ESCAPE VELOCITY: the return of the Red Queen?

We all know business or human life is a spark of light in the dark silence of the universe. A brief journey from rise to fall that we will endure just as thousands of corporate and human generations have endured it before us. This is what we have known for generations.

But isn’t it what we THINK we know rather than an immutable truth? Because the pace of time is changing and accelerating!

For innumerable generations, we have been used to expecting a linear way of living. A slow course between birth, growth, decline, and finally, death. Most of the time in the same world. With some discontinuities in periods of revolutions and wars. But within a pretty stable environment for most of the time.

Can we expect to live our future the same way?

Statistics tell another story. And they are staggering as the world is changing faster and faster around us.

• We see that in countries' development timeframes. Starting in the 1800s, it took Britain 155 years to double its gross domestic product (GDP) per capita with a few million people. In the 2000s, it only took China half that time, for 100 times more people!
• We see it in corporate life. In the 1950s, the average lifespan of a corporation in the S&P Top 500 was about 60 years. Today, statistically, it takes just 15 years before a Top 500 company is bought, acquired, or liquidated.
• We also see that in technology innovation. At the end of the nineteenth century, it took 50 years for the telephone to hit its first 50 million users. Today, an application can reach the same number of users in just a few days.

We are definitively moving from linear to volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous times.

All this reminds us of the escape velocity required to tear oneself away from Earth’s attraction to reach outer space. Once the first painful efforts to slowly escape from gravity have been made, we cross a point of increasing returns, where friction and gravity diminish, and each rocket boost only augments speed.

We are now entering such a time. Technology has made us enter a fast-forward, hyperdrive mode, where our world transformation is accelerating to the speed beyond which we get free from the past gravity.

How does this acceleration materialize in our personal lives? Today’s millennial business founders and workers understand they may have to change career paths, maybe even continents, several times in their life. This sustains a lack of loyalty and commitment that traditional corporations often complain about. The proportion of self-entrepreneurs is steadily increasing, even if this is also a testimony to the crisis. The gig economy already involves 36% of US workers, and this share could exceed 50% by 2027, nurturing what analysts now label as the ‘great resignation.’

Even on a day-to-day basis, we often complain about it ourselves. The pace of time is accelerating in our modern societies. Sometimes creating a sentiment of overflow that the 2020 Ipsos Global Trends report labeled as a ‘Loss of Control,’ with multiple people feeling “unable to keep up” and on the edge of burnout.

Why this exponential acceleration? Just as the development of strategic infrastructure such as railways and the telegraph boosted the industrial era, today’s information networks have put progress on the highway.

Who remembers that four of the six largest corporations in the world - impacting billions of customers - are less than 25 years old? In previous decades, creating an enterprise that would impact millions of lives would have been a lifelong effort. Today, the availability of cheap cloud, automation, and artificial intelligence tools can make it a matter of years, if not months or days. In 2012, when Facebook purchased Instagram for a billion dollars, Instagram had collected 80 million users in just two years, and the company only had 13 employees!

How to adapt? All along history, human evolution has been an accelerating race to progress. Genetic evolution took billions of years to create life, hundreds of millions of years to create mammals, millions of years to create hominids, and hundreds of thousands of years to give birth to Homo Sapiens. Then, emerged with language and then writing a second accelerating machine: culture.

Through cultural development and competition between civilizations, it has elevated in a few millennia humanity from the caves of hunter-gatherer tribes to agricultural empires, industrialized nations, and, in the last few decades, digital global corporations. With a dramatic recursive effect, provoking human group multi-level selection at a pace previously unknown with biology alone.

Today, the emergence of artificial intelligence puts us on the verge of a new quantum leap, with self-learning algorithms that may auto-engender and improve themselves at a pace our DNA and culture are incapable of. And that may recursively influence our culture by helping us to reengineer our DNA at a much faster pace than random mutations with the application of CRISPR-based genetic engineering.

These developments are still in their infancy, and some of them are still in the realm of fiction. But their progress is staggering. May they even - will it be in 10 or 30 years - profoundly influence our future? Giving birth to what some people correlate to ‘humans becoming semi-Gods’? Man-machine “centaurs” able to auto-engender their own creation as the next steps of their own evolution? 

Since Darwin, biologists have coined the concept of co-evolution. We not only evolve ourselves, but we evolve within complex ecosystems. And we must adapt at the pace of how our environment itself is changing. Paleontologists have poetically coined it as the ‘Red Queen’ evolutionary concept after the Red Queen of Lewis Carroll’s book “Alice in Wonderland.”

To Alice, who finds herself running faster and faster during a journey but complains that however fast she runs, she never seems to pass anything; the Queen remarks: “here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” 

As Alice, aren’t we in a Red Queen realm on steroids? In an exponentially changing environment where we’re increasingly at risk of losing ground?

This will dramatically change our societies, business, and individual lives.

Previous generations usually had decades to adapt. The last European Great Transition from agriculture to industry took multiple decades. Laborers didn’t have to become engineers in their lifetime. It took a few generations. And this long transition already brought many dramatic conflicts, such as the violent Luddite movement in the 1800s, against manufacturers in the UK. It was only the army that was finally able to put down the revolt. Or such as the worker union revolts and communist insurrections in the 1900s, that only social democracy finally solved.

The upcoming digital revolution will be much more violent, with even less time to adapt. Therefore, raising dramatic social and governance challenges.

In a nutshell, could we be the first generation to see its business, social, and geopolitical environment radically transform from our birth to our death?

How to adapt to this coming era of continuous change? It may force us to rethink all that we know:

- Reshape the way we operate,

- Reinvent the way we do business and create value,

- Re-imagine how we relate,

- And even entirely transform the way we envision our business or human purpose

This may force us to challenge many of the traditional assumptions of the past. Not just to learn the new. But to UN-LEARN what we had ever taken for granted.

Community-wise and individually-wise, the time of the Red Queen agility may have come for each of us again!

The next post in this initial "Global Transition Crisis" series - GREAT RESET - will be published next week. Click here to subscribe >

'ESCAPE VELOCITY' is the second post of our 'Global Transition Crisis' series. The first post, 'ANTIPREDICTIONS 202x+', can be found here > 

^{(*) Source: Artificial Intelligence expert Thierry Caminel}