Perusing my re-discovered notes, I came across hand-written notes and Kindle highlights compiled in 20017 from “Thank You for Being Late”: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in an Age of Accelerations” by Thomas Friedman. My notes testify to my appreciation of the book.
“Thank You...” focuses on exponential change our world is experiencing, in particular, since 2007. Those changes are impacting every facet of our society, bringing promise of unimagined progress and, perhaps, even greater peril. Friedman exposes the tectonic movements that are reshaping the world today and explains how to get the most out of them and cushion their worst impacts. As I re-read my notes, I was startled by Friedman’s words written in 2016 and how applicable they can be to our Pandemic context.
In the world we are in now, acceleration seems to be increasing. [That means] you don’t just move to a higher speed of change. The rate of change also gets faster … And when the rate of change eventually exceeds the ability to adapt you get ‘dislocation.’ ‘Disruption’ is what happens when someone does something clever that makes you or your company look obsolete. ‘Dislocation’ is when the whole environment is being altered so quickly that everyone starts to feel they can’t keep up.”
That is what is happening now. “The world is not just rapidly changing,” adds Dov Seidman, “it is being dramatically reshaped—it is starting to operate differently” in many realms all at once. “And this reshaping is happening faster than we have yet been able to reshape ourselves, our leadership, our institutions, our societies, and our ethical choices.”
Here’s what I’m thinking.
The change we have been experiencing, particularly since 2007 is teutonic in its magnitude and velocity, i.e. warp speed (“warp 1” is equivalent to the speed of light). We now find ourselves at “warp 3” , (27 times the speed of light), with the pandemic. That being the case, the impact of change will increase proportionally, if not exponentially. (You’re welcome, Trekkies)
“…even though human beings and societies have steadily adapted to change, on average, the rate of … change is now accelerating so fast that it has risen above the average rate at which most people can absorb all these changes. Many of us cannot keep pace anymore.
This is a real problem. When fast gets really fast, being slower to adapt makes you really slow—and disoriented. It is as if we were all on one of those airport moving sidewalks that was going around five miles an hour and suddenly it sped up to twenty-five miles an hour—even as everything else around it stayed roughly the same. That is really disorienting for a lot of people.”
I found Friedman’s analysis and conclusions helpful in 2017 and believe they can be of value as we negotiate warp3 changes we are experiencing with the pandemic. I will share some highlights in the remainder of this post.
DYNAMIC STABILITY
When so many things are accelerating at once, it’s easy to feel like you’re in a kayak in rushing white water, being carried along by the current at a faster and faster clip. In such conditions, there is an almost irresistible temptation to do the instinctive thing—but the wrong thing: stick your paddle in the water to try to slow down.
“Why ‘Keep Your Paddle in the Water’ Is Bad Advice for Beginners.” Have you ever stopped to consider what the phrase “keep your paddle in the water” actually means? If you did you wouldn’t ever recommend it to a beginner whitewater paddler. The paddlers and instructors who give this advice are well intended and what they are really expressing is: “Keep paddling to maintain your stability through rapids.” When beginners hear “keep your paddle in the water,” they end up doing a bad version of a rudder dragging their paddle in the water back by their stern while using their blade to steer. This is a really bad position to be in … To enhance stability in rapids it’s important to move as fast or faster than the current. Every time you rudder or drag your paddle in the water to steer you lose momentum and that makes you more vulnerable to flipping over.
The only way to thrive is by maintaining dynamic stability—[a] bike-riding trick …But what is the political and social equivalent of paddling as fast as the water or maintaining dynamic stability? It’s innovation in everything other than technology. It is reimagining and redesigning your society’s workplace, politics, geopolitics, ethics, and communities—in ways that will enable more citizens on more days in more ways to keep pace with how these accelerations are reshaping their lives and generate more stability as we shoot through these rapids.
It will take workplace innovation to identify exactly what humans can do better than machines and better with machines and increasingly train people for those roles. It will take geopolitical innovation to figure out how we collectively manage a world where the power of one, the power of machines, the power of flows, and the power of many are collapsing weak states, super-empowering breakers, and stressing strong states. It will take political innovation to adjust our traditional left-right party platforms, born to respond to the Industrial Revolution, the New Deal, and the Cold War, to meet the new demands for societal resilience in the age of the three great accelerations. It will take moral innovation—to reimagine how we scale sustainable values to everyone we possibly can when the power of one and the power of machines become so amplified that human beings become almost godlike. And, finally, it will take societal innovation, learning to build new social contracts, lifelong learning opportunities, and expanded public-private partnerships, to anchor and propel more diverse populations and build more healthy communities.
This is a full-on societal reinvention challenge.
It is time to redouble our efforts to close that anxiety gap with imagination and innovation and not scare tactics and simplistic solutions that will not work.
The last thing we want is for everyone to stick their paddles in the white water to slow down. That is exactly how you destabilize a kayak and a country.
MORAL REFLECTION
f there was ever a time to pause for moral reflection, it is now. “Every technology is used before it is completely understood,” Leon Wieseltier wrote in The New York Times Book Review on January 11, 2015. “There is always a lag between an innovation [pandemic] and the apprehension of its consequences. We are living in that lag, and it is the right time to keep our heads and reflect. We have much to gain and much to lose.” To put it bluntly, we have created a world in which human beings have become more godlike than ever before.
We as a species have never been to this intersection before. That we are becoming more godlike in our powers is indisputable. Today, “if you can imagine it, it will happen,”
The first line of defense for any society is always going to be its guardrails—laws, stoplights, police, courts, surveillance, the FBI, and basic rules of decency for communities like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. All of those are necessary, but they are not sufficient for the age of accelerations. Clearly, what is also needed—and is in the power of every parent, school principal, college president, and spiritual leader—is to think more seriously and urgently about how we can inspire more of what Dov Seidman calls “sustainable values”: honesty, humility, integrity, and mutual respect. These values generate trust, social bonds, and, above all, hope. This is opposed to … “situational values”—“just doing whatever the situation allows”—whether in the terrestrial realm or cyberspace. Sustainable values do “double duty,” adds Seidman. They animate behaviors that produce trust and healthy interdependencies and “they inspire hope and resilience—they keep us leaning in, in the face of people behaving badly.” When I think of this challenge on a global scale, my own short prescription is that we need to find a way to get more people to practice the Golden Rule.
…the simple truth is: If we can’t get more people doing unto others as they would want others to do unto them, if we can’t inspire more sustainable values, we will be “the first self-endangered species,” argues Amory Lovins.
TRUST
Where trust is prevalent, … groups and societies can move and adapt quickly through many informal contracts. “By contrast, people who do not trust one another will end up cooperating only under a system of formal rules and regulations, which have to be negotiated, agreed to, litigated, and enforced, sometimes by coercive means,” wrote Fukuyama.
The heart pumps in two cycles—systole, when it contracts, and diastole, when it relaxes. And one of the things we often think is that contraction is the most important phase, because that is what gets the blood pushed out everywhere around your body. But you realize when you study medicine that it’s in diastole—when the heart relaxes—that the coronary blood vessels fill and supply the heart muscle with the lifesaving, sustaining oxygen that it needs. So without diastole there can be no systole—without relaxation there can be no contraction. In human relations, trust creates diastole. It is only when people relax their hearts and their minds that they are open to hear and engage with others, and healthy communities create the context for that.
When you are in a real one[community], never, ever say to someone in need: “Call me if you need help.” If you want to help someone, just do it.
LEADERSHIP
Harvard University expert, Ronald Heifetz,…says the role of a leader is “to help people face reality and to mobilize them to make change” as their environment changes to ensure the security and prosperity of their community.
…leadership matters more than ever—at the political and personal levels—but a particular kind of leadership. At the national and local levels, we need a leadership that can promote inclusion and adaptation—a leadership that starts every day asking, “What world am I living in? And how do I engage in the relentless pursuit of the best practices with a level of energy and smarts commensurate with the magnitude of the challenges and the opportunities in this age of accelerations?” It is also a leadership that trusts the people with the truth about this moment: that just working hard and playing by the rules won’t suffice anymore to produce a decent life.
WHEN HAS NIGHT ENDED AND THE DAY HAS BEGUN?
A rabbi once asked his students: “How do we know when the night has ended and the day has begun?”
The students thought they grasped the importance of this question. There are, after all, prayers and rites and rituals that can only be done at nighttime. And there are prayers and rites and rituals that belong only to the day. So, it is important to know how we can tell when night has ended and day has begun.
So the first and brightest of the students offered an answer: “Rabbi, when I look out at the fields and I can distinguish between my field and the field of my neighbor, that’s when the night has ended and the day has begun.”
A second student offered his answer: “Rabbi, when I look from the fields and I see a house, and I can tell that it’s my house and not the house of my neighbor, that’s when the night has ended and the day has begun.”
A third student offered another answer: “Rabbi, when I see an animal in the distance, and I can tell what kind of animal it is, whether a cow or a horse or a sheep, that’s when the night has ended and the day has begun.”
Then a fourth student offered yet another answer: “Rabbi, when I see a flower and I can make out the colors of the flower, whether they are red or yellow or blue, that’s when night has ended and day has begun. Each answer brought a sadder, more severe frown to the rabbi’s face. Until finally he shouted, “No! None of you understands! You only divide! You divide your house from the house of your neighbor, your field from your neighbor’s field, you distinguish one kind of animal from another, you separate one color from all the others. Is that all we can do—dividing, separating, splitting the world into pieces? Isn’t the world broken enough? Isn’t the world split into enough fragments? Is that what Torah is for? No, my dear students, it’s not that way, not that way at all!” The shocked students looked into the sad face of their rabbi. “Then, Rabbi, tell us: How do we know that night has ended and day has begun?”
The rabbi stared back into the faces of his students, and with a voice suddenly gentle and imploring, he responded: “When you look into the face of the person who is beside you, and you can see that person is your brother or your sister, then finally the night has ended and the day has begun.”
...who can deny that when individuals get so super-empowered and interdependent at the same time, it becomes more vital than ever to be able to look into the face of your neighbor or the stranger or the refugee or the migrant and see in that person a brother or sister?
… in the dizzying moment we’re experiencing right now, both blue-collar and white-collar workers in the developed and developing world feel like they are just one small step ahead of a [pandemic] making their job obsolete. …in such a transition it is much easier for humans to visualize what they will lose than all the benefits they will gain, or already have gained.
The transition will not be easy. But human beings have made transitions like this before and I believe they can again. “Can” doesn’t mean “will,” but it also sure doesn’t mean “can’t.”
Who ever would have thought it would become a national security and personal security imperative for all of us to scale the Golden Rule further and wider than ever?
