State Change
We’ve been talking a lot about State Change at work. The thought that - though we are all changing a little bit all the time - the big things that change in society happen all at once.
The pandemic. WWII. The Dust Bowl leading to the Great Depression. The launch of the iPhone.
There were one thousand things that led us to those moments (increased contact between humans and wildlife; building tensions & xenophobic leaders allowed to be in power for years; mis-management of soil and poor farming practices; development of thousands of small pieces of tech . . . ) but true State Changes happened ALL AT ONCE in the culminating moments. Punctuated equilibrium.
Our lives didn’t change when someone invented touch screen technology with haptic feedback. But when Steve jobs packaged that technology up in the iPhone? Boom.
And the reason we are talking about it now is that we are trying to predict the next State Change.
We sell technology that individual human people will hopefully use. A lot. And we aren’t trying to just predict the next State Change - we are trying to predict what’s after that. Because the products that meet the future moment will be ready in time and in place to be the solutions for that moment.
It’s all speculative, of course, but there are signals that tell us what State Change is coming. And a lot of the work we are trying to do is around noticing identifying and qualifying those signals. Things like social media posts that gain popularity, late-night TV mentions that repeat cross-channel week after week, conversations with the person in the checkout line that mimic conversations with your Uber driver.
It’s really the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon on steroids: the idea that, once you hear about something for the first time - you suddenly hear about it everywhere. The “That’s so werid, I just heard that yesterday.” of it all.
I think it’s also why so many things were discovered simultaneously (evolution) or when someone gets famous for an idea that “you totally had already” but didn’t act on.
It’s fun to pay attention to and it’s training my brain in a way I really like.
Less trend-spotting and more just . . . observing.
As if every conversation I have, every Instagram Reel I watch and every SNL skit I see is part of the larger web of the one big cultural conversation. And all I have to do is pay attention to connect the dots..
I’ve always gravitated to the idea that we are all alike. That there is more that connects us than separates us.
And thinking about State Changes is a real leaning-in to that idea. I like thinking of our culture riding a wave up and down together and we are all controlling how it’s moving and we are all impacted by how it moves.
Sure - the predicting of that way is good for business. But noticing where it’s going? That’s life.
