What we really mean with accelerating change
Breaking down our definition and how we can cope best
Welcome to Designing the Future,
In this newsletter issue, we share the following topics:
Time as a constraint in an accelerating world
Breaking down the definition of acceleration
Some things are better at speeding up than others
Breaking down the time-pressure paradox
The effects of acceleration on our lives
Time as a constraint in an accelerating world
We can increase almost everything in our lives. But at least one thing can not be increased: Time itself.
We can not turn a second into a minute, a minute into an hour, or an hour into a day.
The consequence? To improve, we aim for efficiency, putting more and more of the increasing other activities in our lives within the same timeframe.
Around the year 1900, the average European household contained about 400 different objects. By now, this number has increased to around 10,000 objects. Also, the objects that we own are exchanged at an increasing rate.
Because of this, we now have to distribute our time between 10,000 objects asking our time, instead of 400 objects in the year 1900. This is not only the case with objects, we also see an increasing number of people/contacts in our lives, and an increasing number of options asking for our time.
We can increase goods, the number of options and the number of contacts we have. Still, you only have 24 hours a day to distribute your time between them. Time can not be increased, only condensed.
Breaking down acceleration
When people feel that their life speeds up, what do they mean? We break it down three dimensions of acceleration:
Technological acceleration
Includes different technological innovations. For example, the speeding up of transportation, communication, or manufacturing.
Acceleration of social change
This acceleration is about social change itself. Think about faster-shifting values, resulting in polarization in societies or instability of government institutions. Or to give business examples, regulations change, partners you deal with change, clients you service change, etc.
Acceleration of the pace of life
With this acceleration, we mean the speed and compression of actions and experiences in everyday life. Multitasking is for example a way to increase your pace of life.
This continuous acceleration results in problems.
(1) It uses up more and more individual and collective energy to keep it going.
(2) you need to run faster and faster just to stay in place. People feel the world is changing, and we feel we need to run faster to stay the same. We call this an accelerated standstill, growing and accelerating just to keep the status quo.
(3) Growth may not include everyone in society, meaning growth is not causing stabilization, or it may not improve everyone’s lives.
We’re standing on many different escalators. And for every escalator we don’t run up, we are gradually going down.
- Hartmut Rosa
Some things are better at speeding up than others
Not all aspects of our society can be speeded up to the same extent. Fast systems will put pressure on slow systems in a world that is accelerating.
Think about our ecological environment.
Our economic acceleration is going too fast for nature to keep up. Cutting too many tries for them to grow back again, overfishing, etc., etc.
Think about a political crisis.
The world is changing too fast for political systems to keep up. Politics is putting out fires, no longer shaping the world proactively due to the acceleration of the economic of finance systems that the political system can not keep up with.
Breaking down the time-pressure paradox
So why is it that we are feeling more and more time pressure? Technology is helping us be more and more efficient, right? Look at transportation. For example, airplanes help us now travel the world more efficiently.
The answer to these questions can be found in how the 3 types of accelerations relate to each other. What we find here is a time-pressure paradox.
Remember, we had 3 types of acceleration:
Technological acceleration
Acceleration of social change
Acceleration of the pace of life
Let’s walk through the following steps to explain:
Because of technological acceleration, less time is needed for things like production and transportation. Think of inventions like airplanes or vacuum cleaners saving us a bunch of time.
As a result, you would expect this entails an increase in free time, all because the activities in your life take less time because of new technologies.
This increase in free time would again mean it slows down the pace of life.
Concluding from these 3 steps, you would assume: more technological acceleration = a slower pace of life.
However, this assumption is not correct. Rather than time becoming abundant, a lot of people feel that time is increasingly scarce. The reason is that technology changes the way people interact socially (think of mobile communication), making the sphere of technology and social acceleration the same (if there is technical acceleration, there is also an acceleration of social change).
Note that there are many different definitions of acceleration or an accelerating society, we’re just explaining one of them based on the models and academic research developed by the professors mentioned in the footnote of this issue.
The effects of acceleration on our lives
We learned that many things are increasing, but time is one of our main constraints. We saw there are 3 types of acceleration: technological acceleration, acceleration of social change, and acceleration of the pace of life. We learned not every system manages these types of accelerations as well as others, causing problems. Lastly, we learned why, because of the time-pressure paradox, we are becoming more pressed for time due to technology instead of it helping us free up our time.
Now, let’s look at how this acceleration and time pressure affects us in our daily (business) life.
You’re more likely to make a decision if you can imagine the outcome.
- Hartmut Rosa
In a world that is accelerating, uncertainty increases. An example of a business consequence of this uncertainty is employee resistance. Employee resistance is ‘a natural reaction to the fear and uncertainty related to an unknown future state’. With more acceleration in the world, the things you thought you knew are more likely to be outdated. This makes it harder to imagine the outcome of any decision you make, resulting in a lack of proactive decision-making today.
The main type of acceleration that people notice is the acceleration of the pace of life. A steep increase in this type of acceleration affects people’s experience of time: it will cause individuals to consider time scarce, feel harried and pressed for time. In other words, people will feel that they can no longer find time to complete the tasks and activities most important to them.
One of the leading futurists that walked earth, Alvin Toffler, coined an interesting term related to acceleration: Future Shock. Future shock means the physical and psychological distress suffered by one who is unable to cope with the rapidity of social and technological changes.
What we can do to adapt to our accelerating environment
For organisations to keep up with their accelerating environment, they need to anticipate emerging changes and be resilliant enough to pro-actively shift their organisation along with the arising environment.
It also requires people to operate in more uncertain environments. We can do this better by intentially letting go of things we can not control. One of the main frameworks giving insight into this is the circle of influence, developed by Franklin Covey.
A key learning this framework provides is that there is only so much you can control or influence. The first step to dealing with uncertainty is to accept that we can’t control everything. Recognize that there is only so much you can do right now, to feel more in control and work with uncertainty in an accelerating world.
There are many other methods and techniques we can do to better work with uncertainty, like cultivating a growth mindset. Feel free to share with us your best methods for dealing with increased uncertainty, and we’ll definitely share more about this topic in future issues!
Hope you found our writing interesting and will learn from every new piece of writing we publish. Not subscribed yet?
Until next time,
Koen Vegter