Tuesday, September 2, 2008

I don't like spiders and change ... and change?!



It's a hot summer day a few weeks ago and my granddaughters are playing with Legos and their imaginations in the cool shade of our screened in porch. And then the animated yelling starts.

"Meg! Move! Get out of the way! Move! Megan!"

"Kyra! Don't tell me ... yikes!! A daddy long legs!!" (I think she hollered daddy long legs because "phalangium opilio" was too long a word to shout in a crisis.)

Well, it didn't take long for two little girls to put some distance between them and the spider. They came spilling into the house, excited terror in their eyes, calling for me to rescue them from what was certain "little girl death." I was reluctant to forsake my wonderfully horizontal position on the couch, so I told them where they could find the fly swatter, which in our house is called the bug whapper.

After a few a furtive whispers and intense strategic planning, one or two whaps later the spider was seriously dead. I know this because they gathered up its pitiful remains in a Kleenex and came and laid their trophy on my chest to prove their collective triumph over fear and death. I rewarded them with a mumbled smile and sent them back outside, still armed with the bug whapper in case another terrifying spider showed up.

A few minutes later, all I can hear from the porch is laughing and shouting and our furniture being pushed around. I pull myself up to a sitting position, a major effort on my part, and there are my two girls chasing a fly with the bug whapper and missing wildly and amusingly. After about 10 minutes of this the fly is unharmed and doing very well. And the girls are panting between giggles and regaling each other with their comic exploits.

Now, what makes the difference between a quick and decisive victory over a daddy long legs and a prolonged and indecisive non-victory over a fly? It's all about direction and the road that's travelled. A daddy long legs makes a pretty easy target for a little girl with a bug whapper: they travel on the most readily available surface and run in pretty much a straight line. Flies however, take off and scribble their way through the air, buzzing in a 100 unpredictable patterns ... landing anywhere they like and taking off in a whole new direction at will. So when it comes to the skill of escaping a bug whapper, daddy long legs end up at a lot of funerals and flies end up nibbling on the funeral lunch.

All of this is an interesting picture of the changes that are happening in the field of ... change! It used to be that change was predictable. It was built from one idea to the next, each one building on the last, each technology based on the previous technology, each reasoned thought connected to the previous one. It was like a daddy long legs: moving in a pretty much a straight line on the most readily available surface (i.e.) the idea that preceeded it.

But that's changing. Allan Hirsch in his book "The Forgotten Past" talks about moving into a new era of "discontinuous change". Change won't happen in systematic, 'trace-able' patterns and logical sequences anymore. Change will come in a manner that is discontinuous with what preceded it. It won't look like a daddy long legs running in a straight line across the back porch. It will look more like a fly buzzing randomly along an unmarked path through the air ... as unpredictable as the weather and as hard to figure out as a teen age girl's cell phone bill.

If you're like me and older than 45, we come into such times as these already "change weary." We've seen more change in our time than every previous generation combined. So when someone talks about discontinuous change, our response might likely be: stick to what you know, hold on to how you've always done it, and hope not to get washed away in this new tide of change. But will that really help?

And if you are younger than 45, the rapid pace of change you've always lived with is now about to go into hyperdrive and you won't really have a clue who's steering the future. If you feel like you're on a roller coaster without tracks it's because you are. And you might very well just stop thinking that you know where in the world life is going and just ride the wave. But will that really help?

What will really help? How are we supposed to live in a world of unpredictable, complex, 'doesn't-make-a-whole-lot-of-sense' discontinous change? Well, how's this for an answer? I have no idea. But it's worth thinking about, don't you think? After all, it is the future we're going to live in ... not the past.

... just thinkling.

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