Step on that Accelerator

The only three questions that are relevant when we talk about change is not what change is but how do we feel, view and respond to it? These are the questions that can help us get deeper and closer with the idea of change and how it is affecting us more and more as we traverse the first quarter of the 21st century. In a way change is a matter of perspective. In the past centuries, I am sure they had a different conception of change than we do now. Even a few decades ago, change and ways to predict and model it have been quite different.

In fact before, and up to a certain extent, even some people today, model the future linearly. In simple terms, we used to see the future as progressing more or less at the same rate and fashion as it did over the last few decades. Every 21st century schoolboy knows that this is not so. Progress is far from linear. At least it doesn’t behave so anymore. Change is exponential which means that the rate of change we observe in any sector - say microprocessors or A.I research - increases over time. Meaning that the change we observed in the last five years might for example be experienced over the next year or so.

Some people see this as frightening or out of control but it is the way things are for now and can only be more so in the foreseeable future.

Non-linearity and Blindspots

The idea of non-linearity or hyperbolic change is a bit of a pain in the neck for those people or organisations who want to peep into the future and make sure they put steps in place so as to anticipate it and align with it. The main reason is the forecasting models, although some of them have evolved to be smarter and more powerful, not to mention running on faster and more sophisticated machines, have their blindspots or lacks when it comes to forecast such a cheetah paced future change.

One of the factors is the above mentioned idea of non-linearity although that is one of the least problems in terms of mathematics or computing power. The other problem is indeterminacy that arises out of highly complex interaction of events and systems. The human world has grown tremendously complex - more enmeshed layers of systems from digital communications, economics, data, culture, new social habits and lifestyles, etc - interacting together and creating emergent effects that could not have possibly been foreseen by the raw data at hand. We could and can foresee some probable outcomes in certain areas but we still have blindspots when it comes to other areas.

This is where the so-called problem termed by Nassim Nicholas as the black swan theory comes in, describing an event that has a low probability of occurring but when it does has a big impact. These are those things that pop out from one of those blindspots - could be a disruptive technology or a ground-breaking idea or just an uncontrolled event that change everything. It seems that in the day and age we are living in, because of the high-level of complexity, there is a higher chance of having black swans emerging out of nowhere.

Everything Spins in Cycles

The ancients had got it right - change is cyclical. This is another face of change that we modern-world inhabitants don’t get quite right. We have been educated - or rather programmed - to see change as linear (see above) and only now starting to see it as non-linear and exponential. Even so, we still conceptualise time as moving in a continuous arrow from the past to the future and this is how we model our future whether we are a business organisation, a governmental entity or a multi-billion dollar corporation.

Some ancient cultures used to see time as cyclical, meaning that it repeats itself through the ages and eons. Perhaps not necessarily repeat itself as in all events repeating like in a sort of time loop, but what they were more visioning is that the same driving forces of change will come to be active again in some part of the future. A more refined way to understand it is the spiral, where things move both in a cyclical manner but thrust forward at the same time - the spiral of evolution if you may. What is also interesting is to note that everything in the universe is in a constant spin from quantum particles to galaxies - and I am mentioning this because things that are so persistent in all levels of reality tend to have a fundamental element of truth in them!

So basically the idea was that there are systemic forces of change that are wider and older than our present culture that influence the course of our history but at the same time we still have the free will to shape it differently than our ancestors did a few thousand years ago. The point here is not historical or philosophical. I want to highlight the inherent multi-directional force of change.

In the case of our modern day world, I see change as happening also more or less in a similar way described by the ancients in that there are opposing yet complimentary forces giving shape to change, and innovation.

What goes up must go down:

We have come to see innovative change in a one way fashion or at least focus on just one side of it. That side is the one that has to do with invention, discovery and breakthrough. Let’s take two steps back. Innovation is a process whereby systems, products or processes are transformed, re-organised or re-invented in a way that could also be very different and discontinuous from their original state. This is what we refer to as disruptive innovation or a breakthrough in thought.

Now, generally speaking innovation is not an everyday occurrence and neither is it something that comes about from institutionalised knowledge and structures. Quite the opposite, innovation is usually something very far detached from the business-as-usual mindset of mainstream society. Those innovations are usually cooked up on the fringes of society by some individual or group of individuals who are pursuing some form of idea from a totally different mindset than mainstream thinking.

From this point of view we see how innovation is closely related to breaking through the normal limits and patterns of institutionalised thinking and behaving. In a way we also subconsciously associate innovation and innovative people with mavericks or anti-conformists with a heavy pinch or lateral and creative thinking. For sure, they definitely aren’t any stereo-typical characters.

Yet innovation seen from this point of view is only half the picture. It is the bottom-up part of the process, the one in which something novel is introduced to the system, which in this case could be an organisation or an entire sub-culture. It is bottom-up because it is the opposite of institutionalised top-down hierarchical forces which takes me to the other part of the story.

So imagine a social system such as an organisation or sub-culture made up of millions of interactions. Those interactions form emergent but stable effects over time such as for example norms, codes of behaviour, memes, protocol, shared identities, myths, etc. These effects crystallise into ‘structured patterns’ that are then used to filter and auto-regulate the system. So for example imagine a teenage club whose members have formed certain ‘protocols’ or ‘rules of engagement’ for being cool. New members have to adhere to these protocols in order to be approved by the group at large. It’s like these established and ‘institutionalised’ protocols or patterns have predated the new members and they are exerting a top-down regulating force on them. The same can be seen from any level of society.

There is a top-down force manifested through rules, laws, norms, protocols, policies and values that sort of filter in or out those things that are either aligned with it or not. This is hierarchical and self-regulating. What has it got to do with innovation? Well innovation or any change for that matter, has to go through these selective and regulating top-down forces in order to be accommodated by the system at large.

Getting Sucked Back into the System

So for instance an innovation is really an innovation if it is integrated in mainstream society and applied to a larger number of people thus ultimately moving from being an innovation to a mass commodity. The steel-ribbed umbrella or parasol in Victorian England is a historical example. When it was invented, the early adopters were very probably ridiculed by passing children in the streets of London. There were seen as alien and funny. Soon after it was a day-to-day commodity outside the English shores.

Thus, innovation is not just about discovery or invention. That’s necessary and important but it does not become an innovation until someone or something, say an entrepreneur with a vision, decides to introduce it to the mass market and once it starts being adopted by the few it reaches a tipping point where it spreads out to the general public. Somewhere along the line, the top-down forces will block or enable what goes through the system, so to speak. If an idea is way too ahead of its time, it might be not make it through and it will get shovelled out of the way.

So the important point is this: Innovation is not simply making a discovery or re-inventing something that will push us forward into the future. Rather we have to see innovation from a holistic point of view, that is, to see it as a process, an interplay, between opposing yet complimentary forces - the top-down regulating and hierarchical forces and the bottom-up discoveries and novel emergent behaviour. It has to be seen as a whole package. To see innovation from a simplistic and linear point of view is to miss the mark and to fail to see a fuller and realistic perspective of what drives innovation and how we can systematically accommodate it in our planning and policy-making.