Navigating leadership in the age of disruption

We live in a moment of rapid change, of “disruption.” And in response, we must “move fast and break things” (Mark Zuckerberg). We must “treat every day like day one” (Jeff Bezos). We must push out Minimum Viable Products. We must be Agile. And we must worship speed because we live in a V.U.C.A. world, where the only constant is change. And today is the slowest day of the rest of our lives.

In short, we must urgently…do…stuff. In a moment when the stakes — for our organizations, for society, for humanity — are highest, we navigate by a narrative that is seriously lacking in depth. There is precious little sense of “why.” Of what should change. Of what should be preserved.

Ordinarily, to gain perspective in a situation, we step back. We find another point in space from which to observe the moment. But the changes we struggle with now are global. Nowhere in space can we gain distance from events.

But we can gain perspective by stepping back in time. The intuition that many leaders today feel — namely, that our own moment surely cannot be as unique as we pretend it to be — deserves to be taken seriously.

Capitalism’s reading of history says that we are in the midst of a Fourth Industrial Revolution — that we are now (as with the advent of the steam engine, or electricity, or computers before) shifting how we make things, how we communicate, and how we collaborate. And the economy and society must shift with them.

But capitalism is a rather recent, rather narrow lens on human history. The world historian might say, “Fourth Industrial Revolution? Already the fourth, in just 250 years! That is small potatoes. We are living in the midst of a Fourth Information Revolution, just the fourth, in 100,000 years.” (The first three being the advent of speech, then writing, then print.)

If the advent of print was like the lighting of a single candle in humanity’s dark night, then the advent of digital is like the sun rising. It is an accurate metaphor, to describe the inflation of information that humanity now has at its disposal.

That single candle sparked “a Renaissance.” More precisely (for the historians in the room), it catalyzed Europe’s transition from the Medieval Age to the early Modern Age. It catalyzed a transition in the structure of economics (from local to centralized); in the locus of truth (from myth and revelation to present-day observation); in communication networks (from one-to-one to one-to-many); and in the very purpose of our being (from obedience to progress; from acceptance of Man’s place in the Great Chain of Being, to a striving higher that led ultimately to the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment).

Capitalism and the Industrial Revolutions were all derivatives of much bigger changes.

If we want to understand our own time of rapid change more deeply, then we should spend some time looking out through both these lenses. The micro-lens shows the unstoppable forces of technological change that are driving society through yet another Industrial Revolution. The macro lens shows us humanity’s indomitable will to break free of fixed futures. And now is one moment in which both these awesome forces collide.

What happens when the unstoppable force meets the indomitable will? We know that answer; we are living it.

What needs to happen? That is the better question. And the answer is: leadership.