Most of us spend a lot of our time on autopilot, making old and reliable assumptions without even thinking about it.
That’s going to be even less helpful tomorrow than it is today – and already a good number of our once safe and secure assumptions are crumbling into dust.
According to Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab and author of the new book Whiplash: How to Survive our Faster Future, technology began to outpace our ability to understand it late in the 20th century.
Partly as cause and partly as effect, we now live in a world characterized by three dynamics: asymmetry, complexity and uncertainty.
Linear thinking – assuming that processes yield more or less consistently linear outcomes – is a wholly inadequate and often dangerous mindset.
Consider other new paradigms, which are growing in utility by the millisecond:
- biological over mechanical;
- emergence over authority;
- pull over push;
- compass over maps;
- risk over safety;
- disobedience over compliance;
- practice over theory;
- diversity over ability;
- resilience over strength; and,
- systems over objects.
If any of those perspectives confuse or intrigue you, you owe it to yourself to dig deeper.
Fortunately, a leader grounded in the rock solid principles of Jesus-like S3 Leadership, should have no problem adapting to new paradigms that do a better job of equipping individuals and organizations to deal creatively with the highly interdependent processes which characterize life today.
Our goal is to creatively serve God’s plan for creation. The more we know, the better we’ll do.
But our adaptive and creative processes begin with more and better knowledge about how the world and its systems – including its human systems – actually work. It’s time to dig deeper.
To read a more about what the MIT Media Lab director has to say about the highly interdependent world we live in today, click here.
To order his new book, Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future, click here.