Some reading on "change"
A few weeks ago a friend asked me for reading recommendations on the subject of “change” — by which she meant how the world is changing, how society is changing, and how change happens within organizations and groups.
We throw around the word change a lot but what does it really mean to people? How do we make change happen? We don’t discuss this very often, and the question of why that is came up at a recent talk I gave for the German Federal Cultural Foundation's Digital Fund.
I recommended, to my friend, the following books and articles as a starting point. These resources, among many more, have helped me get a feel for what change is and how people think about it from a variety of perspectives.
For my own work I’m focusing in on the idea that change itself is changing — and my work for the Smithsonian, the United Nations, the Museum of Solutions in Mumbai, and others has been about re-shaping institutions (or creating new ones) to deal with the fact that change is now faster, more disruptive, more surprising, and more complex than it has ever been before. This new kind of change poses enormous risks for society if we can’t increase the speed and clarity with which we deal with the world around us. (Take our sclerotic response to the climate emergency, for example.)
Indeed, we may soon look back on 2020 and say, “Wow, I wish things were as calm and mellow as they were back then.”
Change and Human Factors
Surgical Checklists Save Lives — but Once in a While, They Don’t. Why?
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/09/magazine/surgical-checklists-save-lives-but-once-in-a-while-they-dont-why.html
By Siddhartha Mukherjee, New York Times, 9 May 2018
”What happened? How could an idea that worked so effectively in so many situations fail to work in this one? The most likely answer is the simplest: Human behavior changed, but it didn’t change enough.”
Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds: New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds
By Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker, February 27, 2017 issue
This article covers the hypothesis that what we think of as human intelligence arose not to enable us to solve complex, scientific and logical problems but to give us the wits necessary to avoid getting screwed (killed, ostracized, marginalized) by our social group. This idea explained a lot about the phenomena of fake news, conspiracy theories, and Trumpism for me.
“Living in small bands of hunter-gatherers, our ancestors were primarily concerned with their social standing, and with making sure that they weren’t the ones risking their lives on the hunt while others loafed around in the cave. There was little advantage in reasoning clearly, while much was to be gained from winning arguments. Among the many, many issues our forebears didn’t worry about were the deterrent effects of capital punishment and the ideal attributes of a firefighter. Nor did they have to contend with fabricated studies, or fake news, or Twitter. It’s no wonder, then, that today reason often seems to fail us. As Mercier and Sperber write, ‘This is one of many cases in which the environment changed too quickly for natural selection to catch up.’”
Change, Networks & Communities
Twitter and Tear Gas: The power and fragility of networked protest
https://www.twitterandteargas.org/
By Zeynep Tufekci, 2017
Do yourself a favor and read everything by Zenyep. Here is her work in The Atlantic, and here’s a nice profile of her in the New York Times.
“…The ability to use digital tools to rapidly amass large numbers of protesters with a common goal empowers movements. Once this large group is formed, however, it struggles because it has sidestepped some of the traditional tasks of organizing. Besides taking care of tasks, the drudgery of traditional organizing helps create collective decision-making capabilities, sometimes through formal and informal leadership structures, and builds a collective capacity among movement participants through shared experience and tribulation. The expressive, often humorous style of networked protests attracts many participants and thrives both online and offline, but movements falter in the long term unless they create the capacity to navigate the inevitable challenges.”
Emergent Strategy
(via Google books, with links to local libraries and booksellers)
By Adrienne Maree Brown, 2017
“We learned that every member of the community holds pieces of the solution, even if we are all engaged in different layers of the work. We learned to look for telltale signs that actions were community based. One indicator that things are off is when impacted communities and people of color get involved and they are put in the role of “performing the action,” for example, having their photos taken, being spokespeople, or being asked to endorse or represent work they don’t get to lead, etc., while most of the background organizing is still dominated by the folks who aren’t impacted and won't be around long term to sustain the campaign or to be held accountable. At its worst, this approach builds up hope and encourages local communities to take risks, and then abandons them with the results.”
Bunch of Amateurs: A search for the American character
(via Google books, with links to local libraries and booksellers)
Jack Hitt, 2012
“Innovation is supposed to happen one of two ways. There is the Great Galilean Aha!—the Instantaneous, practically divine revelation—and the Edisonian Grind, the slow-motion epiphany involving the unending effort for the inventor who lives in the lab struggling through trial and error until he arrives at the answer. […] But amateurs show that there is another path to innovation that doesn’t yet have a movie shorthand—the collaborative, marginal effort that culminates in a Great New Thing.”
A Sense of Urgency
https://www.kotterinc.com/book/a-sense-of-urgency/
By John Kotter, 2008
Kotter’s research indicates that 70% of change initiatives fail, and the thing that unifies the best and most successful initiatives is “a sense of urgency.” This book is worth its weight in gold just for its description of the “false urgency” that is seen inside many organizations, and the concrete, tactical descriptions of what actual urgency is and how to develop it.
My favorite story from the book is about Caroline Ortega, a 27-year-old mid-level employee in a data management firm, and her experience raising urgency within her organization.
This short podcast from Harvard Business Review gives a pretty good summary.
Kotter’s other books, including Leading Change and The Heart of Change: real-life stories of how people change their organizations, are also excellent — good places to start if you’re interested in organizational change.
25 years of Wired predictions: Why the future never arrives
https://www.wired.com/story/wired25-david-karpf-issues-tech-predictions/
By DAVID KARPF, 18 September 2018
David Karpf read every issue of Wired magazine from cover-to-cover to see what he could learn about how the Wired community views the world.
“WILLIAM GIBSON IS said to have remarked that ‘the future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed.’ Paging through the first 25 years of WIRED, what’s most striking is that the future never becomes evenly distributed. Sure, everyone gets on Facebook and uses Google, but the dinosaurs never die outright, and the new age of abundance never quite gains its inviolable foothold. The future just keeps arriving, mutating, bowing to the fickle pressures of advertising markets and quarterly earnings reports.”
“Wired’s early visions of the digital future, the mistake that seems most glaring is the magazine’s confidence that technology and the economics of abundance would erase social and economic inequality. The digital revolution’s track record suggests that its arc doesn’t always bend toward abundance—or in a straight line at all. It flits about, responding to the gravitational forces of hype bubbles and monopoly power, warped by the resilience of old institutions and the fragility of new ones.”
Tactical Urbanism: Short-term action for long-term gain
Volume 1: free pdf / Commercial press version via Google Books, with links to local libraries & book sellers)
By Mike Lydon and Anthony Garcia, 2015
“It’s easier for any of us to envision what the future can be if you can see it, touch it and taste it as well. Instead of looking at a piece of paper, we want people to experience it.” (Quoting Pat Brown, instigator of a local project in Memphis, Tennessee.)
“Too often, cities only look to big-budget projects to revitalize a neighborhood. There are simply not enough of those projects to go around. We want to encourage small, low-risk, community-driven improvements all across our city that can add up to larger, long-term change.” (Quoting Memphis mayor A. C. Wharton.)
Environmental change
Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html
By Nathaniel Rich, New York Times, 1 August 2018
A harrowing, beautifully written story about the 10-year period from 1979 to 1989 — “the decisive decade when humankind first came to a broad understanding of the causes and dangers of climate change.”
“We have less time than we realize, said an M.I.T. nuclear engineer named David Rose, who studied how civilizations responded to large technological crises. ‘People leave their problems until the 11th hour, the 59th minute,’ he said. ‘And then: Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani?’ — My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? […]
”Few of these policy geniuses were showing much sense. They understood what was at stake, but they hadn’t taken it to heart. They remained cool, detached — pragmatists overmatched by a problem that had no pragmatic resolution.”
(The scene described was at the so-called Pink Palace conference, a gathering of climate scientists and policy experts, in 1980.)
The Insect Apocalypse Is Here: What does it mean for the rest of life on Earth?
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/magazine/insect-apocalypse.html
By Brooke Jarvis, New York Times Magazine, Nov. 27, 2018
Another harrowing story about the collapse of ecosystems, revealing the degree to which we humans struggle to comprehend incremental, planetary-scale change.
“Scientists have begun to speak of functional extinction (as opposed to the more familiar kind, numerical extinction). Functionally extinct animals and plants are still present but no longer prevalent enough to affect how an ecosystem works. […] Like the slow approach of twilight, their declines can be hard to see. White-rumped vultures were nearly gone from India before there was widespread awareness of their disappearance. Describing this phenomenon in the journal BioScience, Kevin Gaston, a professor of biodiversity and conservation at the University of Exeter, wrote: “Humans seem innately better able to detect the complete loss of an environmental feature than its progressive change.”
Winning Slowly is the Same as Losing: The technology exists to combat climate change – what will it take to get our leaders to act?
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/bill-mckibben-winning-slowly-is-the-same-as-losing-198205/
By Bill McKibben, Rolling Stone, 1 December 2017
Economist and environmentalist Bill McKibben has been writing powerfully about the climate emergency for over 20 years. His books Eaarth (two “a’s”, because, as he argues, our current Earth is much different than the old one) and Deep Economy helped me form my first ideas about the urgent need for climate action. Here are McKibben’s 17 articles for Rolling Stone — pick one at random and start reading.
“If we don’t win very quickly on climate change, then we will never win. That’s the core truth about global warming. It’s what makes it different from every other problem our political systems have faced.”
The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html
By Tim Urban, January 22, 2015
This 2-part post on Wait, But Why is a good, accessible primer on Artificial Intelligence and it gives a glimpse of what the runaway acceleration of technological change could yield.
“When it comes to history, we think in straight lines. When we imagine the progress of the next 30 years, we look back to the progress of the previous 30 as an indicator of how much will likely happen. [But] in order to think about the future correctly, you need to imagine things moving at a much faster rate than they’re moving now. […] And if you spend some time reading about what’s going on today in science and technology, you start to see a lot of signs quietly hinting that life as we currently know it cannot withstand the leap that’s coming next.”
Change and the future
William Gibson Has a Theory About Our Cultural Obsession With Dystopias
https://www.vulture.com/2017/08/william-gibson-archangel-apocalypses-dystopias.html
By Abraham Riesman, Vulture, 1 August 2019
How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/16/how-william-gibson-keeps-his-science-fiction-real
By Joshua Rothman, New Yorker, December 16, 2019 issue
A couple of stunning, difficult, quirky profiles of novelist William Gibson.
“Many works of literary fiction claim to be set in the present day. In fact, they take place in the recent past, conjuring a world that feels real because it’s familiar, and therefore out of date. Gibson’s strategy of extreme presentness reflects his belief that the current moment is itself science-fictional. ‘The future is already here,’ he has said. ‘It’s just not very evenly distributed.’
Q: How do you account for the recent surge in popular fiction about the collapse of civilization into dystopia or Armageddon?}
Gibson: This could be a case of consumers of a particular kind of pop culture trying to tell us something, alas. Seriously, what I find far more ominous is how seldom, today, we see the phrase “the 22nd century.” Almost never. Compare this with the frequency with which the 21st century was evoked in popular culture during, say, the 1920s.”
What perpetual war looks like in America
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/what-perpetual-war-looks-like-in-america/2019/08/04/8f89c95a-b6da-11e9-a091-6a96e67d9cce_story.html
By Philip Kennicott, The Washington Post, August 4, 2019
The idea, from the Washington Post’s cultural critic, that America’s civil war is already here — it just doesn’t look like we had imagined it.
From a scene outside a Hooter’s restaurant in El Paso, Texas, after a mass shooting in August, 2019.
“The eyes of the Hooters [restaurant] owl stare at us, as if through large goggles, wide open with shock and horror. In front of the restaurant, men and women in military fatigues, some with helmets, others dressed more provisionally, hurry past, bearing a formidable arsenal of weapons and communications gear. This is what war looks in America, a surreal juxtaposition of familiar logos and brand names and a now all-too-familiar display of police response.”
Homo Deus: A brief history of tomorrow
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Deus:_A_Brief_History_of_Tomorrow
By Yuval Noah Harari, 2017
I saw Yuval Harari give a short, impassioned talk about the dangers of AI to a group of elderly philanthropists at a birthday party in Israel a few years ago. There must have been 1,000 people there and one-by-one you could see the comprehension, and then the shock and fear, wash across their faces: How can this be?
“In the coming decades it is likely that we will see more Internet-like revolutions, in which technology steals a march on polities. Artificial intelligence and biotechnology might soon overhaul our societies and economies — and our bodies and minds too — but they are hardly a blip on the current political radar. Present-day democratic structures just cannot collect and process the relevant data fast enough, and most voters don't understand biology and cybernetics well enough to form any pertinent opinions. Hence traditional democratic polities is losing control of events, and is failing to present us with meaningful visions of the future… Ordinary voters are beginning to sense that the democratic mechanism no longer empowers them. The world is changing all around, and they don't understand how or why. Power is shifting away from them, but they are unsure where it has gone…The sad truth is that nobody knows where all the power has gone.”
The pandemic is a portal
https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca
By Arundhati Roy, Financial Times, April 3, 2020
The novelist Arundhati Roy on how coronavirus threatens India — and what the country, and the world, should do next.
“The scene was biblical. Or perhaps not. The Bible could not have known numbers such as these. […] Every one of the walking people I spoke to was worried about the virus. But it was less real, less present in their lives than looming unemployment, starvation and the violence of the police. Of all the people I spoke to that day, including a group of Muslim tailors who had only weeks ago survived the anti-Muslim attacks, one man’s words especially troubled me. He was a carpenter called Ramjeet, who planned to walk all the way to Gorakhpur near the Nepal border [over 500km away].
‘Maybe when Modiji decided to do this, nobody told him about us. Maybe he doesn’t know about us’, he said.
‘Us’ means approximately 460 million people.
[…]
“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.
We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”
* * *
Excerpts from these and other books/articles are posted to this blog, tagged #change.
…Also this slide deck/talk of mine, How Change Happens, might be useful for people thinking about creating institutional or sector-wide change.
…And while I'm at it, a draft foreword of my book, The Age of Scale, is about the topic of accelerating change: