Hey there. I’m working on a new keynote and follow-up workshop. I’ll have video of the talk soon, but I thought you might like to see the draft. I’d love to have your feedback.
If you want to talk about developing a talk or workshop for your organization, drop me a note!
Intro:
In 1982 a small paint factory outside of Cleveland, Ohio, died. The building and machinery were sold for parts and storage. The company had done pretty well for a couple of decades, but the national and international economy had been transformed in the space of a couple of years. And this business, and the families that depended on it, and the entire economy and society of the region, got swamped by the backwash.
What does it take to thrive in a period of change - in a period when all the old assumptions get thrown out on their head? What does it take for us to thrive in a globally transitional moment? What does that thriving require of us, of our businesses and organizations, of our communities?
That business was my family’s. My grandfather started it, my dad did most of the work of running it. And in a matter of weeks, my dad went from a respectable small business owner to a middle aged guy out of work, with little education and seemingly useless skills. And the small, historically industrial town that both he and I grew up in was never the same.
And I think that question I raised has been driving me from a very young age. I was 13 when the company folded. Since then, I’ve touched a lot of the ways that people might try to answer that question. I’ve been a small-town journalist, a teacher, a historic preservationist, a downtown revitalizer, an urban planner, an economic developer, an entrepreneur and an entrepreneurship support system-builder. And through all that time, I think I finally figured a few things out.
That business closing, and the massive dislocation that marked the 80s where I grew up, that was the first blast of the destruction of the Industrial Era. We still have industries, of course, but the assumptions, the mindsets, the expectations that made the Industrial Era what it was have been falling apart since those rough days, crumbling ever since.
And we’re not totally sure what comes next. A hundred years ago, Antonio Gramsci wrote ““The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
That’s where we are now.
But the picture is coming into focus. And if we want the places we care about, and the organizations that matter to us, and ourselves to be able to thrive in a future that’s so different from out past, we have to get ready. We have to get Future Ready.
I’ve written a lot ( a loooot) about how this future will be different from our past. But I think it all boils down to three core resets, three core ways in which how we relate to each other are changing, and will change. The challenge to us isn’t AI this or self-driving cars that. The real, gut level, underlying challenge is to change our assumptions, our systems – our paradigm, the basic core structure of our personal and collective understanding – away from what we got from our Industrial Era upbringing, and toward the era that’s dawning.
So what are those three?
Panopticom
Inclusion Advantage
Interdependent.
Notice that there’s no machine learning in there. Technology is just a set of tools - we can use them for good, or bad, or a mix. The key question in this moment is, do we have the understanding, the consciousness and the intentionality to use our technologies in ways that reinforce where our future seems to want to go, or are we using them to try to hang onto outdated assumptions, power structures, ways of doing things. And what we will find – what we’ve always found – is that resisting these kinds of sea changes is like fighting the tide. You can waste all your energy on it, but eventually the water wins. A lot of the conflicts we see today, locally and globally, have their roots in the old ways dying, and the new ways struggling to be born.
So what do those new ways look like?
Panopticom
This is the most technology-driven of the sea changes, and I’m shamelessly borrowing this term from the great sage Peter Gabriel. Yes, this guy [clip of one of the weird videos]. Don’t let the goofiness fool you. This guy has been one of the best futurists I know of for more than 20 years. Do a YouTube dive on him sometime, and you’ll see what I mean.
Gabriel put out a song last year called “Panopticom.” It’s a play on a thought experiment from an 18th-century philosopher. In that thought experiment, the philosopher theorized that you could control a whole prison worth of people with one guard – IF that guard could see you, and you couldn’t tell whether the guard was looking at you or not. This idea was used in the late 1900s to explore authoritarianism - thing Big Brother and Orwell’s 1984.
Gabriel turns that idea on its head. He writes that
We pour the medicine down
While we watch the world around us
We got witness on the ground taking in the evidence
And we reach across the globe
We got all the information flowing
You face the mother lode tentacles around you
We see video of cities on the other side of the world bis being bombed, in real time, and the person who is being hurt in that moment looks us in the eyes through the camera. We search millions of words of text messages to find the smoking gun that proves a politician’s corruption. We can read a hundred individuals explaining how structural racism hurts them, personally, and we can never claim again that we didn’t know.
We have immediate information, directly from the source, with next to no effort on our part as viewers and readers. That has never, never happened in all of human civilization’s history. All of a sudden, there are no gatekeepers.
Um, duh. We know that. We’re living that.
But how does that change us?
There are about a hundred different directions I could go with that. But I’m going to stick to one.
Soon, there will be no successful coverups.
We are seeing that with conspirators who are convicted on the basis of their text messages. We see this when a company tries to “greenwash” its products and that gets exposed. We see that when a citizen sleuth writes a macro in 10 minutes to search a CSV download of the city’s payments to find the details on a questionable contractor. And we see it most of all when someone takes the advice of an attorney or a PR agent and tries to hide or sidestep the truth. More often than not, that backfires worse than a simple admission.
Pundits sometimes question whether we can handle all of this, whether we get information overload and stop caring, or whether we will not be able to tell the real thing from the deep fakes. I think this is a short term problem - one that we will be forced to address in the next 5-10 years. And based on what we are seeing from our youngest digital natives, who already manage massive information streams and spot “sus,” even with completely inadequate formal training, I think that will be OK. But the existence eddies of doesn’t change the tide.
Inclusion Advantage
The second new way has to do with what - and who - creates value. And again, this is deeper than 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 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. [P&G factory story?]
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.
Throughout most of 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.
Interdependence
The last big sea change we are experiencing, and will continue to experience, is another broken-down binary: interdependence and network organization replacing problematic ideals of hierarchy, self-sufficiency and separation.
We’re seeing this in virtually every aspect of our economies and cultures. In urban planning, we’re seeing major shifts from strict land use segregation – stores over here, houses over there, workplaces way off somewhere else – to combinations of uses right on top of each other, in a way that would have made a 1950s planner go nuts. In business, we’re seeing a proliferation of small businesses and increasingly even micro-businesses. It’s easier to be self-employed than it ever has been, because you can outsource virtually any task to a network of people across the world. Even in popular music, the vice grip that labels had on what you heard through most of the 20th century has splintered, making it easier than ever to get your music heard the way you want it to be heard. There are a lot of problems, but that’s in part because we’re still in this transition. Music and business and urban development will look even more different 50 years from now.
One of the most profounds ramifications of this sea change is what we see in those examples: the death of externalities. Economists use the word “externalities” to describe anything that falls outside of the transaction that they’re interested in. For most of the Industrial Era, pollution was an externality - it was a side effect, one that didn’t change the economic decision, one that industrial leaders assumed they could ignore, or push aside. And this wasn’t just a BigCo problem - it was embedded in Industrial era thinking. That sweet little company that I opened this talk with? It dumped untold amounts of oil and benzene and failed paint batches into the scraggly woods behind it… where it slowly leached downhill into a creek that now runs through a national park.
In some ways we’ve gotten a whole lot better about addressing externalities than we did back then. But that’s an assumption that you still find underlying lots of our behaviors. Maximizing stock value, fertilizing your lawn, dismissing structural racism’s impacts…all of these exist because we learned to assume that the side effects – the externalities – didn’t really matter. As we come to terms with this element of the sea change, we will have to learn to think in terms of not just transactions, but in terms of systems – and that means that we will have to manage a level of complexity that we never have before.
I try to pay attention to what other people are saying about the future, and most of what I see these days looks like this:
If people trying to sell us stuff think that we are scared of the future, well, at least they’re thinking in terms of the future being different from our past. It’s an inadequate response to the kinds of sea changes we’ve been talking about, but, well, it’s something.
The thing is, we can’t future proof. We can’t fend off the sea changes – we can’t protect the familiar from the unfamiliar.
Instead of future proofing, the big challenge in front of all of us today is to learn to be Future Ready.
If I approached sailing the way I approach driving a motor boat, I would capsize and throw everyone in the water within 15 minutes of leaving the dock. It’s fundamentally the wrong approach for the reality in which I find myself.
But if I’ve spent decades driving a motor boat and one day I switch over to sail, even if I know intellectually how it works, there’s a pretty good chance my old muscle memory will kick in at some point. And then we might all be swimming.
The biggest challenge in front of all of us right now isn’t a new technology. It’s ourselves - our assumptions, our systems, our this-is-how-we’ve always done it. Our basic, often unexamined paradigms of how the world is supposed to work.
When our core expectations work at cross-purposes to a new reality, we hamstring ourselves and hurt others without meaning to, or sometimes without understanding why.
The biggest challenge facing our communities, our businesses and organizations, and ourselves, is to develop the skills of Future Readiness, and do that soon enough to capitalize on the opportunities that comes from knowing how to navigate the seas. Even when they’re changing.
BJ - sorry it took me a couple of days to respond - deadlines all over the place this week.
Also, thank you for your response. I'm particularly glad because it helps me understand where I might need to be more clear about what I'm trying to say.
I don't disagree about the points you raised. You've described these elements of the foreground, the current context.
The point that's important for all of us to keep in mind, IMO, is that the _reason_ why so much of this is happening right now is because we're at that "between there be monsters" phase. Because people have so much _prima facie_ access to information, two things happen:
(1) we lack the tools to deal with the information deluge adequately, and as a result we are letting ourselves get trapped into echo chambers and failing to adequately assess the reliability of information. That's a result of the fact that all but the youngest of us came up in that Industrial Era, command-and-control context, where we were taught from childhood to believe what authorities told us. That means that when the New York Times or Tom Brokaw or some other Authority told you what to think, we believed them. And as we found out with the Vietnam War and Iran-contra and all of the other important stories worldwide that we heard barely anything about, we were getting a very filtered reality. Now there's a whole lot less of that kind of filtering, and too often we react by creating our own personal or tribal bubbles. But I think that's going to change as younger generations are growing comfortable with managing more information sources. Bubbles pop sooner or later.
(2) As you note, there's a lot of information manipulation going on right now, and that's an immediate concern. But think a moment about why that's happening: it takes _more effort_ now to maintain a level of disinformation than it ever has, because the information that can counter it can be found by virtually anyone willing to look for it. So interests trying to maintain an obfuscation or keep misleading have to put far more effort into that than they did 50 years ago, when alternative views had a much harder time finding an audience and you only had to "sell" your half-truths to a small number of stakeholders - who might have a very strong self-interest in supporting your narrative. If I'm hiring a corrupt scientist or pushing a lie, it's a whole lot harder for me to hide that for long. There might be a bubble that believes me no matter what, but over time those bubbles can only keep their core members in the face of all the other information out there.
The only thing I really disagree with you on is "kids" fact checking. Media has a ton of flaws and failures, but if you look at how a fact checker with a reputable operation does the work of fact checking, most of them IMO are pretty sound. Just because you have a political POV does not mean that you cannot look at a range of sources and vet their reliability. In fact, I would argue that people who have learned to do critical thinking (most liberal arts degrees, with the exception of economics, which has its own problems), are on the whole better qualified to do fact checking that someone who is deep in the technical details. You need someone who can criticially evaluate the underlying assumptions, not just whether they did the math right. And I'd rather have someone who has facility with managing a wide range of information sources and approaching those with an open perspective that considers other possibilities than the one they came up with than someone who is convinced that they know all the answers. Brain research indicates that people under 25 are better at than than us oldsters.
The last point you make is actually a really important one. As you know, our understanding of physics changed totally in the last 100 years. Even the very fundamental ideas of our certainty about everyday physical objects seems to have broken down at the atomic level, with current understanding being that the very act of observing something changes the distribution of its subatomic elements . Quantum physics upends most of our core, inherited assumptions about how matter works, and yet we are still acting as though Newton's laws govern everything they way we thought they did when we invented industrial systems. One of the most significant challenges to our systems - and our own brains - over the next 100 years is going to be integrating that understanding of uncertainty, of shifting perspectives, of what we see not necessarily being the whole story, into our lives in community. It's going to require us to be able to perceive and accept multiple alternative realities at the same time. And I think that's going to be an important element in helping us deal with the challenges that the time of monsters showed us.
You're wrong about transparency increasing. Obfuscation is the new watchword. Half-truth and trickle truth and spin are becoming higher arts as AI becomes better at manipulating human thinking [sic]. Also, competing ideologies are getting trapped in echo chambers where NO dissenting ideas need intrude. And that's in the MSM crowd. Keep out malinformation (real facts that disagree with our interpretation of reality). On the fringes, fanatics search for out of context sound-bytes that support their biases. No questions allowed.
Usable information is crowded out by random, often deliberately misleading, out of context data. And wisdom is becoming harder to find. You may find that an organization's official "fact checkers" are kids with political science degrees and a definite political bias. They are totally incompetent to check science-based facts. And since the era of big tobacco, the "hire a corrupt scientist" program has expanded to the point where you can easily find an "expert" you can pay to do biased research and cherry pick data to throw doubt on facts that don't support your corrupt business practices and bankrupt political ideologies.
Yes, you can find data, but it's accuracy and applicability are always in doubt. We no longer have trusted sources that aren't biased by ideologies and self-interest. Perhaps we never did?