Change in the context of… change

Change just isn't good old 'change' anymore.

Used to be that we could expect change in fairly predictable time frames. A mid-life crisis happened at forty or so. There were births and deaths in the family, graduations, marriages, divorces, the seven year itch, the occasional business failure. There was the first, second, third and last age of life. For the golden billion people, as Comrade Putin recently put it, that was the story. To an extent it still is. And we got along pretty well, discovering these and learning how to handle and even make the most of them. Short of calamity, most of these changes are inner driven and all such milestones still and will occur. And handling these used to serve to handle the issues of change, transition and transformation which came along in most lives and businesses. With these changes came periods of uncertainty and unknowing which raised our anxiety levels and which eventually passed as we sorted out the next phase of our lives. From 1978 until the middle nineties this view of it all worked pretty well. But, during that time change was changing. And suddenly, we are all caught up in this unsettling awareness that everything is not what it seems, events are happening too fast for us to stay up with, respected societal roles whether in business or government seem to be increasingly populated by liars and thieves and virtually everyone is being manipulated by the few to extract as many dollars from us as fast as they can by any means at hand. At least this is shorthand for my experience of it as a sixty something red blooded white boy from the US of A.

Change just is not the same anymore. The level of uncertainty and chaos in life has increased. Time is getting shorter and shorter. Shorter for me now than what I recall my parents complaining about in the nineteen seventies when they were getting into this age.

Recently I made some short films explaining the TransforMAP. I used the underlying analogy or driving a car through straights and curves. Depending on one's perception the curves might be there to get you between the straights or just the other way around. If I take that model back to when I was in my thirties, it seemed that there were long straights. Enough time to learn what I was doing, get things really completed, have a life besides work and acquire mastery in something or other. Job changes came along every three to four years. I made one big career shift in my first fourteen years of work. And my friends and fellows had similar time frames. Now, when I engage people who are at the ages I was, and who are at similar levels of competitive organisations, their experience is quite different. I would suggest that the straights have disappeared and life is one continuous flow of curves and switchbacks which include lots of rapid ups and downs to add to the ride. It suggests to me that it is time to think further about how we perceive and measure change and how we go about making the most of our life experience in this more rapid, ever shifting context.

There is much to be explored. In the remainder of this piece, I take a look at three timetables which affect our experience and how they might be at the root of the end of the straights.

The Natural Pace of Change - Genetic Time

It still takes nine months to create and bear a child. A good run of living still lasts eighty five or so years. Death of a loved one requires a minimum of eighteen months to complete the dark journey through Voice 1 with another year or two tacked on for the Voice 2 exploration of who and what we are on our own. Then there is Voice 3 still ahead.

It still takes months for the most dedicated user to grasp the nuances of a sophisticated piece of software. For most of us it may be a year or two.

It takes multiple readings over many months or years to grasp the essential meanings of the great novels, films, plays and music.

There is the Seven Year Itch in relationships. Not seven weeks or seven months, but seven years.

The most rapid ascenders in corporate jobs still hang in to an assignment for an average of three years. A year to find all the ins and outs. A year to make a mark and a difference, and a final year to complete the learning and do the explorations to find the next assignment.

I think of my life as a series of decades; my teens, twenties, thirties and so on (I dare not go on as the list gets desperately long).

It takes months to gain weight and years to take it off, years to diminish health and years to restore it, years to go crazy with love, fear, work, power, money or religion and years to get sane again.

Such is our Genetic Time. Genetic Time has held as long as we can see back into human history. The Greeks and Shakespeare described all this well. And it hasn't changed a whit.

Physical Movement - Transport Time

Most of the audience reading this have been born to the age of jet aircraft, high speed rail and motorways. We do not know about horse and buggies, covered wagons, intercontinental sailing ships and twenty mile per hour rail travel. My grandfather did.

In 1980 I flew from Los Angeles to Cleveland with a ninety year old woman whose kin were moving her from her fifty year home in California to a nursing home in Ohio. This was enough of an insult. That she was making the journey in under four hours was devastating, as she told me. She would have preferred three months in a covered wagon so she would have had time to really complete the change by experiencing it in Genetic Time rather than Transport Time. To watch, daily, California recede in the west. The sun would rise and set at imperceptibly different times in the eastward journey, her body adjusting easily, one day to the next. The climate would change as well from region to region. In three months she would truly BE in Ohio. Not still in California with an Ohio address.

That said, transport time has now been very stable for the last fifty years, and it shows no sign of hurrying up anytime soon. The world had a supersonic airliner for forty years. It is being decommissioned in 2003. The speed of sound requires that jet transport aircraft move at about 600 miles per hour for economical travel. Cars with human drivers can safely average about seventy miles an hour on really well maintained roads over a day's drive. Railroad trains, the best in the world, average around one hundred and some miles per hour. Star Trek is still a marvellous fable. These numbers have held for fifty years. Nothing suggests that even the most developed countries will make more than small percentage increases in these rates in the next fifty years. I look forward to being proved wrong on this one every time I get on a plane that will be stuffy and uncomfortable for an eight or nine hour journey somewhere. While I can hope for changes in the stuffy and uncomfortable bit, I truly don't think the travel time will be reduced much in my lifetime. Of course, if we commute to work in our automobile, transport time is creeping the other way, slowing down thanks to all the increased congestion.

We have all grown up, used to these rates. And we will likely all die with them still in place. That said, while jet lag is not changing, jet lag is still hard on our bodies because it short cuts the Genetic Time needed to adapt to changing sunrise and sunset times.

Information Movement - Market Time

Once upon a time, a letter took the same time to get from England to Virginia as did the person carrying it. Today it takes milliseconds through the E-mail.

Once upon a time, producers in America were in competition with producers in England. Today, it is highly likely that the competition is between world-wide entities with holdings in many countries around the globe.

Once upon a time, product design was all accomplished on paper which had to move in Transport Time between people in different locations. Today, much product design occurs in three dimensional mathematical spaces on computing workstations. And with networks, individuals can collaborate on the design from anywhere in the world at any time.

Once upon a time, "consulting with my people" implied a process which might take weeks for the information to move between the stakeholders and for a decision to form. Today, a few pushes on the cell phone buttons put all the stakeholders on line together, immediately.

The list of our life and business processes impacted by this speed up in information movement includes practically everything. In my view, we have been most profoundly impacted by the reduction in the time it takes to invent and update and bring a product to market. Ford Motor Company has a twenty four hour automobile design process running. By distributing the specialties around the world, the sun never sets on the design process. The folks in Germany working on the engine design go home at night knowing that the effects of their day's work are used by the drivetrain designers in the US, whose work is used, in turn, by another design team in Japan, followed by the others in Asia. All of this sets the stage for the next morning in Germany, when the engine work continues with the added work from around the world. Theoretically, we could invent a new car in one year if it had taken three years before installing the global design scheme.

Faster and faster product and service revs are the mark of competitive strength in the global marketplace. When a trend in adolescent hair design is spotted in the south of France, it can be packaged with a plastic clip and a hair spray product and put into test markets in days instead of months. So, a fashion statement which would take months to propagate to the marketplace through magazines before anyone would ever imagine it as a trend, becomes an instant trend through the web, advertising media and the rapid product development cycle.

A trend used to spring from the Genetic Time process of discovery, trial, investment and use. Now a trend can be manufactured by the marketing department in days, and supported with things to purchase at your local store within more days, which further reinforces the perception of a genuine trend. Genetic Time has once again been short circuited. I call this Market Time. And I suggest that this new reality is at the root of the end of change and transition as an occasional matter.

When I buy a product I expect it to last for a while. I expect it to last in value to me and others until I have outworn my need for it and am ready to sell it on and buy the next thing that suits me. That is my plan and expectation. But now, by the time I have genuinely completed my use for it, the product will have been evolved and re-defined in the marketplace many times over. The product line may have disappeared, not to mention the company that produced it. It is possible that the product runs out of value in the market long before it runs out of value to me. The loss of the value, the speed up of new features and the need for products to work with other systems - which are also revving rapidly - lead me to make a new purchase decision. I must almost literally throw away the product and buy a new one to stay current and functional. This is seen widely in the computer and cell phone world where the product revs are measured in months. I suspect it is also true in every other industry which has gone the route of global integration and competition. It is simply the system.

Of course we need to ask why the speed up in product revs? Just because we can? Perhaps. Perhaps the 'Market' of Market Time is really the market for profitable financial deals. Stock markets now hammer industry to deliver quarterly profits and value gains to the shareholder. Organisational goals have become centred on delivering shareholder values. Every quarter. One solution to this is to consolidate competitors, integrate across the world and get rid of spare human capacity and become competitive in a benchmarking sense. Once that is complete, the next step is to have a product mix of a nature which can be revved very rapidly and manufactured for the lowest world costs and sold at the top of the market in each market segment. This keeps the pressure on the consumers to have the latest stuff. People look forward to the latest stuff in fashion, personal toys, automobiles, computers, kitchen appliances, pornography, travel destinations, convenience foods and so on and on. The marketing forces make sure there is compelling emotive reasoning going on and that our credit cards come out of our wallets based on the right primal urge. We are no longer a patient race. We will trade instability for a quick buck most any day.

Show me a company that has 'world class' mentioned anywhere in its literature and I will show you a company going through this 24/7, speed-up-optimisation-world-competition game.

So Market Time adds to our uncertainty in many overt ways. As consumers, products and services come at us faster than ever and we can't 'settle-down' with things before our desire is whipped up by the marketing blitz for the next absolutely must have thing. As workers, the Market Time acceleration means that the foundation businesses which our work life serve are changing their inner structure and assumptions faster than our Genetic Time bodies can integrate the changes.

In TransforMAP terms, uncertainty has gone up to a level where we cannot complete the Voice 1 and 2 work to get ourselves back to a level of certainty which feels stable.

Is any of this going to slow down any time soon? Hardly. The question is, is what I've called Genetic Time, the time it takes for humans to actually process and complete the work to finish, re-invent, and re-commit, really Genetic? Is it hard wired or am I missing something?

Beginning the enquiry takes me off in a new direction.

If we assume straights and curves we expect straights and curves. Especially straights. Any race driver will tell you that hurtling along the Mulsanne Straight at Le Mans at 275 mph is a chance to rest. If we assume we have to have a profound straight on every lap to stay rested and centred and those times are increasingly fleeting, and unpredictable if not downright just not there, then what?

If we assume that engaging chaos and uncertainty is anxiety producing we may not start looking for other life assumptions and mental models which allows for chaos and uncertainty and even find live giving quality within. What does our Mother Culture tell us? What about the pervasive Judeo/Christian monotheistic system offer us? Would an animistic model based on the robust diversity and unfathomable chaos of the natural world suit us better for thriving in the times that are ahead?

And we have to ask whether, just as Transport Time has stalled under the speed of sound, Market Time will stall out at some absolute reference speed. And if so, are us old folks just caught in a singularity which our kids will not be troubled by?

Perhaps we are just in one of the hugest curves of all, the curve of a change in change. Maybe there is a straight coming up which will serve for another couple thousand years or so. Or maybe what is being revealed to us now is that there never were any straights. Just the illusion.

When my principal mentor told me about his view of transformation in 1977, he said that short of a calamity, there was no such thing as a big transformation, unless we personally ignored all the signs and signals along the way. Our job was to stay tuned to ourselves and keep doing the work in small ways that kept us up with ourselves. That way the big cataclysms were far rarer indeed. That was good advice then. I think it remains so. I believe a really well maintained learning organisation probably is weathering all this pretty well. Nimble design companies, generally out on the edge of things anyway likely see all this as opportunity and aren't nervous about it. The reaction of governments and big public, slow moving, organisations is a different matter.

So it all may depend where we sit. But then again it may not.

More to wonder and scribble and argue about for all of us. Meanwhile, how come the car we just bought for $24k is suddenly worth $3k? And it isn't any less effective transportation than the day we bought it. And 'They' say it isn't as safe or as green as anyone of our intelligence and taste would really want it to be. Damn.