The challenge of increasingly fast change ...

We do only understand things relative to things we understand already. Remember school - there was a base established and then new material was relying on this base knowledge. Those who did not understand the base had a hard time. The overall human learning process is rather slow.

• We live in a time where change happens fast - increasingly fast.
• Currently many things evolve in parallel - many of them exponentially.
• These things can be combined resulting in addition in a combinatorial explosion of possibilities.
• And there are also paradigm shifts - things which change near the base of our knowledge and require unlearning and new learning

All in all, we need to adapt faster and faster to changes. We cannot really lay back as there will be somebody out there who will provoke the next cascade of fast changes.

This is also true for companies. They need to start to work much more like living organisms rather than static hierarchical structures. Each cell must deliver value, increase its efficiency and help the organization to proceed and try out alternatives. Some of the will fail and a few will be successful and become the base for the future evolution.

The effect seen at school that those who do not master the base knowledge have difficulties to advance is also true for companies. It is also hard to find good combinations of things unless there is a good level of understanding established for each of them.

In other words - the ability to unlearn and learn again will be the decisive factor for success.