Anybody who has waited for a traffic light to change, in the middle of the night at an empty intersection, knows the urge to rebel. There is always a tension between order and freedom. While we intuitively understand the need for order to constrain others, we yearn for the freedom to do what we want and to seek out a vision and sense of meaning in our lives.
Yet as we have seen over the past decade, attempts to overturn the existing order usually fail. The Tea Party erupted in 2009, but had mostly sputtered out by 2014. #Occupy protests and Black Lives Matter sent people into the streets, but achieved little, if anything. Silicon Valley “unicorns” like WeWork routinely go up in flames.
Not all revolutions flop, though. In fact, some succeed marvelously. What has struck me after researching transformational change over nearly two decades is how similar successful efforts are. They all experience failures along the way. What makes the difference is their ability to learn, adapt and change along the way. That’s what allows them to prevail.
Ahhhh…Summer! After more than a year of quarantine, we finally seem to be getting a grip on the pandemic. Things look infinitely more bright than they did a year ago and, almost against all odds, we can look forward to taking our masks off as we put our sunblock on. Hopefully, we can move back to some semblance of normalcy.
Still, it all feels like more of an interlude than a conclusion. Clearly, we have no shortage of challenges that face us today. Economic inequality, environmental sustainability, diversity & inclusion, technological disruption and geopolitical instability are all things that we need to deal with and overcome.
Fortunately, there are a number of people who have been thinking deeply about these things and some have written books about them. So I decided to focus this summer’s list on books that can help us understand the challenges we will face over the next decade. My hope is that the accumulated wisdom they contain will inspire us to meet them and, in time, to prevail.
When Barack Obama appointed Aneesh Chopra as the first Chief Technology Officer of the United States he was sending a clear message: No longer a quirky trend, digital technology would become central to managing the country. He was, in effect, laying down a marker for how important information technology had become.
More recently, Joe Biden sent a similarly important message when he announced that not only would he be nominating Eric Lander, a mathematician turned geneticist, as director for the Office of Science and Technology Policy, but that he would be elevating the position to a cabinet-level appointment.
The simple truth is that the digital era is ending and innovation is shifting to other places. Digital technology will remain —just as heavy industry persists long after the end of the industrial era— but will no longer be primary. Over the next decade, we’ll see a major shift from bits to atoms that, hopefully, will help us emerge from our extended productivity slump.
In 1983, McKinsey consultant Julien Phillips published a paper in the journal, Human Resource Management, that described an “adoption penalty” for firms that didn’t adapt to changes in the marketplace quickly enough. His ideas became McKinsey’s first change management model that it sold to clients.
But consider that research shows in 1975, during the period Phillips studied, 83% of the average US corporation’s assets were tangible assets, such as plant, machinery and buildings, while by 2015, 84% of corporate assets were intangible, such as licenses, patents and research. Clearly, that changes how we need to approach transformation.
When your assets are tangible, change is about making strategic decisions, such as building factories, buying new equipment and so on. Yet when your assets are intangible, change is connected to people—what they believe, how they think and how they act. That’s a very different matter and we need to reexamine how we approach transformation and change.
In the regulatory filing for Facebook’s 2012 IPO, Mark Zuckerberg included a letter outlining his management philosophy. Entitled, The Hacker Way, it encapsulated much of the zeitgeist. “We have a saying,” he wrote. “‘Move fast and break things.’ The idea is that if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough.”
At around the same time, Katalin Karikó was quietly plodding away in her lab at the University of Pennsylvania. She had been working on an idea since the early 1990s and it hadn’t amounted to much so far, but was finally beginning to attract some interest. The next year she would join a small startup named BioNTech to commercialize her work and would continue to chip at the problem.
Things would accelerate in early 2020, when Karikó’s mRNA technology was used to design a coronavirus vaccine in a matter of mere hours. Just as Daniel Kahneman explained that there are fast and slow modes of thinking, the same can be said about innovating. The truth is that moving slowly is often underrated and that moving fast can sometimes bog you down.
In 1998, the dotcom craze was going at full steam and it seemed like the entire world was turning upside down. So people took notice when economist Paul Krugman wrote that “by 2005 or so, it will become clear that the internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”
He was obviously quite a bit off base, but these types of mistakes are incredibly common. As the futurist Roy Amara famously put it, “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” The truth is that it usually takes about 30 years for a technology to go from an initial discovery to a measurable impact.
Today, as we near the end of the digital age and enter a new era of innovation, Amara’s point is incredibly important to keep in mind. New technologies, such as quantum computing, blockchain and gene editing will be overhyped, but really will change the world, eventually. So we need to do more than adapt, we need to prepare for a future we can’t see yet.
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.
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.
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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