Opinion Keeping up with change?

By Ian Grais

"Change is not merely necessary to life— it is life." Alvin Toffler (1970)

We've all heard the cliché that change is a constant. The fact that these words were written 50 years ago reminds me that as much change was happening then as today.

Toffler’s quote comes from his book Future Shock, which chronicles the numerous stress-inducing changes being brought about by the “media revolution” of the day.

Today the communications and media industries, along with many others, are still changing. We’re being challenged by numerous new social platforms, media models and measurement tools, which together are creating whole new paradigms for business and communication.

Change truly is good

It’s natural to feel confused by so many new channels and tools and lament the momentousness of today's technological and social changes. But that won’t change the change.

Business today is a weird and often wonderfully complex new set of inputs and variables. The sooner we accept this basic truth, the sooner our question becomes “What's our strategy to ride this confusing and constant wave of change so that our work remains relevant?”

I believe the answer is the same as it's always been. It's all about curiosity. We should all relax and feel secure that the reason we're in this business in the first place is because we're naturally creative. And creativity is impossible without curiosity.

Catching a bigger wave

Some would say the wave of change is moving too fast. How do you catch up? Curiosity can provide the solutions in our business— just like it has in other areas of life.

For example, let’s look at the curious example of surfing pioneers Laird Hamilton and Buzzy Kerbox. These guys invented the use of jet skis to tow surfers into previously un-surfable giant waves. They realized that the larger the wave, the faster it moves. In short, catching a wave is all about take-off speed.

Before their experiments, the biggest waves that could be surfed were limited by a surfer’s physical ability to reach take-off speed. You can only kick so hard and paddle so fast. By using technology, in the form of a jet ski, they started towing surfers to accelerate take-off into giant waves.

I believe that the more we follow our curiosity and interests and experiment with new technology, the more successful we will be in riding the tsunami of change around us.

The benefits of a curious mind

The current wave may be moving faster than ever before, but the opportunities created by it are also great. And the curious are benefiting.

In science circles, the benefits of curiosity-driven research are well documented and have led to drugs that treat diseases like cancer and AIDS. Not to mention magnetic resonance imaging, and even the technique that is the basis of DNA fingerprinting, which revolutionized criminal forensics.

Management should understand and encourage this need to be curious and allow for time to explore. We can all learn from the incredible success and growth of Google, with their policy of allowing staff to work on personal projects for 20 percent of their week.

Maybe not every business is ready to let their staff just experiment one day a week, until you realize that many of Google’s product extensions have been the result of employee curiosity and experimentation. They appear to be on to something.

Today there are so many amazing new products and tools that we can use to free up our time so that we have room to be curious. Applications like YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Dailybooth, Tagged and Skype are helping enable rapid social change. And where there's social change there's always opportunity for creativity and new ideas.

So let’s not forget the value of curiosity as we race to keep up. If change is constant, then we can't forget that our open attitude and interest in change also need to be constant or we risk missing what could be the ride of our life.

Posted on December 1, 2009 by Ian Grais, partner and co-creative director of Rethink Communications in Vancouver.

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