Mayan Calendar
Back to the Future, part 1 - Where is it?
07/05/08 07:44 Filed in: Future
Two things recently inspired me to write this blog. The first was a work project that I had undertaken recently; the second was a video by the late Ian Xel Lungold on the Mayan calendar that I watched recently with great fascination.
The Mayan calendar, that can be interpreted in hindsight to have portended many of the great events and changes in our history, runs out in 2012. Many have interpreted this to be something of a watershed, a turning point for mankind; a time of some massive and fundamental changes in the world. Not the end of the world by any means, but perhaps the beginning of some different sort of world. I can believe that and feel some optimism about it too. I hope…
Economists predict that very soon the world's manufacturing capacity will outstrip its ability of consumption. Simply put that means soon we will be able to make more than we need or can ever hope to use. So what happens then? What happens to our economic, social and political systems that are already beginning to creak under the strain of change? What happens to stock exchanges and money? If you have a career in the financial services industry and are looking to change, now might be a good time to consider that move.
The speed of technology change has accelerated beyond belief. I started my career in computing long ago. What took years at the outset of my career can now happen in minutes, even seconds. At the beginning of this piece I talked about a recent work project of mine. Without wishing to mention my client's name, it was one of the world's largest mobile phone manufacturers. This company now launches a new mobile phone handset at the rate of one a month. Yes, one new mobile phone each and every month. What this means is that they have decided that the life of an average mobile phone to be just a year; from product launch to obsolescence in a year! They don't even call some of them mobile phones anymore; they are "multi-media communications computers!" Even my own phone takes photographs, keeps a calendar, has an MP3 player…what else…? Oh yes! Then there's an FM radio in it as well. But predominantly I use it to make phone calls and send text messages. It's well-made, well-designed and reliable so why would I wish to change it in a year? I have kept my last couple of mobile phones for a good few years and see no reason to consume more for consumption's sake.
But speed of change has accelerated beyond our conception of what was possible just a few years back, and it is accelerating exponentially all the time. Our knowledge, belief, economic and manufacturing systems are moving at a speed far faster than our social and political systems can keep pace. It's no small wonder that our social structures are beginning to creak and that our political systems seem to be holding on by a thread. It's no romantic illusion either. If you don't believe it then go make yourself a very strong cup of coffee and wake up!
What implications does this have for us ordinary mortals? Do you remember that idea about having a career? I am reminded of a couple of conversations recently one with a law and psychology graduate friend turned farmer, now turned national training expert, and the guy who moved me into my home, the removal guy was an Oxford-educated, ex stockbroker. Then there's me, I call myself a management consultant to cover a variety of sins! So what am I? Well, I'm a change, transformation and transition specialist, a programme director, a turnaround person, an expert in information technology and telecommunications, a venture capital appraiser, a psychologist, an ex-chairman of a large mental health project, an ex-chief executive of a software company, a general manager, a communications specialist, a facilitator, a strategic planner and a strategic marketing expert…and sometimes a writer…done a bit of broadcasting, some futures consulting…Okay so how many was that? More than ten for sure! Get the picture?
There are no single careers anymore. Every single knowledge-based discipline with which mankind is involved is moving at the speed of light or else it's moving fast towards obsolescence, like my mobile phone and that's just six months old now!
Take another example…a safe profession; let's be a doctor, a physician. That's an interesting trade, one that I might suggest controversially is more regulated and controlled by the economic interests of the pharmaceutical industry than the social needs of mankind. It's those guys who currently dictate the speed of medical developments and progress, but even that world is about to be busted apart. We have the genome now, a map of our physical bodily universe – a means of understanding our physical condition and potentially the knowledge to be able to cure its ills, we have the means to manufacture chromosomes, and last year it was announced that a scientist had manufactured a living organism synthetically in a laboratory (Guardian newspaper, 6 September 2007). So what will a doctor's profession be in future? If a doctor is to keep pace with developments in medicine and our world of physical knowledge then it is conceivable that she might have to undergo continuous training and education for her entire working life. Or else she might choose to just carry on writing those prescriptions that keep the pharmaceutical industry plump and happy. Somehow I doubt that will happen.
Our world is changing. It's getting better too. As Lungold points out we are transcending an age of ethics in corporate responsibility: one where the bad guys are being weeded out and held to account. I'll just run a quick internet search on recent corporate scandals and see who we can come up with. The list on Wikipedia, mainly for those qualifying as prize-winners in "imaginary arithmetic", include Enron, Barings Bank, Merrill Lynch, AIG, WorldCom, Kmart and there's even a couple of very big pharmaceutical companies in there too. It's a long list now. But I simply want to make the point that businesses who dishonestly exploit their customers or their shareholders for their own financial benefit or power interests are going to fail in a world where ethics, social and personal responsibility are coming to be recognised as universal values. It's not before time and I'll say more about time itself here too.
Some people may find this speed of change frightening; certainly it is awe-inspiring. It's no wonder that we feel that change is running past us; that we feel we can't keep up with it any more.
Lungold talks about this very well, about the limitations of mind. He says rightly that the mind is man's survival equipment. It works slowly and it's like a pattern recognition engine detecting similarities and differences to build a picture of our world. It does construct knowledge as pictures too, pictures taking the form of all our senses: sight, sound, taste, smell and physical experience. It works at about the speed of twenty-four frames per second, that means we can take twenty-four decisions a second in a world where billions of decisions are being taken each and every second. Lungold cleverly points out that the mind is limited in speed and easily deceived, that the guys who do special effects in the movies already know this well. I believe Lungold was on the right track.
So what do we use instead? Lungold and I believe the same thing here and it's called intuition. Intuition is our own sense of the world, and repository of inner personal knowledge, it's our ability to sense and know immediately without reasoning. It's what the very best sportsmen know and use all the time. Just think of David Beckham playing soccer, do you think that he's using his mind like "click-decide, click-decide, click-decide"? No, he has very high speed intuition and that combined with his enormous and well coordinated physical abilities makes him one of the greatest footballers there is; the same goes for great, basketball players and lots of other sportsmen too. I'll write more later about intuition and my current sense of it later. Important questions for me are how one gets in touch and stays in touch with intuition. I'm working on it and I am already very intuitive!
So what's going to happen and why 2012? Frankly, I don't know. I'm not a futurist or a soothsayer. I'm not that sure about 2012 either, but big change will happen and happen soon enough. It will be to coin that overused phrase and now hackneyed cliché, first used by Thomas Kuhn to describe the revolutions that occurred in the world of science, a massive paradigm shift in our entire world. (Brother, can you spare me a paradigm?) It will be an entire shift, not an evolution, but a revolution in our consciousness. It may be a whole series of shifts, who can tell? But one thing is for sure, this post-industrial world we inhabit will go through some big changes and it will be soon and it will be fast.
Time as a universal accurate concept itself took hold then because it was what was used to control and regulate the workforce. Perhaps in a post-industrial age, our concept of time may change. The best I would hope for is that time will be used no longer to oppress our daily existence, but perhaps it might embrace those Mayan concepts too in a new and better world.
NB The video "The Mayan Calendar comes North parts 1 and 2" presented by the late Ian Xel Lungold is available to view for free on Google.
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