The secret to change? Crisis.
A few thoughts on the pandemic, the book "The Future of The Professions." and the nature of change overall.
I’m STILL reading The Future of The Professions. I didn’t think the book would be as “thick” as it is, but here we are. I’m at least glad to say I’ve made some progress on the book and should publish a review and the subsequent notes soon.
That said, I’ve been deep in thought. The book was written in 2016. Its greatest strength is the fact that it details trends that were taking place and were bound to become commonplace. But the authors depicted these changes as inevitable due to factors around efficiency. Looking back, I’m not convinced.
The most obvious case study would be that of Remote Work. The pandemic forced a lot of businesses to work from decentralized locations. But prior to this pandemic, Remote Work was mostly hype (This isn’t to say that there was no growth. It just wasn’t pronounced.). You had business leaders and techno-libertarian minded futurists claiming the inevitability of Remote Work, simply because “it is better”!
In a blogpost Naval Ravikant wrote recently, his reason for stating that Remote Work was the future was that buildings were expensive, that taxes were high, and that scaling a labor force in Silicon Valley, was unproductive.
In the book The Future of The Professions, the authors say:
Across the professions, we find professionals (and para-professionals) operating as contractors rather than employees, working remotely, often from home. This is frequently being made possible by online platforms that allow professionals to promote themselves and enable those who are seeking their services to find and select the most suitable provider. Various online collaboration tools make it easier for those who are hired to interact with each other if working in a team, and with the recipients of their work increasingly without meeting face-to-face.
They go on to state that:
This pattern is likely to continue. In part, this is being driven by a sense of the superfluousness of gathering in large, costly buildings in which the recipients of the services never have cause to appear. But it is often a conscious lifestyle preference of the professionals themselves, who are attracted to the flexibility, autonomy, and the possibility of achieving a more favorable work/life balance than employment often affords.
All this doesn’t sound inaccurate. In fact, I’d say it is largely right. That is until one realizes that it wasn’t the “superfluousness” of meetings or the costly buildings that caused the shift towards remote work.
It was, however, a global pandemic that disrupted social order which would eventually make Remote Work a necessity. A lot of techno-optimists(including myself) tend to discount the role that social disturbances play in the impact of technological progress. Things are primarily viewed from the lens of a culture that can only be impacted from within.
In short, business and tech leaders often discount large scale social crises as a factor in motivating change.
One Merriam-Webster definition of a crisis defines it as:
An unstable or crucial time or state of affairs in which a decisive change is impending.
According to Thomas Kuhn crises are an integral part of scientific progress. Theories would become overly convoluted. Then, the practitioners whose fields require the use of a theory stumble upon one mindboggling problem where they find their founding paradigm to be insufficient in tackling the said problem
The whole field scrambles to tackle the issue. They revert to first principles, hoping that they could identify something that went wrong in the creation of the theory; a logical flaw perhaps. Then (as Einstein did) a single person comes along with what seems like a brand new perspective that tackles the problem in a way the original couldn’t. It also manages to simplify a lot of theories as a result.
But here’s the twist. The paradigm is very rarely accepted. That is until those within the field see it as a necessity to do so. And till then, there are vast periods of time where people would much rather leave their field than accept the paradigm as the new normal.
In this example, Remote Work would be such a paradigm. The pandemic is the crisis. And like the previous example, Remote Work wasn’t mainstream until it became necessary to adopt it. Even now albeit wide adoption showing that it works, some CEOs still want their workers back in the office.
Convenience is powerful. We recognize the lack of energy required to do things we’ve become accustomed to. As such, we rarely want to change despite claims of a solution being “A hundred times better”.
If there are faults in systems (which always is the case) then crises are definitely inevitable. Hence, change is always inevitable. But the reason for that change is rarely due to the efficiency of a proposed solution. It is always, however, bound to be adopted due to a disrupted sense of comfort inspired by a crisis.
As such, I recommend all those making predictions to take into account the sort of crises that would 'awaken people from their slumber’. Technology is rarely good for its own sake. And your claims of efficiency rarely translate into adoption. Ease of use and convenience in times of inconvenience is a far more accurate measure of adoption. If we are to make progress we must focus on the real world and the potential institutional crises that may yet come. Anyway! If you enjoyed this article, and aren’t a subscriber yet, what are you waiting for!? Subscribe down below.
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