I’m doing a series the next couple of weeks on two ways of framing up the fundamental changes that are driving so much of our sense that what we learned coming up is no longer working. This is the first of the first framing — the Sea Changes, which are basic conditions underlying everything else we will talk about. I think of Sea Changes as wind or water. None of us control them, but they have a tendency to push us in a particular direction. If we are looking to act effectively in our communities, our work and our own lives, we need to understand where the wind and the waves and the currents are pushing us.
And where they are pushing us is not in the same direction as it was when many of our assumptions and expectations were formed.
This piece attempts to explain the second change: the ongoing shift from humans as cogs in a machine of sorts, to humans as sources of creative problem solving. This isn’t totally new — ever since we hooked oxen to a plow, we’ve been working on ways to move labor off of our backs and on to something else. But we are in the middle of a massive shift in what human labor is actually best used for.
The second Sea Change has to do with what - and who - creates value. And again, this is deeper than the surface treatments that newspapers and policy-makers deal in, like who knows how to write what kind of code.
This has been true through human history: as technologies improve, peoples’ economic value shifts from what they can do with their bodies to what they can do with their minds. Farm laborers who went to work in a factory in the 1900s had to be able to tell time, sign their name, read basic instructions - none of which were skills they needed for the previous many hundred years of farming.
As labor becomes automated - not just assembly lines, even formerly “brain” tasks like writing a contract or a letter - the role that we as people play in any economy becomes progressively higher order. The most important tasks for people working in any future industry are going to revolve around creation, innovation and problem solving – two things that foreseeable technology isn’t going to be able to replace. Even AI can only remix what it’s already been given. And since we know that problems usually find better solutions when there is more than one brain in the mix, collaborative creation, innovation and problem solving are becoming even more important.
Here’s the other thing we’ve learned about creating, innovating and problem-solving in a group: given the right conditions, the more diverse the group is, the better the results and the less likely to miss something important or valuable.
Throughout most of human history, we have stuck with people who look, sound and think like us. And while that might have made us feel more safe, it didn’t make us more creative or innovative or better at problem solving.
One of the reasons why we have all of these tech startup ecosystems is because tech leaders got really excited about “collisions” about 10 years ago. Then we learned that, left to their own devices, people usually “collide” with people who look, act and sound like ourselves.
Diversity thus becomes not only a moral good, but an economic advantage – and one that needs careful cultivation of a constructive environment to achieve. It’s a skill that we will have to learn and develop - just like our great great grandparents had to learn to get to a factory on time and follow instructions.
The other implication of this sea change is that differences are a feature, not a bug. In western and western-influenced cultures, we’ve typically suspected, and often rejected, the person who varies from the norm - the one who looks different, dresses different, acts different. Our history is full of people with differences trying to “fit in” with the majority, and of the majority rejecting them. Often violently and hurtfully.
Now that difference is becoming an advantage. Our younger and future colleagues understand this already - when they embrace their differences through self expression, through self-definitions that don’t fit our conventional structures, they’re showing us that their authentic selves, their differences, make them valuable. Even if they’re not thinking in the kind of pragmatic terms I used, they’re acting from a core assumption that difference is inherently valuable.
One more ramification of this sea change. If differences add to value - practical value, not just moral value of some type - then the very idea of a binary, any binary, becomes un-valuable. Hard divisions between work and home, labor and recreation, black and white, male and female – become barriers, artificial blockages that get in the way of accessing and benefitting from the full range of experiences and perspectives that we can get access to. It works against what we’re trying to do, and where the sea is pushing us. And I can assure you that sailing against the tide is no fun.