Roland Harwood at 100% Open describes five vectors of our postmodern economy. We do seem to be living in confusing if interesting times, where the benefits of hyper-connectedness are coming into question. Roland refers to Tom Friedman’s division of web people and wall people, and offers five guiding ideas for how we cope with uncertainty. They are at the least a great jumping off point for a conversation.
Much of what Roland says aligns with what I’ve been assembling under the heading of unhurried. We have to get better at living with uncertainty – which doesn’t mean despising experts but being willing to listen to them but still reach our own conclusions, among other things. As computers appear to get better and better at doing things many of us earn our living from, we need to think carefully about what it is that humans can do that the machines can’t.
Roland quips that
If you are not living on the edge you are taking up too much space. The future has always revealed itself from the peripheral so we all need to surround ourselves with independent and diverse perspectives with a mechanism to turn that into collective decisions in spite of imperfect data.
Being alive in uncertainty means getting better at sitting with discomfort, and we need lots of practice at that. Without it, we risk getting drawn into destructive battles between vehemently held but incoherent fake certainties.
I’m very much in agreement with Roland about the need for reciprocal relationships. And in workshops, I keep noticing how even tiny signals of connection and reciprocity can have a profound impact on relationships,
