“The Universe and the Biosphere keep advancing into a persistent adjacent possible.”

~ Stuart Kaufmann

Leading the 21st Century

The Conception-Aware, Object Oriented Organization

Change We Can See

When he wrote that, it seemed like mere conjecture from a brilliant young mind. For most of our human existence, the rate of advance was so slow, that the concept of stability, rather than change, constituted the hidden background to human ventures.  The 19^th Century Enlightenment aroused our interests in a specifiable human nature, an attainable absolute truth, and our beliefs in unlimited resources, enduring economic progress and lasting ecological resilience.

In the year 2000, Stuart Kauffman makes a bold claim for the 21st century mindset

The universe and the biosphere keep advancing into a persistent adjacent possible

Just a decade later we have seen innumerable advances into ever- new actualities at a rate that even Kauffman might have thought alarming. We not only participate in change that is so rapid, we can actually name it in real time (think Gen X, Gen Y) but we also precipitate unprecedented change at unprecedented scales. The most significant technologies of

the last two centuries are obsolete, as are the most significant constructs of the 20th century mindset. We are in the midst of one of the largest extinction events – and we are here to record it. We invest in technologies that are designed to offset unimaginable planetary disasters – should they occur; while at the same time invest in technologies that risk them.

Combined, the scientific, technological, and humanistic developments in the 20^th century are both the forces of this change, as well as its consequence :  a feedback – feed-forward loop that is responsible for today’s exponential growth rate in human knowledge. Today, knowledge advances at such a rate that each generation’s knowledge base will be superseded in less than a decade. This is profound in two ways:

Human technology is transforming the planet so rapidly we act with unknowable consequences.

Since there is no “body of knowledge” to be passed on for the future, we must learn how to build capacities to face unknowable futures

This is the 21^st Century’s double bind – we can see that today is already past as we feel ourselves slipping into the near adjacent future; yet we have no vantage point to see what lies ahead. We can name the change we see, but we are too slow to make course corrections