Once businesses learn to harness the disruptive elements of today’s digital technologies—or so the conventional thinking goes—everything will settle back into equilibrium.
But what if the historical pattern—disruption followed by stabilization—has itself been disrupted?
“The New Reality: Constant Disruption” - The Big Shift - HarvardBusiness.org
The title of this article (which kicks off a new blog from two of my favorites, John Seely Brown and John Hagel), sums it all up succinctly.
We now face something entirely different. Today’s core technologies—computing, storage, and bandwidth—are not stabilizing. They continue to evolve at an exponential rate. And because the underlying technologies don’t stabilize, the social and business practices that coalesce into our new digital infrastructure aren’t stabilizing either.
One thing that worries me about some colleagues, partners, and clients, is that they have heard people say “the world is different now” before. They’ve seen the world change, and then stabilize. As Hagel and Brown (and Lang) mention in their introductory paragraph, Ray Kurzweil has made a very persuasive argument for a future of exponential change…at an exponentially increasing rate. This inevitability (i.e. reality) has informed much of my research and practice in business strategy, and I’m proud to say that I’ve had some success communicating the implications to the aforementioned colleagues, partners, and clients.
Still, I constantly wonder what proportion of organizations will figure it out (and execute adaptation). When you’ve been printing money by doing the same thing for generations, a future of constant renewal, deep learning, and competition may seem like a much larger problem than opportunity.
In the world we have entered, we must accept that there will be many more new questions than answers every single day. This dynamic has a profound effect on sources of advantage. When the earth moves beneath your feet, you need to learn to dance (or improvise); that’s why the geniuses quoted herein have argued that developing the ability to learn faster than competitors is the only sustainable edge.
I’m always so inspired by the people I meet who share both a natural curiosity and a keen desire to dig deep and learn about the fundamental forces that are shaping humanity, economy, and society.
The combination of these forces - a rapidly evolving digital infrastructure and public policy shifts favoring freer movement -defines a world of constant change. If this premise is right—that the pattern of disruption followed by stabilization has itself been disrupted—then it may be we’re facing the mother of all disruptions, a big shift into a world without equilibrium, one that will continue to shift rapidly even once the current recession has passed.
There’s enormous power and creative freedom in accepting that tomorrow will not be like today.
Today was certainly momentous, for many people and for many reasons.
The only thing I know is: tomorrow will be different. WAY different.
