The Adaptation Advantage

4Getting Comfortable with Adaptation: The Slowest Rate of Change Is Happening Now

Key Ideas

1. The slowest pace of change you'll ever experience for the rest of your life is happening right now.
2. To gain advantage from change, organizations must make the shift from “scalable efficiency” to “scalable learning.”
3. Effective learning requires organizations to tap into information flows, capturing the most emerging knowledge from sources inside and outside the company.

The Power of Pause

Stop. Breathe. Inhale deeply. Exhale slowly. Take a moment to experience slowness. Pause. As author and business strategist Dov Seidman says, “When you press the pause button on a computer, it stops. But when you press the pause button on a human being, it starts. It starts to rethink, reimagine, reflect.” This is our unique, human, competitive advantage.

Feel refreshed? Great. Now get ready to leap into action. The speed with which technological, cultural, and social changes come at us is only accelerating. This exact moment in time, right now, is the slowest rate of change you will experience ever again. This speed of change makes it even more important to occasionally pause to reflect and focus on being human. Advances in technology allow machines to do many things, but they cannot dream, contemplate, or yet imagine our unseen future.

Both the acceleration in change and the need to pause may seem like frightening propositions to some. We, however, think this just might be the start of the most ...