dispatches from the new world of work

First There Was The Word.
And The Word Was "Non-linear."

"Futurist" is a word uttered with a sneer often as not ... and deservedly so. But there are, as usual, exceptions ...

Consider: Alvin Toffler. He and his wife Heidi have gotten so much so right before so many of us. Future Shock and The Third Wave, among others, pegged most of today's conundrums and opportunities and snares 20 or more years ago. To the penny, more often than not.

Hence, what a great pleasure it was, exhausted though I was following a 22-hour journey from Boston, to see Mr T standing in the entryway to my hotel outside of São Paulo as I arrived. He was leaving, having finished his remarks to the top execs of Odebrecht, the Brazilian-headquartered multi-national.

Our conversation quickly veered to China, as it tends almost automatically to do these days when any two or more business folks collide. And he said something I fervently believe: "Who knows what will happen, but no historical trajectory is linear."

Amen!
As in: AMEN!!

China's march since Deng's endorsement of wealth creation roughly 25 years ago does indeed follow a remarkably smooth upward path. But if history is any guide, there will indeed be "outlier" events that confound the current process. We digressed to Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "black swans" [The Black Swan], my favorite digression these days. Ever so much of where we are at a given time, personally or organizationally, is determined by the tiniest set of "black swans"—outlier events not imagined, or even imaginable, until they have become history.

So, "the word" for the day (any day! Every day!): non-linear.

Life is non-linear.
Progress, if indeed there be progress, is non-linear.

A very, very few black swans will break you—or make you. The "trick," then, is to be more or less prepared for the unpreparable. E.g., Rudy Giuliani reacted well to a Black Swan of the highest-lowest order, 09/11, and his instinctive response to what cannot be prepared for may garner him the White House. At the very least, his response on 09/11 demonstrated how rapidly (hours!!) one can flip from "laughable nearly has-been" (lame-duck mayor booted out of Gracie Mansion by his cheated-on wife) to "king of the largest of hills."

Thinking of yesterday's blog post, "The right plan is to have no plan," I recall Henry Mintzberg's observation (The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, also mentioned yesterday): "Strategic plans work wonderfully ... when you don't need them, when tomorrow unfolds as a natural extension of today. They are useless, or even detrimental, when you do need them—in discontinuous times."

To dismiss the myth of continuity and acknowledge the absolute ubiquity of non-linearity, black swans and the like—i.e., their centrality on the scorecard of your life's record as parent, spouse, professional—means that you will never again look at the world the same way again.

Tom Peters posted this on 08/02/07.

Comments

"life is non-linear." exactly! thanks for the reminder.

speaking of futurists and China, the latest book by John Naisbitt, Mind Set!, has a lot of things to say about China too. and that guy was also right with a lot of things in the past ;)

Posted by ~C4Chaos at August 2, 2007 10:08 PM

A favorite passage from Gerald M. Weinberg, that always comes to mind when I think about the future and all things non-linear.

â€œ...Many years ago, Sir Ronald Fisher noted that every biological system had to face the problem of present versus future, and that the future was always less certain than the present. To survive, a species had to do well today, but not so well that it didnâ€™t allow for possible change tomorrow. His Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection said that the more adapted an organism was to present conditions, the less adaptable it tended to be to unknown future conditions. We can apply the theorem to individuals, small groups of people, large organizations, organizations of people and machines, and even complex systems of machinery, and can generalize it as follows: The better adapted you are, the less adaptable you tend to be...â€
Source: Gerald M. Weinberg, The Secrets of Consulting (New York, Dorset House Publishing, 1985) pp 29-30

Posted by Tom Carroll at August 2, 2007 11:09 PM

Randomness is a given, but itâ€™s not disconnected, lest we forget the old adage that the more things changes the more they stay the same.

I like to use DNA as a metaphor for progress. It is both linier and circular, it accommodates random changes into its structure but you can still trace its core characteristics back to the original human beings.

Itâ€™s human nature that stays the same. Sometime things that seem random are the result of an ageless cycle of human behavior, that once forgotten is repeated over and over again. Each new occurrence seems to be out of the blue to those who have no memory of the previous manifestation.

I love this quote.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted, it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience.
George Santayana, The Life of Reason, Volume 1, 1905

Posted by MLM at August 3, 2007 12:35 AM

What would really be non linear?
If Mike Bloomberg becomes president because
Guiliani endorsed him for NYC mayor.

Posted by GlenOrGlena at August 5, 2007 10:04 PM

I agree about Taleb. Most challenging perspective I've come across in a generation. Reminds me of Peter Drucker's description of entrepreneurial opportunity from Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

The Seven Sources of Innovative Opportunity
1. The unexpected â€“ the unexpected success, the unexpected failure, the unexpected outside event;
2. The incongruity â€“ between reality as it actually is and reality as it is assumed to be or as it â€œought to beâ€;
3. Innovation based on process need;
4. Changes in industry structure or market structure that catch everyone unawares
5. Demographics (population changes)
6. Changes in perception, mood, and meaning;
7. New knowledge, both scientific and nonscientific.

Thanks Tom. Great post.

Posted by Ed Brenegar at August 7, 2007 2:32 PM