How Exponential Disruptive Change Represents the New Normal
Right now, the confounding, overwhelming experience of disruption is impacting our lives in an immediate way. Right now, we all understand what it’s like to have a tsunami sneak up on us and sweep us off our fee ten masse. But this is our “new normal”, friends. COVID-19 is just currently the most gripping expression of it. But make no mistake: it is a single factor in an entire system of exponentially unfolding disruption.
It doesn’t particularly surprise us that for many people, the need to socially isolate is difficult to understand. That’s because COVID-19 is a perfect example of exponential change. And as we discussed in a recent post, people simply don’t “get the exponential”.
This is how exponential growth works with COVID-19:
Without social distancing, each infected person is expected to infect 2.5 others. Those 2.5 go on to each infect 2.5 others. With each “round” of infections, the number of infected people doubles. At first, this steady doubling doesn’t raise any eyebrows. But then, one day a tipping point is reached and the number of cases surges upward. On day 15, there are 5,000 infected people. But on day 20, there are 70,000. And the numbers keep doubling after that.If you were to plot it out on a graph, day 15 to 20would look like an elbow. That’s exponential growth.
We believe that before people become conversant in “the exponential”, they’ll always cling to business as usual. And the fact is, when it comes to massive disruptions following exponential trajectories,COVID-19 is just the start. In global health, as well as in business, politics, technology, social trends, and the environment, exponential change is the new normal.
So, can we harness this experience as a powerful lesson with the potential to transform us, to make us more resilient than we were before?
We believe that step one is education. You need to understand that we are inhabiting anew reality. In this reality, exponential “elbows” are converging and disrupting lives at an unprecedented rate and scale.
COVID-19 is just one face of this new normal. What are the others?
Larry and David
Feeling Disrupted?
We now live in a world in which obscure start-ups like YouTube, Facebook, and Airbnb each respectively secured a billion users (or a billion and a half in the case ofFacebook) in a single decade. In that same decade, a “drone” went from being a military weapon system to being a toy that could be purchased for a child for $50.
Consider the phenomenon of “the Internet of Everything” (IoE), in which there is forecast to be over 400% growth in Machine-to-Machine (M2M) connections in the next five years. By 2018 there’s likely to be over 10 billion connected devices, and by 2020some observers predict over 70 billion. Add Big Data to IoE, and it’s tough to predict just how big the impact will be on our already complex digital transaction capability and culture.
Of course, exponential isn’t just expressing itself through technology or commerce.Scientists touring the Russian Artic Ocean to check for plumes of noxious methane gas recently encountered a troubling phenomenon. Where they formerly found hundreds of meter-wide plumes, now there are hundreds of kilometer-wide columns of gas bubbling out of the ocean waters. Methane gas is fifty times more damaging to the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. Warming thaws Arctic sea ice, eroding the natural “mirror” that reflects heat back into space, which then raises the temperature of the ocean even higher, and so on. Nature, too, is a matrix of elbows, threshold breaches and tipping points that are accelerating changes—in this case changes to the climatic patterns that provide a stable platform for existence as we know it.
Will digital disruption pale into insignificance relative to climate change? Or, will digital be the disruptive influence that, if leveraged in the right way, provides us with exponential solutions to exponential climate change?
The truth is that we are living in the “exponential elbow” of many different but interconnected sectors and systems. This is the age of disruption, in which the change that was always developing at an exponential rate suddenly and profoundly accelerates, reshaping the reality of everyday life. It’s the moment when we wake-up, startled and disoriented, in a bed we’ve been sleeping in for millennia.
So how does it feel to be an individual living at a time when exponential change registers in the arena of everyday life? How do these “elbows” manifest in your personal experience, at work or in your home? From yesterday’s rush of cloud computing, to the rapid changes in climate patterns, to a Big Data driven IoE, how is your every day existence shifting?
A Series of Insights from Disrupted, the Book
Written in 2015, Disrupted was, and still is, both a book ahead of its time, and a timely guide for those committed to understanding and addressing the complexity of disruptive change, preparing for disruption, and critically, leveraging disruption to generate sustainable value.
This series of articles are extracts — some with comment from the authors — from the book and are intended to highlight some of the key concepts captured in Disrupted.
A must read (if) you want to understand the world of today and tomorrow, and look forward to the future rather than fearing it.
- Phil Ruthven, Founder, IBISWorld
To find out more visit: www.resilientfutures.com/disrupted
