It Is Going To Get Faster

I realized a long time ago that rate of change is exponential, not linear, and that multiplier of events, the speeding up of change, was due to our ability to specialize, communicate and share. What I just realized is that the industrial age was the process. The schools teach you to take direction well, someone tells you what to do, and you execute. Works great on a factory floor. But, that's going the way of the dodo. The industrial age is dying, long live the creative age. Today, we as individuals can execute to our maximum potential, not the lowest common denominator. Small teams are crushing giants in their wake. Desktop manufacturing. Computing power on your phone that could only be found at MIT 40 years ago. Kickstarter.com. Crowd sourcing. And I could go on.

What happens when we all start executing rather than standing around waiting to be told what to do? Holy crap will rate of change explode.

What we should learn

We learn lots of stuff in school about what happened last year, if we're lucky, and more likely what happened 5 years ago. Same thing happens to a lesser degree in the workplace. What we should be learning is how to learn. How to assimilate and inspire change quickly and efficiently. How to position ourselves at the front of the wave of change so that it pushes us, rather than us wasting time paddling like mad to climb up the back of the wave. We need to be able to quickly learn about and adopt change and just as readily abandon what we might have known or have acquired as it becomes obsolete. This is the one skill that we need to thrive as the rate of change expands exponentially as each day passes.

Learn. Adopt. Abandon. Repeat.

Rate of change

I was chatting with a coworker about a new project we are building with Google Apps and the Google Web Toolkit and he came back with something that struck me as profound about the rate of change that we live in today. Oleg said:

"Remember how I said yesterday I am enjoying working on App Engine and GWT? Well I'm going through the new features in GWT 2.0. Oh My God! So many improvements. This is the best platform I can possibly imagine for developing rich web applications. And this is nothing compared to what we will be able to do with HTML5!!! I'm afraid that with this rate of change my understanding of possibilities is far behind what's already possible."

In other words what we are imagining might be possible at some point in the future is already here. I'm experiencing this every day and I believe it is because we are all living at a fairly unique point in time for humanity. Today we are all standing on a rate of change curve that is shaped like a hockey stick and we had have have had very limited experience with what this means as we have only been here for a very short while. When asked to predict what will happen next year we use the past year as a reference point. But as the rate of change increases what had been accomplished last year may only take a matter of a month or even a week to accomplish now. We as humans are just not that good at that exponential extrapolation. We tend to think on linear lines and have a very hard time with exponential expansion.

What does this mean? Ignore sunk costs more than ever before. Ignore what was done before as it may have absolutely no bearing on what you will do today. Stretch the imagination further than you have ever done and aim for the farthest point out that you can conceive. And just maybe you will be able to have a grasp on what might happen next week. ;-)