Photo Credit: Industrial Fly By by Bas Leenders via Flickr

By Thornton May
Futurist, Senior Advisor with GP, Executive Director & Dean - IT Leadership Academy

History changes things. One of the things history changes is how we look at a particular point in time. Historians have changed how they look at the critical period of time labelled the Industrial Revolution. So should we. I think the Industrial Revolution holds many lessons that are supremely relevant to leaders operating in these transformative times.

A Perpetual Reinterpretation

William Ashworth, Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Liverpool asks rhetorically, “Why Steam? Why Britain? Why 1700?” In less nuanced textbooks the Industrial Revolution was initially portrayed as a time when a group of ingenious white male tinkerers operating in various parts of Britain managed to out innovate just about every other member of the species. The artifacts of the Age were steam engines and William Blake’s “dark satanic mills."

Discussions of THE Industrial Revolution today remain highly emotional. I refer to reader to Part I of “The Industrial Revolution” podcast on the BBC program In Our Time hosted by Melvyn Bragg where normally reserved and urbane scholars become quite heated over what the Industrial Revolution really signifies.

Lesson One: Celebrate Change

Jeremy Black, professor of History at the University of Exeter believes that the true distinguishing facet of THE Industrial Revolution was the general political and societal mindset surrounding and enabling technological advance. Britain WAS NOT the only place in the world that had individuals of capacity and curiosity. They were not the only place in the world where coal existed in such abundance. Britain during the Industrial Age was unique in how it thought about change. In this era

“people believed they should change things. You should apply knowledge for change. Many other cultures in the world do not believe in the value of change and do not believe the purpose of knowledge is apply it to obtain change.”

Professor Black views every one of the 2,000 steam engines extent in Britain by the end of the 18th century as an icon to change – a huffing, puffing monument that enabled people to see the possibilities of the new age.

Steam engines may have been THE Monument of THE Industrial Revolution. I think the smart phone may be the monument to the transformative age we now inhabit. Every dial tone, every chirp and every buzz signals that we live in a connected and datafied new world.

Lesson Two: See the Wave & Ride It

During the Industrial Revolution individuals were no longer conceived as autonomous selves but ‘rather like filings aligned by magnets,’ the broader forces at work in society impacted their lives. The “Great Men” of the Industrial Revolution, the legends of oversimplified textbooks are what historians call ‘situational’ heroes: ordinary people anointed by their peers in recognition of their behavior. When situations change, behaviors need to change as well.