Day 5 of my guest blog series on WIRED Magazine’s Change Accelerators Blog sponsored by BMW.
Accelerating transformation makes continuous reinvention imperative.
Everything we’ve talked about this week boils down to this fact of contemporary life: Geometric increases in processing power, bandwidth, and digital storage are driving a curve of technological change that has reached escape velocity. Those three hard trends of digital change are what lie behind today’s blisteringly rapid avalanche of commercial, economic, social, and global transformations.
Change is now accelerating so fast that it’s changing all the tools and all the rules.
If you’ve been following this blog all week, you’ve probably had this thought: “So is this all purely a function of technology?” Yes and no. Because there’s something behind those technological events: the human mind.
Our tools are an expression of our thoughts. The fact is, the continuing geometric increase in human knowledge and communication is one of those hard trends that is linear in direction: it is progressive, not cyclical. It continues to flow, and never ebbs. As Buckminster Fuller was fond of saying, “You can never learn less; you can only learn more.”
Today information and new knowledge travel around the world at the speed of light. Which means that technological innovation proceeds at close to the speed of thought.
This puts us face to face with what I call the reinvention imperative.
Transformation will happen, whether you want it to or not: it’s a hard trend. The work you do, your business, your field, your career, everything will be completely and profoundly affected by it. How this affects you will depend on how you respond—or react.
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