Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Incrementalist to the core.

At a recent international procurement conference I delivered a series of future scenarios from the perspective of a rather older man in 2030. As I hope you might imagine I assembled all the usual suspects; climate change, environmental degradation, careless use of resources, failing infrastructures, irresponsible technologies and so on – and played out some of the impacts as they converge on each other . Like many future pictures they were quite confronting to many in the audience, whose life stories and world views were firmly attached to the current paradigm.

In one post session conversation, a senior strategic adviser said to me that he was ‘incrementalist to the core’ and that the kind of transformation I was suggesting was not realistic or even desirable. Naturally to support the case he picked up on a couple of factual errors I had made in a 90 minute conversation and interactive commentary – I hate that! What struck me as interesting about what he said was how his views would obviously directly effect both the design and the deliverables of the very significant projects that he was working on.

Two thoughts: firstly, there seems to be a gulf between ‘incrementalists’ and ‘navigators’ and its growing. Navigators believe living with accelerating change and making lots of them is what we all need to do; whereas incrementalists believe that only change which can be controlled and that is measured is desirable. Perhaps there is a fundamental wiring in the brains of both groups that cannot be undone whatever the circumstances and whatever the evidence.

Secondly, if the navigators are right – and I would suggest that on the big issues the evidence is mounting – then the delays caused by incremental thinking have consequences for those that support them. My worry is that in not articulating and exploring the incremental and the transformation options in a clear and credible way, we lock ourselves into futures that are not understood and that may be less than desirable. Of course those that have to really live with the consequences are normally those that have the decisions made for them.

It strikes me that all of us, in our lives, organisations and societies need to decide where we stand in terms of Theodore Roosevelt’s stark words:

“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.”

Or will our present actions frame a future that will decide it for us?

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