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

On October 28, 1980, while debating President Jimmy Carter, then candidate Ronald Reagan asked:

"Next Tuesday all of you will go to the polls, will stand there in the polling place and make a decision. I think when you make that decision, it might be well if you would ask yourself: ‘Are you better off than you were four years ago?’"

Every leader every day has to ask himself or herself the question, “Is my organization or my people or am I more or less confused than I was yesterday?”

It is not an easy question to answer—honestly, at least, because not only is the pace of change in every dimension of the business world speeding up, the complexity of those changes is ever widening.

Yet it must be answered if understanding—the antonym of confusion—is to become a key criterion in judging executive performance.

 An exercise I use when working with senior management groups seeking to move from confusion to understanding is to ask them, in a severely constrained time frame [3-5 minutes] to divide a thirty-year time period [15 years back in the past and 15 years forward in the future] into “eras.”

The exercise validates some universal truths. We know that every age, era and epoch has a feel to it. We know that every age has a defining technology. Economists [sticklers for detail] tell us that in America, there was not just one industrial revolution [IR], in actuality there were three:

IR #1 (steam, railroads) from 1750 to 1830;

IR #2 (electricity, internal combustion engine, running water, indoor toilets, communications, entertainment, chemicals, petroleum) from 1870 to 1900; and

IR #3 (computers, the web, mobile phones) from 1960 to present.

Each IR/era had its own cluster of technologies. We know and have previously blogged that the era we are about to enter will be defined/shaped by four disruptive technologies [the S.M.A.C. stack]:

Social

Mobile

Analytics [Big Data]; and

Cloud

The path out of confusion and toward understanding requires articulating and making explicit a path to mastery for each of these key technologies.

Working with a group of scientists, academics, business leaders and students at the National Academy of Science’s Beckman Center [UC-Irvine] we explored what the “High Performance Organization of 2025” might look like.

This group labeled as fact that an on-going source of confusion and the defining reality of the era we are about to enter is the accelerating pace of change. An analysis of the past quarter millennium reveals that inflection points [i.e., moments in time when the mental models/behaviors of the past are found to be no longer effective moving forward] have tended to occur once every fifty years or so in the early industrial age and once every twenty years in the later industrial age. There is some debate regarding the precise pace of change during the information age. Geoffrey Moore times fundamental change as follows, “every five years in the technology sector things change enough to force me to write another book.” Many in the technology industry now posit that inflection points arrive roughly once every three years.

Every three to five years a major mental model paradigm shift regarding dominant design for servers, networks, storage and software. Every year a major new application area expands the portfolio of what must be mastered and managed. Every quarter a new technology advance makes something that was once impossible/too expensive possible [e.g., desktop supercomputing]. Every month a law changes that requires new compliance behaviors. Every week business requirements change. Every day a new internal relationship must be managed. Every minute a customer has an issue. Every second something that breaks must be fixed.

A key executive skill is the ability to create a context which minimizes the sturm und drang of perpetual change and enhances the situational understanding which enables people to act efficaciously.