We know that the half-life of career paths, business models, products and processes is shrinking rapidly. If you long for the days of yore when permanence and a semplance of stability were attainable, you're probably not alone. Not only do we as individuals find comfort in nostalgia, but we are also surrounded by institutions and organizations that are architected for a past that will surely never return.
In his recent Fast Company article "Generation Flux", Robert Safian describes this trend: "Nostalgia is a natural human emotion, a survival mechanism that pushes people to avoid risk by applying what we've learned and relying on what's worked before. It's also about as useful as an appendix right now." (Fast Company issue 162, February 2012 - p. 67).
It seems to me that we have allowed ourselves an extra helping of nostalgia, more so in recent times. Unlike 100 years ago in 1912, when a world preparing for war was forced to embrace a blinding set of new technologies from the automobile and electricity to telecommunications and mass production, we live in an era of apparent reluctance, if not outrigth resistance to change.
Companies hold on to historically record-high amounts of cash on their balance sheets, unable to identify investments, innovations or expansions of their own core business that would yield more than even the infinitesimal 2.5% average return on cash assets. Families and individuals relocated in 2011 at a rate less than that of the late 1940s.
Ultimately, just like life among the Pennsylvania Dutch, we will arrive in a place where we can no longer realistically return to the mainstream. It would be too much of an adjustment, too costly, and too difficult. Falling far enough behind inevitably puts us where we no longer having the skills to even adjust at a fundamental level.
At this point, preservation has become a priority for many. Preservation of familiarity, preservation of the status quo, preservation of nostalgia. We find ourselves playing defense, and seeing erosion and fraying showing up at the edges of our private world we seek so much to maintain.
It’s one of the most prevalent tendencies of human nature. This desire to preserve the comforts of the present until they become the past is so ingrained that it permeates every corner of society. It happens with older family members – who often become stuck in their familiar living conditions, even after they are no longer workable. It happens to manufacturers – who may prolong the switch to new products or processes, trying to milk out just a bit more profitability and useful life from old plants, old machinery, old methods. It happened to Kodak, stuck in a pre-digital world while it stood still and let others gain control of the market it once owned across the globe. From the US Postal Service and American Airlines to Research in Motion and Borders Books, the attempts to preserve, to somehow extend the older business model in the face of aggressive change, to hold on to the comforts of the familiar, are fraught with great danger and often result in catastrophe.
What seemed so appealing for so long, and started to appear as a position of relative safety – slowly becomes a trap. Like quicksand, the realization that it is become harder and harder to break free becomes apparent nearly at the point where it may already be too late. Time and again, leaders marvel after the fact that it had seemed unthinkable at the time that “conditions could change so fast” or that “anyone could have imagined this”.
So we come eventually to recognize that the further behind the rest of the world we fall, the more expensive it becomes to maintain that position. Like the Amish, we begin to need things – parts, expertise, supplies – that only we want or need, and that cost us more and more over time, if they are available at all. In the end, our attempts at preserving this false nostalgia exhaust us. Many never make it back to the mainstream again, and see their careers, their businesses, their lives – wind down into an anachronistic world filled with rationalizations and self-justifications necessary to sanely preserve the illusion that it’s all OK. It happens to individuals, it happens to families, businesses, entire industries – and it even happens to entire societies.
As in any destructive habit of human nature, we know we must first admit that we have a problem before we can address the problem. We must then act to eradicate the problem, knowing that our tendencies may cause us to gravitate back to this harmful pattern. We must be mindful of the signs of our craving for nostalgia, the seeking of comfort from preservation of the present long past its usefulness.
In rejecting unnatural fear of change, progress and the uncertainty the future brings, we gain by embracing the inevitability of change. Only by acknowledging the relentless pace of 21st Century life do we enable ourselves to be a full participant in it, and to advance. But to engage this journey, we need the preparedness necessary, the core capabilities that equip us to operate and properly interact with the many opportunities and ongoing adaptations the current world will continue to require.
