The 21st Century Revolutions
Happy Halloween!
In this newsletter we present a second excerpt from our forthcoming book,
“Hello Future! The Next Ten Years.”
Our intent is not scare or trick you, but to treat you to a taste of the many themes and topics that the book examines. We hope you find it interesting.
You Say You Want a Revolution...
When we explore the future of civilization we’re inevitably also drawn to think about civilization’s past, as it’s the past that tells us how we came to be where we are now, and which also gives us examples to draw from as we try to understand and shape our shared future. And talking about the past definitely means talking about revolutions – in economics and technology, the Agricultural,
Industrial, and Digital Revolutions, in politics, the American, French, and Russian, the Cultural Revolution in China, the Newtonian and Relativity revolutions in science, and plenty more.
And while it’s obvious that society is beset by revolutions and is highly unsettled at present, it’s also clear that there hasn’t been much stability for most of the last 250 years. Indeed, a key lesson of our recent history is that we should expect change, upheaval, disruption, and full-on revolutions to occur with some regularity now, because that’s what history has been offering to us as a steady
diet for more than two centuries.
So when we look back and observe the pattern of change that industrial era has delivered, we should not be fooled into thinking that the turbulence we experience today is anything other than the next phase in a nearly unbroken chain of upheaval going back 250 years. The twin revolutions that defined the 1780s, the industrial and the political, set us on a course of nearly continual revolution: it was revolution then, and
so it is revolution today.
This tells us that we would certainly be wrong to expect smooth sailing during the next ten years, or any set of ten years beyond that. Decade by decade, revolutionary change that spreads across all dimensions of society has been the norm for the last 250 years, and will certainly be the norm for the next ten, and for the 50 after that, etc.
We have to be cautious, though, because the term revolution is very broad and is used frequently and quite loosely. It can be highly charged, intentionally provocative, and foolish hyperbole used every day in trite and mundane advertising for laundry soap, but it’s also the focus of countless scholarly studies which seek to describe fundamental change of some important kind. We therefore require a definition,
and even a simple one will do: a revolution is that event or process which marks a major shift. Whatever was the case before the revolution is fundamentally altered afterward, and it has enduring consequences.
Revolutions, however, may not result in permanent change, as they almost inevitably beget counter-revolutions which seeks to uproot the changes and revert back. But even when counter-revolution succeeds, the spirit of revolution remains, and continues to exert influence in various ways. Often its arrival is only delayed temporarily, as the forces that urge revolution forward usually remain.
So although the word is tiresome and overused, we really are living in a time in which many of the fundamental changes we’re creating and experiencing do fit the definition of revolution. Despite abundant overuse and frequent misuse, it’s a meaningful and indeed important concept for us, as it captures something fundamentally accurate about our era, for ours is certainly a time during humanity is grappling with
fundamental changes on many levels. This makes for an incredibly interesting but also incredibly confusing and stressful time in which to live. All of which makes it very worthwhile to see if we can develop a deeper understanding of the revolutionary factors and forces that are driving us forward at such breakneck speed.
What Did the Past Bring?
With all that in mind, we note that the modern world’s revolutionary pace of change began to accelerate significantly with the dawning of the Industrial Revolution, which took hold around 1780. It brought with it capitalism and globalization, which in Joseph Schumpeter’s very accurate description is a system based on “creative destruction.” That is the essence of the competitive marketplace, to
displace the competitor firms with new products, services, industries, and enterprises, which create new possibilities as they simultaneously destroy the market for what came before. A constant whirl of innovation results in obsolescence; entirely new industries arise as old ones are displaced, bringing new capabilities to society.
The core of industrialism was the development of machines using coal, oil, and electricity energy sources to significantly (but never entirely) replace muscle power. In doing so the capacity to do work increased millions of times over, an authentic and permanent revolution in how work got done.
This in turn enabled a cascade of further advances across all aspects of life, and led to the global population boom, largely enabled by the application of industrialism to agriculture, and steady increases in food supply.
New industries arose from the search for market opportunity, the disruptive profit motive. It is a very familiar list: airplanes and atom bombs, electricity and elevators, fast food and fast cars, computer chips and potato chips, rockets and refrigerators, etc., ad infinitum.
All of this forced the social structures of society to adapt to constant change, and so capitalism has been the relentless driver of change not just for the economy, but socially and culturally as well. For by its very nature as a source of constant change, inherently non-static, and with strong built-in incentives to self-disrupt, its impacts quickly cascade from the market into every other aspect of life. Employment
comes and goes, skills become irrelevant, industries fade to oblivion, and economies expand and recede. At the macro level it marks the tides of progress, but the micro level is rent by the rip tides of disruption to lives, families, communities, and nations.
And thus it was no accident that two tumultuous political revolutions occurred around the same time, as changing economic conditions prompted new views and expectations about the social contract. Essentially the entire world was ruled by kings, queens, tsars, and emperors in 1750, but then first in America in 1776, and then in France in 1787, and since then practically everywhere else, the world threw off the monarchs. The
European monarchs fought off the French Revolution by defeating Napoleon’s army at Waterloo in 1815, but their eventual decline was by then set in motion. Monarchy is essentially an agrarian model of government, and almost none of them survived into the maturity of industrialism. By the end of World War I they were finished, and only a few remain today.
Change continued, and it accelerated, through national revolutions - sometimes violently, sometimes peacefully, but in every case it brought forth a new order of things for some significant set of people, the citizens of a nation.
Following World War I the Great Depression brought widespread fear and suffering which sowed the seeds of World War II. World War II gave us the bomb and the definitive end of colonialism as India, Southeast Asia, and Africa became independent as European empires disintegrated, China was transformed by civil war and then reawakened as a global economic and then military power, all the world a constant swirl of
change.
And the changes brought by industrialism have only continued, as subsequent generations of technology operating in capitalist economic systems have brought wave after wave of disruption, with still no end in sight. Economic, technological, and political revolutions have had enduring impact that remains inescapable, and indeed none is finished, nor can they ever finish. Capitalism as the search for disruption by definition
will never stop its revolutionizing impetus, as that is its very essence. Likewise, politics and government, which we might define as a constant process of negotiating who comes to power, cannot ever reach a stable state if nothing else in society is stable either.
We can therefore conclude that any sort of world order which may exist at any given time in the modern era is temporary. It will inevitably swept aside by change in society, in culture, in science, in technology, in attitudes, in expectations, in living conditions, in food supplies, in climatic conditions, in laws, in values. Sometimes change arrives insidiously, largely unnoticed; sometimes it arrives with a roaring
boom. But as long as modern society perseveres, change is inevitable. But where does it lead?
Hindsight, Foresight, and War Games
Finding the answer through hindsight is highly seductive. By gazing backwards it’s just too easy to select the most meaningful events and trends, and then to cleverly connect them into chains to wisely explain exactly how we arrived at the present moment. Now that we know what really mattered and what has faded into irrelevance, our judgement is impeccable, our intellectual pride reaffirmed, our explanations
profound.
Looking forward offers no such certainties.
Foresight is thus fundamentally different, for while the constructed narrative of the past leads inevitably to the present, the narrative toward the future leads only into the unknown.
Despite this, some offer forecasts by flipping an impeccably-crafted narrative of the past toward the future, supposing that tomorrow will mirror yesterday, the identical logic backward to forward. But it rarely (never?) works that way. Instead, the unexpected prevails: in sport, the underdog triumphs; in warfare, the unanticipated very often occurs; in society, a pandemic strikes to disrupt all plans; in the forest, a
wildfire rages; in geopolitics, an archduke is assassinated; etc.
Military leaders are very familiar with this problem. They refer to it as “preparing to fight the last war,” wherein their armies diligently prepare according to the character of the very last conflict, even as they are fully aware that the next conflict will likely take an entirely different form. Hence the Maginot Line built by the French to deter the Germans was a diligent response to the character of World
War I, but entirely useless in World War II; the American army designed for a land war in Eurasia was defeated by the Vietnamese and their jungles; the Russian army that packed their parade uniforms for a triumphant stroll through Kyiv was nearly wiped out along the road to town, and turned back.
What the generals do in response to this cognitive dilemma is war gaming, through which they consider alternative courses that battles and wars may take, in the hopes that this will offer insights into the shape of the future. The quality and scope of their war games thus define the cognitive terrain for their planning.
These are reminders that we have to look to the future in a different way than we look at the past. We can better prepare ourselves by assessing what might happen, given what we know of the driving forces and deep structures of the present. We must give up on making predictions, and consider instead the future as a matter of possibilities.
With that in mind, it’s evident that another wave of technological change has now arrived to carry civilization forward, but only into greater uncertainties. AI and robotics, fintech, quantum computing, genetic editing and cloning all are bringing us still more of the unpredictable. They arrive in the midst of an era of climate change, falling birthrates, economic disruption, the energy transition, social unrest, and
political upheavals that are shaping our world today, all bringing with them major and largely unpredictable consequences. It’s doesn’t take a genius level IQ to recognize that these will be disruptive, revolutionary, almost certainly transformative.
But transform to what? How shall we look at the events of our time and understand them in the broader context of civilization, history, and the future? To do that effectively, we have to separate the transitory from the enduring. For that we distinguish between three types of change: events, driving forces, and deep structures.
Events are what the news covers, the most notable day to day occurrences. Given that the news business focuses on whatever is bad, we get a constant flood of imagery showing fires and floods, accidents and injuries, wars and insurrections, murders, misdeeds, convictions, divorces, business failures, contentious elections, and irate protest marches. Anything that might cause fear or outrage is a particular specialty
of the event-based media universe because they all induce adrenalin, which in turn gets us emotionally involved, so we watch more, and they sell more advertising. It’s the pornography of doom.
When we refer to driving forces we are considering more enduring factors that shape events on longer cycles, from perhaps year to year and even across decades. For example, a wildfire event may have been caused by or worsened by the prolonged driving force of drought; a major crime may have been instigated in response to an economic collapse; a sudden wave of migrants caused by drought may cause social unrest and
then violent protest marches. The drought, the collapse, and the demographics are the driving forces in these examples. Sometimes they’re hidden, but it doesn’t take much digging to identify them as plausible sources of events. We just have to take our attention off of the events long enough to look for them.
A deep structure lies even behind a driving force. It explains something fundamental about society, life, or the world, something that is basic to how we live. Over time, a deep structure may reveal itself in different versions and manifestations, as one or many driving forces, but the likelihood that it will persevere is high. Its time cycle is likely to be multiple decades to centuries. Expanding on the examples
above, we now know that climate change is the deep structure causing drought conditions worldwide, hence we can identify wildfire as an event, drought as a driving force, and climate change behind both.
A crime wave may be caused by an economic collapse, which may in turn have been caused by a fundamental economic shift in a community or nation, such as perhaps the business failure of a major employer or an entire industry. For example, major cities in the American Midwest, including Detroit, St. Louis, and Cleveland, saw massive population declines during the 1990s and 2000s as manufacturing industries relocated
operations to China, or collapsed entirely. These cities were then plunged into downwards spirals that were excruciatingly difficult to escape, and recovery, if it happens, takes decades.
In a third example, as increasing numbers of people sought to escape the civil war in Syria or gang violence in Central America, anti-immigrant anger and resentment led to much social unrest in many parts of Europe and the US. Huge anti-immigration protests resulted in significant political pressure, and many elections were won by right wing, anti-immigration candidates, who then introduced new, anti-immigrant legislation
accordingly, and also took actions like building razor wire fences or massive border walls.
However, we also have to be careful with all of these examples because it’s quite possible to get the causality wrong. We sometimes attribute events that truly are random to some force or structure that actually may have had nothing at all to do with it. We also tend to attribute causality according to our beliefs and biases, which are likely to distort our perspectives. Further, many of these issues are highly
charged — the outrage factor comes into play — so it's prudent to be cautious in our judgements.
What we’re very well aware of is that everything significant is connected in one way or another to just about everything else significant. For example, demographics and economy are closely linked, as birth rates tend to rise during periods of prosperity and fall during hard times, and hence both are also closely linked with expectations. Similarly, technology is a major driver of the economy, and to take a specific example, the technology of fossil fuels powered the stunning global
economic boom of the 20th century, but is also at the root of increased CO2 emissions that are causing deadly climate change in the 21st. Further, we know that fossil fuels and the energy transition to non-fossil sources will continue to be major factors of disagreement and possibly conflict in both politics and geopolitics, probably for decades to come.
Sorting out the future of any driving force or deep structure against the backdrop of all the other forces and structures leads us inevitably into a tangled thicket of complexity, reminding us that it’s impossible to make accurate predictions about events. But we can craft insightful war games to examine plausible futures and possible outcomes of this mass of interacting forces and structures, which should be very
helpful in making sense of the choices we face today, and thus an aid to make better choices toward creating a future we would prefer, as it our choices that set the course for the future.
Hence, we look forward to gain insight into what’s coming, both so that we can better prepare, but also so that we can influence the future. Further, the goals toward which we aspire will shape the choices we make, and so we can work to shape our 21st century revolutions to create a better world for ourselves and our descendants, or by poor choices, to make it worse.
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Hello Future! is coming along nicely, and should be out some time this winter.
But if you’re too excited to wait for Hello Future!, there’s always 16 other great volumes in the Innovation Mastery library to keep you entertained!
And in other news …
Innovation Mastery
Our Innovation Mastery online course continues to attract an appreciative global audience of aspiring innovators. We have far exceeded our initial expectations for the course, and as a result we have realized the opportunity to lower the price.
You can now access the full, 25-hour, 125-video learning extravaganza for only $99. OMG!
Please do take advantage for yourself, or for someone you may know who ready to learn all about the ins and outs and all-abouts of innovation!
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Design Thinking
In related news, we are pleased to announce that we have entered into partnership with GIMI, the Global Innovation Management Institute. GIMI requested us to provide them with our Design Thinking course (all of which is included in Innovation Mastery), which we were very happy to do. The difference is that their offer includes a legitimate certification, so if a Design Thinking credential would be valuable for you, then
the GIMI offer may be the right choice. We’ll let you know as soon as the course goes live.
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As always, we welcome your feedback on this newsletter.
Thanks!
Top image (Landscape with Glass) by Lars Nissen from Pixabay. Thanks, Lars!
Bottom image (The Future Is Now) by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay. Thanks, Gerd!
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About InnovationLabs
InnovationLabs is recognized worldwide as one of the most helpful and important innovation consulting firms. We help our clients achieve world-class innovation prowess by designing innovation systems and tools, implementing innovation programs and departments, and providing fun and enlightening innovation trainings. If it’s got anything to do with innovation, we’re your key resource.
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Langdon Morris is Senior Partner of InnovationLabs, one of the world’s leading consulting firms working in the areas of strategy and innovation. He is author or coauthor of more than ten books on innovation. To learn more please visit www.innovationlabs.com/
This book is about important interventions, integrations, and innovations, and about how to conceive, design and implement them
in a meaningful way for a new or existing city. It offers a Transformation Roadmap for cities, providing multifaceted pathways to overcome the Climate Emergency by attaining Net Zero.
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