I am going to say something heretical. I am tired of hearing about change. Not that it is happening, but that we feel like we’re the first to go through such times. We are going through “unprecedented change.” You hear it every day. Whether it’s AI, work from home, Covid, or other challenges. In fact, in our recent Virtual LeaderCon, nearly every speaker started by saying what we are going through now is unprecedented. I’m not sure I agree.
Certainly, the challenges we face now are unique to us. You and I haven’t been through many of these seismic changes in our life. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t cope or that we don’t have solutions. People have survived greater stretches of technological and social advancement.
Don’t believe me?
Here’s a little thought experiment. Assume for a moment the average person lives 70 years. If you were born in 1900 and died in 1970, these are just some of the things that either didn’t exist or weren’t widely available when you were born, that were commonplace when you died:
- Voice and music recording.
- Radio.
- Movies.
- Television.
- The telephone.
- The automobile.
- The airplane.
- Indoor plumbing.
- Hot and cold running water.
- A man on the moon.
- The mainframe computer.
- Public libraries in every city.
- The shift from rural to urban populations throughout the world.
- Public education in every town (and exponential growth of the literacy rate).
- Heart and organ transplants.
- The end of monarchies in all but a handful of countries.
- The 40-hour workweek, a minimum wage, and minimum safety standards.
- The eradication of over 2/3 of the diseases that used to kill children.
- The birth control pill.
- The Stonewall riots and the birth of the LGBTIQQ movement.
- Two world wars.
- Spanish Influenza and other waves of diseases.
- The end of legal segregation in the US and elsewhere.
- Women got the vote in most of the world.
Yes, we have cell phones, but they’re an improvement of the telephone. Streaming might kill television and radio, but that’s just a different delivery system for what already existed. Most of the changes we’re currently going through are degrees of change, not the ORDER of change our great-grandparents experienced.
And...?
This isn’t to diminish the challenges we face. The way we work is undergoing the kind of change not seen since the Labor movement in the 1920s gave us the 40-hour workweek. It’s confusing, it’s challenging, and we want it all to stop and let us catch our breath.
But if your great-grandparents survived, odds are you will too.
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