Last week I gave you the first two parts of a series on understanding the fundamental changes that are driving …so much.
So much of our frustration.
So much of our confusion.
So much of our sense that the expectations that we learned coming up in our careers, our lives, our community live, are no longer working.
This is third of 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 push us in a particular direction. If we are looking to make an impact, whether in our jobs or our communities or ourselves, we need to understand where the wind and the waves and the currents are pushing us.
And where they are pushing us is not same as it was when many of our assumptions and expectations were formed.
This piece addresses the Sea Change in how we relate to each other: the growth of entirely new definitions of communities. And this massive shift in our lives as social creatures has impacts that we have barely begun to understand. Again, this piece is looking at just one dimension of this Sea Change.
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.