Are we ready to leapfrog?

Have you noticed the increasing number of thinkers and leaders talking about accelerating change? Especially in terms of a ten year leap?

The first person I heard say it was Collibra’s CEO Felix van de Maele. He said it feels like we’re experiencing ten years of digital transformation in six months. Just a few days later, an investor was quoted in a New York Times piece on tech IPOs, saying that “Covid pulled the world into 2030.”

Meanwhile, Scott Galloway has been raising this idea a lot on Pivot, the podcast he hosts with Kara Swisher. In several recent episodes he’s suggested that we imagine what we want our businesses, our lives, our relationships to look like in ten years and to make those dramatic changes immediately.

Maybe the “ten years right now” meme just comes from our desire to get as far away from 2020 as possible. It doesn’t really matter why the huge desire for change exists, it just matters that it’s here. Zeitgeists are, by definition, a feeling or a mood that sweeps through a whole culture. Across every dimension of culture and business, the zeitgeist now is a massive appetite for change - dramatic change, immediate change, healing change, productive change. This is an amazing thing.

Usually, change is immensely uncomfortable for humans. Our habits and attitudes are entrenched. To persuade anyone to consider something new, you have to get their attention, overcome their failure of imagination, and overcome their discomfort with change.

A social justice activist, an innovator, or an artist who wants to create change in the world must be a tireless evangelist - drawing attention to the problem she sees and the solution she proposes. She must use a ton of energy to overcome her audience’s inability to see what she sees – to overcome their failure of imagination.

People will endure the discomfort of change either because their current worlds are unacceptably awful or because they see a future so compelling that discomfort is worth it.

Right now, both things are true. We’re in an awful situation across nearly every dimension of our culture and people are hungry for sweeping, generative, healing change.

Right now may be the best time in decades to pursue huge ideas. We need them to propel us into a future we are just starting to imagine. We are ready for powerful, lasting change.

To quote Stephen Pressfield, “Give us what you’ve got!!”