Tim Brown of IDEO shares my curiosity:
I am very interested in what new behaviors might emerge this time around and ultimately what innovations they may inspire. Will it be something to do with people changing their attitude toward saving versus spending? Will the growing uncertainty of the world encourage us to look for lives that are more resilient and sustainable versus ones where we are on the limit and vulnerable to the next downturn? It seems to me that now is the time that companies would be well served to think about this so that they are ready with the answers when the market turns.
Behaviours and mindsets are what really interest me. I’ve been working on my “answers” for over a year and here’s a sketch of the background I worked out five weeks ago:
For people like me who love to learn, this crisis is an incredibly fruitful opportunity. The financial landscape has already been radically altered — in the past two weeks alone — and will almost certainly continue to shift and take on new forms, creating new institutions, conventions, and assumptions.
My “general solution” is to conceive the practice of re-creating institutions, conventions, and assumptions, as a discipline itself. This is what I’ve been working out for the past year (after working on it for several years prior, since germination of the idea in 2000). The discipline I have in mind is a kind of ‘conceptual accounting and development’ — a mode of doing philosophy with an especially practical bent.
The purpose of the discipline is to nudge innovators to innovate in ways that tend to facilitate future innovation and learning, rather than degenerating into closed feedback loops that lead to intellectual disconnectedness and disaster, as we are witnessing in finance today. This ’solution’ takes advantage of what makes us human and what makes life worth living, rather than trying to suppress or deny our creative qualities — the strengths that made our economy and society so great — and the inevitability of innovation.
I think it’s still impossible to predict how people’s behaviour will change en masse – mainly because behaviour will be affected by new institutions, and we don’t know exactly what those will be yet.
I was just looking over what I wrote last week about learning from history, intending to cut and paste a mini-argument against predicting anything too concrete because it will still be a while before events play out — and it occurred to me that that appreciation might be one of the changes that’ll occur in the public mindset.
We’ll relearn patience. Fewer people will expect to be millionaires by thirty. Fewer people will expect to retire by fifty… And why retire at all?
Do something you love – that you’re good at, that creates value for the rest of society – and spend the early part of your career investing in mastery (of discipline, skills, and knowledge) and social capital required for generative and sustainable success.
I’m tempted to suggest a few more specific predictions — but that wouldn’t be very patient of me, would it? There’s more than enough time to sleep on this for a night or two.
… Before I even hit the publish button, I’m proofreading my own words with a lot of skepticism. I seem to habitually posit the deepest changes possible and make broad pronouncements about the future — always predicting fundamental changes to the way we work, learn, and live — massive turns in the historical narrative.
But things may not turn out to be so different.
But then again, the historical narrative really might be turning — or shifting onto a whole new axis.
We’ll have to wait and see. It’s all hypothetical.
But not just wait. We need some objective points of reference to evaluate the validity of our hypotheses. It isn’t enough to have answers ready when the market turns; when the market turns we need to be ready to test those answers and have an appreciation of that it means to have our answers proved or disproved.
So let’s do this.
If all three of the big U.S. automakers are still in business (in their current forms) in October 2009 I’ll know I was overly exuberant. If all three are bankrupt, bought out, or (!) nationalized, I’ll be more sure that my radical outlook is valid.
Something else I’m watching for is whether any large or mid-sized consumer electronics firms or major retailers fall into the same type of “surprise” meltdowns that happened in (and around) investment banking.
Other events that’ll validate my suspicions, if, by this time next year:
- the existence of any of the major international treaties/organizations is in serious peril (e.g. if any of the principle members pull out): the United Nations, the European Union, WTO, NAFTA, NATO, OPEC, or anything of similar stature.
- we’re seriously talking about the creation of some new treaty or organization of similar stature.
- the U.S. is officially fighting a war in Pakistan — or any other country they aren’t already in.
- China is involved in a war anywhere.
If any of those things happen I’ll know my thinking isn’t out of line. Until then you can’t tell me otherwise. If any of those things don’t happen, I won’t be wrong, I just won’t be right yet.
I will be proven wrong if our economic and political situation improves at all in the next twelve months.
Any comments, criticisms or additional suggestions are more than welcome.
Before we can design the products, business models, and institutions of the future, we first need to design (or redesign, or continue redesigning) the mindsets and ideas through which everything else will be conceived.
Update: As soon as I finished writing this I found a very relevant post by Tom Davenport (“We Need to Renovate the Old Economy, Not Rebuild It“) and an even better one by Umair Haque, ”Why Traditional Recession Tactics are Doomed to Fail This Time“:
There’s a different way to say that. Discovering new sources of advantage depends on new DNA — on building new kinds of institutions with entirely new capacities. Because, at root — and as we’ll discuss at length shortly — the macro crisis isn’t really a financial crisis, an economic crisis, a liquidity crisis, or a solvency crisis. It’s an institutional crisis: the economic institutions of capitalism are in shock.
And though it’s a scary, frustrating time — the cool part is this: it’s up to us to reimagine, reconceive, and reinvent them. We get to rethink the institutions of capitalism for a new century.
