The other end of the telescope

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete” -R. Buckminster Fuller

Our dislike of change is visceral. Our natural state is to be threatened by it. Uncertainty triggers the same neural circuits as fear, and generates similar responses - fight, flight, freeze.

But what if we looked at it differently? What if we learnt to handle it in the same way as those who face danger for a living - by understanding it, and harnessing it rather than be controlled by it?

The change we fear is not going away. It is accelerating. 7 million people on a resource constrained planet, all within digital reach of each other powered by ever more creative technology. Random is the new normal.

The future is messy. The certainties we like to deal with - processes, procedures, routines - all of these will increasingly be dealt with by intelligent machines. Algorithms don't care how complicated things are - they can do complic…