In an interview more than 10 years ago Ashoka CEO Bill Drayton explained that “The old paradigm for successful growth was to master the information and the rules.”
It’s the idea that once one masters a subject or a craft one has been able to grasp the information used as well as how to use it to create results. It’s understanding the theory and being able to use it. Growth unfolds from being able to transform the theory or its application through understanding how things in that field of expertise work.
That the paradigm is old, doesn’t mean that I disappeared. It also very much continues to be useful.
However, something has changed. Drayton describes it as “the transition from a world defined primarily by repetition to one primarily defined by change.”
An important aspect of the old paradigm was that it enabled people to copy an approach, make it evolve, and repeat it in a continuous process. Whatever one learned would stay with one and be what the next step could be built upon. It was steady growth. And it all happened in an economy following these rules. One was aware of competition and innovation. Management was hailed as the way to deal with external and internal factors to enable that organization’s success.
In that old paradigm, change often meant to propose more options of one and the same thing, and to add features that seemed to be interesting. All changes that would then be described as “new.”
This situation will continue to exist for many industries.
But alongside industries based on repetition, new fields and contexts appeared that are based on change, and more specifically, on new ideas. These ideas transform the rules of repetition we’ve known until now. New industries, approaches to funding projects and organizations, and markets have appeared, all of which establish new types of information and new rules, bringing us back into the old paradigm.
According to Dyson, where value can now be created is by adding it to change that is underway.
The change and space where we see this happen today is AI. In the past, it was the cloud, before that, the internet.
What makes this chaotic is the expectation that change evolves according to the old paradigm.
