t established yet.

So it’s no wonder we feel uneasy. And that some of our friends and colleagues and neighbors are acting in ways that make no sense to us.

Many people have mindsets, perspectives on the world, that don’t deal well with change. That respond to something new, unfamiliar, with fear, doubling-down on the old behaviors and asserting the old assumptions.

Psychologists call it an Extinction Event – a period of time before a person changes a behavior when they try to do the old thing harder and more loudly.

An extinction event is an unproductive, damaging side effect of change.

And it’s ineffective. As long as the force they’re fighting against doesn’t change, the extinction behavior is shovelling the ocean with a teaspoon.

So we have to learn how to accept change, accept disruption, and learn to see the new patterns that may not be so obvious yet.

And do it fast.

Which we can. We have done hard things before. We can manage how we react to change. As people and as communities.

The Resilience Myth

It’s unusual for me to share a book that I haven’t read yet. But this one looks like it’s addressing a crucial topic.

When I was younger and newer to the questions of resilience, sustainable growth, etc., I bought into the idea that a lot of my contemporaries were pushing: that you measure “resilience” by a person’s persistence in pursuing the vision or idea or breakthrough that they were pushing in their professionals world. The conclusion too many of us drew from that was that people who didn’t persist, who didn’t fight back against impossible odds, didn’t have what it takes – they lacked resilience, sometimes labelled as “grit.”

As I worked more and more with Black and under-resourced entrepreneurs on a variety of fronts, I realized how wrong I had been. Over and over again, under-resourced entrepreneurs didn’t give up because it was hard or they didn’t want to do it. They gave up, over and over again, because their responsibility to children, elders, family, sometimes their community, wore away at their ability to take the kinds of risks we have tended to call “grit.” The lack of a functional safety net, for themselves and for those who otherwise had to depend on them, meant that they had nothing of the margin of error that privileged people like me took for granted.

I have watched more entrepreneurs than I can count walk away from their good ideas because they