How quickly things change.... I think Ronald Wright describes this phenomenon the best. In his book, a Short History of Progress, he talks about how technology has advanced the material progress of mankind. What I find fascinating is the pace of this change. Growing up I remember my family having the same kitchen oven for 16 years, in our household today we're already onto our second after only 5 years. When I think about my cell phone, car, sporting equipment etc.... the same can be said for most of the tools I used today, including those at my desk. Ronald notes that the pattern has been for progress to move at an exponential rate - "From the first chipped stone to the first smelted iron took nearly 3 million years; from the first iron to the first hydrogen bomb took only 3000 years."

Technology is influencing cultural generations too (e.g. Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Generation Y) and if you take a look at the duration of past generations then you’ll notice the same pattern exists; these are approximately 10-15 years long and according to McCrindle Research [2006] the trend of shorter generations is increasing. This means in our working lifetime we'll see more cultural change than ever before. This will, or rather is having a profound impact on the workforce. For details of this, read Stephanie’s post on the Punctuated Worker.

When I spoke about the 'pace of change' from a previous post I was referring to the “collapsing of time” and the material impact that technological progress is having on the tools we use and the social behaviours we exhibit. The "Connected" business understands how these changes are impacting the work they do and are adopting work practices to embrace these changes.

I'll give you a quick real life example about adopting new work practices - a Calgary based Oil & Gas Operator is branching out into new extraction methods, known as SAGD (Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage) vastly different from conventional production. This new method is described with new acronyms and terminology. In order to remove bottlenecks to information for new employees unfamiliar with these methods the company implemented “SAGDPedia”, a wiki site designed for capturing information such as acronyms and process descriptions specific to their new unconventional line of business. No more than 5 years ago this information would have been documented, printed and stored in a binder on someone's shelf. It would have remained static, unread and happily collected dust. :)

We are living in Exponential Times...... if you haven't watched this short video yet then I insist you do :)