Managing Change
Originally published in Z as open source. Feel
free to share. https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/managing-the-disruptions-of-change-in-the-foreseeable-future/
“Powerless in the hands of disruptive change
– informational technologies, environmental collapse, breakdown of international
order, global waves of migration -- we stand at future’s gate, uncertain of our
fate.”
Managing
the Disruptions of Change
In the Foreseeable
Future
Edward
Renner
When my grandfather was born there were neither cars, airplanes, nor
phones. Yet, before he died, man had walked on the moon. We now live in the Post-Modern
World, with technological progress happening at an even faster rate.
Rapid change is a powerfully disruptive force – a wave of creative
destruction -- leaving in its wake a residue of vulnerable people. Illustrated
by a strategy celebrated in the film “Money Ball,” a machine and a statistician
can do a better job of making baseball decisions than a scout or manager. Now,
a beginning surgeon can practice on an image, rather than a live patient. There
are autonomous taxis to drive us and autonomous weapons to protect us, both
without human intervention. They are all examples of human progress, of an
emerging era of Artificial Intelligence which discards human roles and
occupations, and with them, the personal identity of the individuals.
People are losing a sense of control
over their life. They are becoming insecure about how to retain their place and
purpose. These creative disruptions of change are not about liberal or
conservative political ideologies; they are deeply felt personal psychological
issues.
The magnitude and nature of change has dramatically shifted
through history. For 5,000 years people lived in the past tense.
Yesterday was the best predictor of their tomorrow. For the next 500 years – the
Modern Era of science and technology, roughly from 1500 to 2000 – people lived
in the present tense. Today could be whatever we wanted it to be. Now,
for the next 50 years – roughly 2000 to 2050 – we must learn to live in the future
tense. We must learn how to live today as if it were tomorrow, or there
will not be a tomorrow worth living.
The rate of change is now so fast that individuals must make the
transition from one historical era – the present to the autonomous future --
all within one lifetime. The magnitude of change we are facing has never been
experienced before in the history of human existence. These are uncharted times
that require adopting new ways of thinking.
In the distant the past, most of the events that impacted a
person’s life were physically and temporally close at hand; but today the
effects of change are increasingly external and arbitrary, and their mechanisms
are largely distant and invisible. Our neighborhood is no longer the families
on our block, or those on the other side of our town, city or even region. Our
neighborhood now includes nations and people on the other side of the globe –
who we have never seen nor spoken to – but who’s actions, beliefs, and values
affect our daily lives in essential ways.
When people lose their personal sense of place, purpose, and control
over their own fate, they become vulnerable to exploitation by opportunists offering
solutions that promise to restore their lost identity.
The End of Living in the Present Tense
The Modern Era gave us a sense of certainty. Science and knowledge
advanced to such a degree that facts replaced faith and fate from the past, as
the basis for daily living. We know that the heavens and the earth were not
created in seven days, that humans evolved over thousands of years, and that
space and the stars are an unknown infinite expanse. Because we
understand causal relationships, events, such as the weather, have become
largely predictable. Socially, we can reliably communicate with others at any
time or place. Politically, we know about every nation on the planet and the
people who live there. Economically we have the financial means and
transportation necessary for global commerce.
Science and technology have now taken us to the limits of the
Modern Era. As our clearest example, we have the power to understand we are
killing the very planet we need to sustain ourselves. History books are full of
accounts of previous societies that collapsed because they depleted their local
natural resources. Science has shown us that we are consuming our global
resources faster than the earth can regenerate them, and that our consumption
rate is increasing. By living as we do in the present tense, we are in the
process of extinguishing ourselves.
Collectively, humankind has no choice but to drastically change
some of our most fundamental beliefs and values or become the authors of our
own demise within our own lifetime. The future can no longer be an extension of
the present; rather, the foreseeable future must now dictate the present.
Living in the Future Tense
At this moment, the most important challenge we face as
individuals – making the transition from one historical era to the next, all
within one lifetime – is a unique human experience. There are no guidelines for
learning how to live today (the present tense) as if it were tomorrow (the
future tense). Yet, if we are to have a worthwhile future for ourselves, we
must create it ourselves in how we live today, in the present.
Living in the future tense means renegotiating our present values
and behaviors to purposefully create a future we would consider worth living
for. It will require a process of embracing complexity and adopting a
perspective of time.
Embracing Complexity. Using singular
political ideological perspectives – as we are now doing -- oversimplifies the
complexity of our current social issues, resulting in seemingly irreconcilable
differences. A recent example was the politicization of COVID management. To
reject a mandatory mask or vaccine mandate because it is an infringement on
personal freedom is a singular political perspective that over-rides the social
and economic elements of the pandemic and fails to identify the most
appropriate comprehensive set of management practices when all three elements
are simultaneously considered. Likewise with the current stalemate in response
to climate change, the political, social, and economic elements are interactive
and must be reconciled with each other simultaneously.
These objective, definable “social issues” only appear to be
intractable because they are complex and because there are no simple solutions.
The changes that must made to live in the future tense all have political,
economic, and social elements which need to be reconciled with each other.
The new role for our individual perspectives is to account for the complex
interplay between these three elements; they are interactive, simultaneous, and
interdependent.
The singular political ideology of conservative vs liberal has
divided the nation and paralyzed our transition from the Present Era to the New
Post-Modern Future we must create within our lifetime. The immutable
flow of the creative destructions of scientific and technological change does
not follow the dictates of our political ideologies. It is time to get off the
left versus right ideological merry-go-around, which is going nowhere in the
present, and to get on the bullet train of time into the future. Time is the principal axis, and our political, social, and economic ideologies
are simply perspectives and tools for adapting to (not degerming) the
disruptions of change from scientific and technological innovations.
Adopting the Perspective of Time. We need
to understand our current social issues through the comparative mental
perspectives of distinguishing between thinking in the past, present, and
future tense. For example, long in the past, severe weather was seen as the
wrath of the Gods. Later, knowledge of the mechanics of the weather allowed us
to predict and track hurricanes. Now, with a geological understanding of
climate change we know that our children’s life will not be sustainable without
significant disruptions to our current ways of thinking and living.
Just as the statues erected in the past to appease the anger of
the Gods were ineffective in tempering the weather, so too are the institutions
of today ineffective for solving the disruptive challenges we can anticipate. Complex issues rest on political, social, and economic values
which at any moment are in a natural state of tension – they are dependent on
each other, interactive and simultaneous. When a significant number of people
can be persuaded that any one of the three – such a political ideology -- is an
overarching hierarchical value, it is a prescription for falling into the
“intractable problem” trap: Cheap fossil fuel will support economic growth,
until we suffocate; a pandemic will subside only when enough people have
developed a natural or vaccine-based immunity.
Only the passage of time tells the
full story. Time is the water-like process that dissolves (resolves) the
competing political, economic, and social values of any issue into a final
all-inclusive solution (resolution). We need to personally reject appeals to
any singular overarching value and embrace the complex disruptions of change
over time as our primary perspective. The future used to be about other
people’s fate, now it is about our own.
If we believe building our future is an ongoing, collaborative,
and participatory process, then embracing complexity and adopting a perspective
of time to solve our current and pressing issues is a difficult but not
impossible challenge. In some ways, it’s like taking a trip, except instead of
downloading maps or packing our bags, our preparation must be psychological and
personal. We know what our destination is, but we don’t know exactly what will
happen or who we will meet along the way. Shifting our collective mindset from
the past and present tenses into Living in the Future Tense is to begin a
wide-eyed, open-end adventure. What an exciting – and challenging -- time to be
alive!
Living in the future tense is an essential, ongoing,
interpersonal, cooperative, and self-reflective process. No one knows the
answers. No one has ever been in this situation before. As individuals we
cannot afford to relinquish our identity to opportunists; we need to own our
personal coherent sense of the foreseeable future to shape our present
behaviors. To do otherwise is to be powerless in the hands of disruptive
change, standing at future’s gate, uncertain
of our fate.
______________________________________________________________________
Edward Renner is a retired Professor of Psychology who has taught
at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Illinois, and the
University of South Florida.
