The conservative columnist John Podhoretz recently took to the New York Post to denounce the plotline of Disney’s new miniseries The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. In particular, he took umbrage with a subplot that invoked the Tuskegee experiments and other historical warts in a manner that he termed “didactic anti-Americanism.”
His point struck a chord with me because, in my many years living overseas, I always found that people in other countries were more than aware of America’s failures such as slavery, Jim Crow, foreign policy misadventures and so on. What they admire is our ability to take a hard look at ourselves and change course.
It also reminded me of something I’ve noticed in my work helping organizations transform themselves. Some are willing to take a hard look at themselves and make tough changes, while others are addicted to happy talk and try to wish problems away. Make no mistake. You can’t tackle the future without looking with clear eyes at how the present came into being.
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It’s no accident that Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein, was published in the early 19th century, at roughly the same time as the Luddite movement was gaining momentum. It was in that moment that people first began to take stock of the technological advances that brought about the first Industrial Revolution.
Since then we have seemed to oscillate between techno-utopianism and dystopian visions of machines gone mad. For every “space odyssey” promising an automated, enlightened future, there seems to be a “Terminator” series warning of our impending destruction. Neither scenario has ever come to pass and it is unlikely that either ever will.
What both the optimists and the Cassandras miss is that technology is not something that exists independently from us. It is, in fact, intensely human. We don’t merely build it, but continue to nurture it through how we develop and shape ecosystems. We need to go beyond a simple engineering mindset and focus on a process of revealing, building and emergence.
It’s become strangely fashionable for digerati to mourn the death of innovation. “There’s nothing new,” has become a common refrain for which they blame venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and other digerati they consider to be less enlightened than themselves. They yearn for a lost age when things were better and more innovative.
What they fail to recognize is that the digital era is ending. After more than 50 years of exponential growth, the technology has matured and advancement has naturally slowed. While it is true that there are worrying signs that things in Silicon Valley have gone seriously awry and those excesses need to be curtailed, there’s more to the story.
The fact is that we’re on the brink of a new era of innovation and, while digital technology will be an enabling factor, it will no longer be center stage. The future will not be written in the digital language of ones and zeroes, but in that of atoms, molecules, genes and proteins. We do not lack potential or possibility, what we need is more imagination and wonder.
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Look at anyone who has truly changed the world and they encountered significant resistance. In fact, while researching my book Cascades, I found that every major change effort, whether it was a political revolution, a social movement or an organizational transformation, had people who worked to undermine it in ways that were dishonest, underhanded and deceptive.
Unfortunately, we often don’t realize that there is an opposition campaign underway until it’s too late. People rarely voice open hostility to change. Opponents might even profess some excitement at our idea conceptually, but once there is a possibility of real action moving forward, they dig in their heels.
None of this means that change can’t happen. What it does mean is that, if you expect to bring about meaningful change, planning to overcome resistance has to be a primary design constraint and an organizing principle. Once you understand that, you can begin to move forward, identify shared values, design effective tactics and, ultimately, create lasting change.
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It’s hard to find anyone who wouldn’t agree that Microsoft’s 2001 antitrust case was a disaster for the company. Not only did the it lose the case, but it wasted time, money and—perhaps most importantly—focus on its existing businesses, which could have been far better deployed on new technologies like search and mobile.
Today, Microsoft is a much different organization. Rather than considering open source software a cancer, it now says it loves Linux. Its cloud business is growing like wildfire and it is partnering widely to develop new quantum computers. What was previously a rapacious monopolist, is now an enthusiastic collaborator.
That’s no accident. Today, we need to compete in an ecosystem-driven world in which nobody, not even a firm as big and powerful as Microsoft, can go it alone. Power no longer comes from the top of value chains, but emanates from the center of networks. That means that strategy needs to shift from dominating industries to building collaborative ecosystems.
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It should be clear by now we are entering a pivotal era. We are currently undergoing four profound shifts, that include changing patterns of demographics, migration, resources and technology. The stress lines are already beginning to show, with increasing tensions over race and class as well as questions about the influence technology and institutions have over our lives.
The last time we faced anything like this kind of tumult was in the 1960s which, much like today, saw the emergence of a new generation, the Baby-Boomers, that had very different values than their predecessors. Their activism achieved significant advances for women and minorities, but also at times, led to tumult and riots.
Yet the changes we are undergoing today appear to be even more significant than we did then. In fact, you would have to go back to the 1920s to find an era that had as much potential for both prosperity and ruin. Unfortunately, it led to economic upheaval, genocide and war on a scale never seen before in world history. We need to do better this time around.
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When I first arrived in Poland in 1997, change was all around me. It was like watching a society transform itself through time-lapse photography. Everywhere you looked, the country was shaking off decades of post-communist rust and striving to make good on the promise of 1989’s historic Round Table Agreement.
Yet it wasn’t until the fall of 2004 that I truly understood the power of change. By then, I was living in Kyiv, Ukraine and the entire country erupted in protests now known as the Orange Revolution. While Warsaw in the 90s was like rebuilding after a tornado hit, Ukraine was like being in the eye of the storm itself.
That experience led to a 15-year long journey of discovery and my book Cascades. What I found was that throughout history many have sought to create change and most have failed, but a few succeeded brilliantly. Starting out with very different challenges, philosophies and personalities, they eventually all arrived at the same principles that allowed them to prevail.
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Early in my career I was working on a natural gas trading desk and found myself in Tulsa Oklahoma visiting clients. These were genuine roughnecks, who had worked their way up from the fields to become physical gas traders . When the NYMEX introduced “paper” contracts and derivatives into the market, however, much would change.
They related to me how, when New York traders first came to town offering long-term deals, they were thrilled. For the first part of the contract, they were raking in money. Unfortunately, during the latter months, they got crushed, losing all their profits and then some. The truth was that the trade was pure arbitrage and they never had a chance
My clients’ brains were working against them in two ways. First, availability bias, caused them to value information most familiar to them and dismiss other data. The second, confirmation bias, made them look for information that would confirm their instincts. This, of course, isn’t at all unusual. It takes real effort to avoid believing the things we think.
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“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas,” said the computing pioneer Howard Aiken. “If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats,” and truer words were scarcely ever spoken. We tend to think that if an idea has merit, everybody will immediately recognize its value, but that’s almost never true.
Ignaz Semmelweis, quite famously, advocated for hand washing at hospitals, but was ostracized, not celebrated, for it and would himself die of an infection contracted under care before his idea caught on. William Coley discovered cancer immunotherapy over a century ago, but was thought by many to be some sort of a quack.
Good ideas fail all the time. Part of the problem is that people who believe passionately in an idea feel compelled to win over the skeptics. That’s almost always a mistake. The truth is that the difference between success or failure often has nothing to do with the inherent value of an idea, but where you choose to start and the best place to start, is with a majority.
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The statistician George Box pointed out that “all models are wrong, but some are useful.” He meant that we create models as simplified representations of reality. They are merely tools and should never be mistaken for reality itself. Unfortunately, that’s much easier to say than it is to practice.
All too often, models take on the illusion of reality. We are trained, first at school and then on the job, to use models to make decisions. Most of the time the models are close enough to reality that we don’t really notice the discrepancy. Other times we notice that the model is off, but we dismiss it an unusual case or anomaly.
Yet the real world is always changing. So models tend to get more wrong—and hence less useful— over time. Eventually, the once-useful models become misleading and we undergo a paradigm shift. Today, as we experience a period of enormous change, we need to unlearn old models and replace them with new ones. They too will be wrong, but hopefully useful.
