The New Normal

Kendrick Strikes Again.

Ian writes....


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Hi all

In answer to Peter’s provocation about change…..

It's all about the new normal.

It’s the Beer talking. Well sort of. Stafford made an argument (in the early 70’s - now there’s prescience for you) that the exponential rate of change is/will be caused by our species’ progress in technology. He plots a graph, (can’t remember which book, Brain, Heart or Platform – will check it out when I return home on Wednesday), showing our developments over the centuries. He discounts the theory that “change has been ever thus”, showing that the increments get ever larger and closer together, hence an exponential curve. I will dig out the reference.

But that is not my argument. I am sure mine is not original but here goes.

As a species we have always been compelled to connect people and things together and that has been, and continues to be, a prime mover in our (technological) development. From ancient forms of writing, Marathon man, printing press, Morse code/telegraph, radio, television, computer, internet we have strived to connect one to one, one to many and many to one. We are now at the point where one to one is instantaneous around the planet with free voice and video (I use it all the time, in my youth it was only in Thunderbirds that such things happened, indeed many of the ideas that were scifi in my youth are now not only reality, but better than the scifi items and happened earlier than predicted. There is a principle with technology that what is predicted comes late and does not really deliver. Then it comes back, much bigger and more powerful than predicted. As the Zen Koan says "first there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is" Chasmic or what? Moore uses the Koan as his intro to Chasm, it's not that I am an aging hippy. Well not completely that anyway...), same thing for many to one and one to many. Further, we can now connect to more abstract representations of ourselves: organisation to organisation, blogs, web sites, web services; without actually being present at either end: web crawlers, search engines that can sus sentiment, aggregators, DIGG and so on.

This level of connectivity drives complexity in our interactions. I am using the definition of complexity as “being the number of possible states of a system”. As complexity increases, so does unpredictability because things get connected in unknown ways and emergence (a hot topic in the systems and complexity community) happens. The one thing that we all agree on is that emergence is, at best, very difficult to predict, potentially impossible. The meteoric rise of Google, eBay and the like show this, underpinned by our old friends Moore, Metcalfe and Coase. Few could/would have predicted the rate of growth and eventual (current?) size of Google/eBay. Increasing complexity driving increasing unpredictability driving increasing and ever more unpredictable change. Can’t see it stopping for a while.

If I may paraphrase Don Tapscott/Dave Ticoll (digital 4-sight) "people keep asking me, after 911, the tsunami, Katrina, google, eBay and the like, when will it get back to normal. I tell them the answer is that it already has. This is the new normal. Get used to it". What is needed are tools that help us cope and maybe even survive and thrive in this new apparently chaotic world, our new normal. Ashby is key here and all that cascades out of his Law of Requisite Variety. "Only Variety Can Absorb Variety" is a far better answer to the Ultimate Question Of Life The Universe And Everything than "42". I even suspect that Douglas Adams might concur. That the words seem innocuous and at first glance meaningless should not deter us. Investigation of them will get repaid a thousand fold. Any tools that we use must, IMHO obey this Law. Stafford's works are based on it. Moore and Christensen conform as does Blue Ocean.

We have not seen, in my opinion, the big changes yet. My view is that we will see “phase changes” going on before long. Connectivity with communication will drive it. As the folks in Funky Business http://www.funkybusiness.com say at the beginning of their book, “Marx was right”. But not with the manual workers, only when economies and power start to be driven by knowledge workers. Which is about now. As Nordström and Ridderstråle point out “The revolutionary reality is that 1.3 kilograms of brain holds the key to all our futures”. Oh, and they quote and use Ashby’s Law.

Provocative? Me? Oh behave!

Cheers and happy midwinter and new year.

Ian

PS – on a sadder note Amanga The Dog passed today after 14 and a half years of giving only unconditional love and acceptance from her moment of birth until her death. Would that we could all do the same in all of our relationships. We will miss her.
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