The Greatest Shortcoming of the Human Race Illuminated by COVID-19

"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function”. Professor Albert Allen Bartlett's quote says it all. We’re programmed to think very linearly: tomorrow will look a lot like today. And oftentimes, it does. So we plan for that. Organize around that. Enroll other people in it. And then guess what? Tomorrow looks a lot like today. 

I was talking with a major west coast supply business a few months ago before the world economy was halted with COVID-19 shutdowns. I asked the CEO what plans for 2020 were going to look like. With a big book of plans with all sorts of charts and numbers, he shared their aims with me. Reduce overhead by 3%. Increase sales by 5%. Great goals, I think we’d all accept those gains, especially now. But what he was doing is something we all do: literally turning to the past for what can we change. What can we fix? What can we adjust? We have to do those things, but if that’s all we’re doing, the best we’ll end up with is a slightly better version of something we already have. Linear growth. 

Exponential growth is all around us. Populations of underdeveloped countries. High-growth startups. Things going viral online (maybe after this pandemic we’ll rethink that name). Intellectually we understand exponential growth. We all know what the exponential graph looks like (the proverbial hockey stick). We even know the mathematical equation. And we know exponential growth creates entirely new normals almost overnight. It’s the UBER in a former taxi city. Netflix instead of shopping at Blockbuster. The iPhone when the Blackberry used to be the omnipresent device. If you don’t work inside these companies, you don’t experience the growth trajectory. You simply engage with the new normal. 

These things happen so fast that it’s easy to slip into the new normal and not be present to the experience of the massive change that has happened underneath. Just because we conceptually understand the exponential function does not mean we truly grasp the power of it, much less plan for it in the future of our business and our lives. 

What we’re watching AND experiencing right now with COVID-19 is the tangible (albeit negative) experience of exponential growth. Dealing with the COVID-19 virus we are watching, experiencing and planning for something that’s on such a trajectory that it's creating new normals overnight. While this new normal isn’t good it still presents us with an opportunity because we can no longer just look to yesterday for what tomorrow is going to look like, so we are free to shape and create something different, even better, than what came before. 

Of course, we have the option to wait to and see if things will “go back to normal” tomorrow, next week, or next month. We can wait until we can once again do what we’ve always done, how we’ve always done it. We’ll hear things like: “I can’t wait to get back to a normal life", or “In another month I can go back to work”. It’s totally a valid perspective, but waiting and hoping without taking action leaves us powerless and at the mercy of luck or chance.

True innovators know that the world may never look the same again. A new normal has emerged, and right now we get the chance to truly stand in today. To stand in the space where we're intentionally thinking that yesterday's models, businesses, and ideas probably will no longer apply and from there we have the chance to look into tomorrow for what might be newly possible and newly created from this point forward. 

Instead of thinking about getting back to normal, let's consider thinking about what’s newly possible now.

If you’re waiting to get back to work, what’s stopping you from figuring out a new way to work, and maybe work better, right now?

I think I speak for everyone in that we absolutely want this pandemic to be over soon. Until then, let's discover what’s possible right now.