The world is changing faster than ever before. - PA Consulting
What's certain is that the world is changing faster than at any time in human history. Philip Stephens, Financial Times
The pace of change has never been this fast. - Justin Trudeau
If there is one grand opinion that you can safely voice in these days of professional offence-taking, it is this - we are living in a time of unprecedented change.
You may be a large consultancy firm, a business journalist or simply the sexiest man to ever lead a nation state (according to Twitter) but the line to take is basically the same: This time, here and now, is unique. History has never moved so quickly. The challenges we face have never loomed larger. The opportunities we can take have never been greater. Now is the time!
Why does nobody challenge this ridiculous hyperbole?
There's money in them there dung heaps of hyperbole...
One of my heroes is a man called BJ Cunningham - the founder of Death Cigarettes and a man who came very close to blowing apart the quasi-cartel formed by big tobacco and the UK taxman. His mantra for discovering business opportunities is this - "Wherever there is a hidden agenda or an outright lie, there is an opportunity for profit."And I think we should be brave about calling out the hidden agenda of people who keep saying that the world is changing faster than ever. Because very often that sentence has an unspoken second half. "The world is changing faster than ever (and what you need to do is to hire my firm/ buy my book/ vote for my party to insure yourself against the consequences)."
The opportunity for profit here is to become smarter, better change strategists by describing what is actually happening in the world rather than what people want to think is happening. If we know what's actually happening we can produce actual change. Given how many 'transformational change programmes' fail to transform anything at all this is an extremely useful selling point to have.
A few final thoughts on 'faster than ever'
As much as I have made some sort of effort to read the literature currently available on the pace of change I can't claim to have a rational answer on how fast the world is changing - nowhere near. Here however are a few hunches:1. The conventional wisdom that new technology is now the key driver of organisational change is wrong. My hunch is that a lot of time what we have is a new platform for an existing mode of behaviour. As a result genuine innovation in technology is not as prevalent as we like to believe (and yes we like to believe it - it's flattering to think that our own meagre lives coincide with history's apex). Yes we have more patents being filed than ever before but we also have more people than ever before. Compared to the monumental technology changes that took place between 1800 and 1960, we are living in slow times. And while I'm basing this on a hunch, Robert Gordon isn't (and he's done the research to back it up).
2. Change in response to government regulation is often underestimated. In advanced, wealthy societies the temptation of government to expand its scope is often hard to resist. Ironically, in our part of the west a key driver for increasing regulation has been the abandonment of widespread nationalisation as a genuine policy of the left. The decision to avoid the heavier end of interventionist policies has increased the appetite for the lighter forms. Arguably this was Tony Blair's singular insight in domestic policy - to engineer change you don't need to own the activity, you can just give it to the private sector and then regulate it heavily. There are lots of attractions to this for government including the ability to deliver a social agenda without having to take the responsibility that comes with ownership. As a result we should expect change in response to regulation to increase. After all we live in a time when a right of centre government can make the banning of sugar a key topic of public debate.
3. The most important driver is public taste - and this changes slowly but surely and often catches people out. While many organisations are mesmerised by the promise of new technology a bold few retain their connection with human beings by listening to the constant patina of feedback. this feedback is multitudinous, complex, contradictory and illogical (just like people themselves). For this reason a lot of organisations give up on listening to it in any meaningful way - normally they start listening with prejudice, picking out only the patterns they want to see. Organisations who truly listen, provided they listen long enough and hard enough, stand a far better chance of seeing where their future lies. Public taste isn't changing faster than ever. It's changing at the same speed as always. And it's being ignored just as much as always That's my hunch anyway.
So anyway, here's my hunch...