The Value of Experience in Times of Change

What kind of helpful experience did a horse and buggy driver bring to driving a motorized vehicle; probably some but in the real world not a lot.

Horse and buggy drivers like motorized vehicle drivers have learned how to maybe stay in their lane, how to maybe drive in some traffic and how to maybe set expectations for passengers. However other than that the care a horse needs and the care a vehicle needs are completely different, the speed they generally travel at are completely different and therefore the distances they can cover in a particular window of time are also completely different not to mention the way they accelerate.

These are interesting times surely but more importantly they are changing times. The experience gained in the agricultural age did not really benefit individuals who had to make the transition into the industrial age. In the same manner, technology and even the nature of being human (think cosmetic and non cosmetic surgery not to mention designer babies) are at best evolving more likely changing radically from the twentieth to the twenty first century. The traits we need now in our leaders are therefore also changing radically. According to Yuval Noah Harari, best selling author in his book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century,

“The merger of infotech and biotech sight soon push billions of humans out of the job market and undermine both liberty and equality. Big Data algorithms might create digital dictatorships in which all power is concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite while most people suffer not from exploitation but from something far worse-irrelevance.”

What we really need at this particular moment in time are leaders who are creative thinkers with very solid ethics that can navigate the changes as they occur, not individuals who know how to do things the old ways and even more catastrophically believe that the way they used to handle issues is the way that things need to continue to be done. At every level of society – international, national, state and local – the rapid pace of change is not only making old traditional experience irrelevant but also requiring individuals that understand this and work in completely new ways to put in place the programs and processes that will allow us to not only survive but thrive in the 21st century.

Today experience is not the panacea people are looking for instead it may well be the anchor that drowns us!