Reflections 4th May

There are no antidotes to change

May 04, 2025

For thirty-five years, I have lived in a house that predates the Industrial Revolution. At the top of the garden is ancient woodland, and in the valley below me, St Alkmund’s Church dates back to around 900AD, and is on a pilgrimage way trodden by those who predate it.

The river that flows through the valley, the Derwent, powered the thirteenth-century corn mill that later became one of Europe’s first water-powered paper mills (where the chimney is) and, in later times, formed one of the significant spines of the Industrial Revolution, connecting the first modern factory in Derby to the mills in Cromford.

There is something comedic, almost tragic, about the reactions of incumbents to what feels like sudden change. Comedic watching the major parties reacting like Monty Python’s Black Knight (‘tis but a scratch) to being Faraged, and tragic that they think it’s happened suddenly, and can be somehow turned around in months via frantic activity and different stories.

The same holds for organisations that thrash around for relevance long after their time is past, like Wiley Coyote as he realises he’s past the cliff edge, running on air.

I wonder how often we focus on what’s shifting: AI, social trends, and how we work and communicate, but rarely reflect on what hasn’t changed—and perhaps never will. In the rush for “performance,” we neglect what changes only slowly, which will witness our presence here in the way we regard seasons and to which our perpetual urgency renders us blind.

I think it is that sense of urgency that drives those who vote for Trump, Farage, or any of the self-serving, propaganda-storied, pathological ideologues who offer easy solutions. They have no sense of the rhythm of time, which will make them little more than historical curiosities, footnotes to the slow, inexorable change that we are, for a short time, part of and to which we owe a duty of care for the sake of those who follow us.

I notice the same in businesses and organisations. Some have strategies that are unashamedly short-term entrepreneurial enterprises designed to provide shareholders with extravagant returns in short time scales by exploiting the commercial zeitgeist, regardless of the damage they create. Others march to a different rhythm, embedded in communities of purpose and practice that will have them developing like trees rather than the entrepreneurial, showy perennials.

It isn’t easy, gardening. Any force applied to the project of making something grow is met with an array of opposing forces. This, the sensation of force meeting force, is invigorating in its way, or at least edifying. When else do you feel it, the palpable pressure of an ecosystem, the weight of other kinds of life bearing down on your own, the limits of your own will?

Orion Magazine.

In the regular calls I variously attend or host, we have discussed how we notice a distinct sense of disquiet, the palpable pressure of an ecosystem, the weight of other kinds of life bearing down on your own, the limits of your own will as the diet of exponential negative change we are fed by those who would harvest our attention comes into quiet conflict with the deeper truths we hold to as they are trampled upon. It isn't easy to describe or put a name to, but it is real to us.

Part of it is the sense of inequality and injustice that has always, and probably always will, exist, magnified and exploited by those who would harness it rather than address it.

Part of it is the stories we are telling ourselves about AI, Climate Change and other issues that on the one hand have us grieving sentimentally for what we think is being taken away, going through the classic symptoms of denial, anger, negotiation and depression, and on the other the frantic excitement of the hype cycle that has us exaggerating the impact of what is emerging but poorly understood.

Part of it is the ever-increasing gap between what is changing exponentially, feeding on itself, and the lassitude of linear organisations trapped in obsolescent dogma, trying to meet expectations of continuous growth in a discontinuous world.

An antidote to change?

We need an antidote to the sheer mass and energy of oligopolistic media that has developed a momentum that positions us between grief, excitement, and fear. We look for leadership and certainty, but are offered only servitude within the walls built by wealth and privilege.

In turn, we watch on, transfixed, as that wealth and privilege, catalysed by a monofocal economic culture coming apart at the seams, consumes the country that so unconditionally embraced it, even as it infects the rest of us.

There isn’t an antidote to change, but there is a music metaphor that I think can help us consider it for what it is.

The excitement of disruption is a glissando, thrilling but fleeting, leaving us yearning for the resolution to be found in the joy of things that change slowly, played in a lower key, rich and resonant, like the cello that steadies the restless violin.

In our small groups, we have come to understand that the joy which steadies the excitement of uncertainty is to be had in conversation outside the walls of those places built on the frantic language and culture of more.

As she so often does, Sue Heatherington captured in a few words the essence of this time, and I hope she will forgive me for placing a few of them here:

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Some words need to be heard.

Those that speak of love and grace and peace. Of possibilities beyond our current way of being or understanding.

These are not voices demanding to be obeyed, infused with self-importance, or tied to what has been.

Instead, they offer humble hope, grounded in the nature of life itself.

I would like to think that, in another two hundred and fifty years (the time we are now from the start of the industrial revolution we are leaving behind), someone will see much the same view as I do from the top of our garden. The houses will change (and I hope this one is still around), but the landscape will change less. It is dancing to a different tune.

I hope it gives them the joy it offers me when I relax into it and consider what it has seen and will yet see, as it defangs the pressure of change for me.

There is no antidote to change, but engaging with it involves more than the economy, it asks us to anchor ourselves in the things that change slowly.

We could do more of that.

Have a wonderful Sunday.

Every Wednesday at 5:00 pm UK time, a group of us gather to share ideas and explore the possibilities emerging outside the walls of "old magic" organisations. If you'd like to join us, drop me a line.