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- The World After Midnight
Image credit: Eddie Obeng
Last post of 2023, so I figured it’d be quite apt to revisit Eddie Obeng’s 2012 World After Midnight TED talk.
Somebody or something has changed the rules about how our world works. When I'm joking, I try and explain it happened at midnight, you see, while we were asleep, but it was midnight 15 years ago.
Okay? You didn't notice it? But basically, what they do is, they switched all the rules round, so that the way to successfully run a business, an organization, or even a country, has been deleted, flipped, and it's a completely new — you think I'm joking, don't you — there's a completely new set of rules in operation.
Fast forward to 2023, and that red line in the first chart indicating ‘Rate of Change’ has basically kept extending vertically in the y-axis. The gradient of the green ‘Rate of Learning’ line probably depends on which demographic we’re focusing on (K12, higher ed, adult learning), but it’s probably safe to say that it’s almost flat.
My simple idea is that what's happened is, the real 21st century around us isn't so obvious to us, so instead we spend our time responding rationally to a world which we understand and recognize, but which no longer exists.
In the eleven years since Eddie Obeng gave his TED talk, schools have behaved exactly as he described above - making incremental changes to the system in response to a world that no longer exists. What schools should be doing is embracing Smart Failure in the pursuit of innovations that help students adapt to a fast-changing world. You see how exponential change is a two-headed hydra?
What should be happening
Exponential change → Innovations in schools → Students who adapt to exponential change
What is happening
Exponential change → Incremental changes in schools → Students who cannot adapt to exponential change
But in our real ‘New World’ there will be occasions where previous learning can be used but in terms of innovation almost everything is outside those limits. So now there are two ways to fail. Failing when you could have used prior knowledge – I call this ‘Dumb Failure’. And failing on a breakthrough – I call this ‘Smart Failure’ I also argue that Smart Failure should be praised and rewarded.
True innovation is futuristic in nature and solves problems that, sometimes, people don’t even realise they have. If one is truly innovating, the genius of one’s ideas or inventions is incomprehensible and hence unvalued by most. History teaches us that the most gifted minds were tortured souls shunned by their contemporaries for their ideas, which were genius, but were not communicated in a compelling enough manner to derive sufficient buy in.
As the clock strikes twelve tonight, remember that we are living in the world after midnight. Attempting breakthroughs and embracing smart failures is the only way forward. The alternative is to be stuck in the past and hope for the best. When so many institutions, businesses and countries are in rapid decline because of their refusal to adapt to this new world we live in, it’s up to the brave, hungry and foolish ones to move humanity forward.
Happy new year, and wishing you a great start to 2024 🥳
p.s. This year, make a resolution about something bigger than yourself.
What if, instead of planning our exercise regimens, we focused our intentions on all that is undesirable in human activity — wars, bigotry, brutality, the despoiling of the earth — and sought to address it? What if instead of making a milquetoast resolution, we made airtight commitments?
In “Leaves of Grass,” Walt Whitman writes: “This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone who asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy.” He continues, “Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem.’’
So there. If you’re looking for a worthwhile resolution, Whitman is not a bad place to start.
The task of improving the world may seem impossible, but it isn’t. All it takes is the proper sequence of correct discrete decisions. Decisions are just resolutions with teeth