Navigating the Great Disruption?

Thomas Friedman wrote the other week that we have entered a period which in retrospect we will name "The Great Disruption." As is often true of Friedman's naming of a social phenomenon, this one struck a chord.

"Let's today step out of the normal boundaries of analysis of our economic crisis and ask a radical question: What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it's telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall - when Mother Nature and the market both said: "No more.""

What does it mean to live in such a period? How must we change our lives? How do we adjust our expectations? What opportunities can we find? What small steps can we take to build our resilience?

As humans we are not good at anticipating futures all that different from the one we are in. Yes, we are worriers -- and can fritter the night away worrying about a worst case scenario that never plays out. But we tend to flit from one extreme to the other -- from our worst fears to wishful thinking.

Think about even the simple situation of planning for a storm you know from the weather forecast is coming your way. You are sitting out having breakfast on your deck under a perfect blue sky and you are told that by 4PM the winds and rain will be so powerful that anything that could move will blow away. Taking in your furniture at that moment seems far fetched.

Similarly, in the middle of the storm, hunkered down as we are, we tend to believe it will continue forever, that sunshine will never reappear.

When it comes to large social disruptions, we never seem to be prepared. It is not just that we are not good at tricking ourselves to anticipate the unexpected. It is also because every ounce of training we've had has been oriented toward extrapolating forward from what we know from the past.

An excessive focus on risk and downsides can be discouraging and certainly it is not terribly fun. Asking "what if?" can open possibilities that you've never before imagined.

We need to build this muscle of flexible foresight. This includes resilience in the face of turbulence, a skill in and of iteslf, and the ability to see the signals that are barely on our radar screen, and form a picture of what might be coming down the pike. We need to learn to be slower to say "that can't happen," and quicker to stop and ask "What if?"