Magpie marketing
By: Alex Murrell
Tags: Branding, Technology, Marketing, Brand Strategy, Advertising

The pace of change is not accelerating

According to the advertising, marketing and technology consultant Shelly Palmer, the pace of change will never be as slow as it is today.

“Tomorrow will not be like today. Today you will experience the slowest rate of technological change in your lifetime. Tomorrow, it will be faster and the pace of change will continue to increase.”

Once you spot this argument, you’ll see it everywhere. You’ll see it in books and business journals and marketing magazines. But perhaps its most ardent proponent is the futurist Raymond Kurzweil, who pushes the perspective to its extreme.

“We’re entering an age of acceleration. The models underlying society at every level, which are largely based on a linear model of change, are going to have to be redefined. Because of the explosive power of exponential growth, the 21st century will be equivalent to 20,000 years of progress at today’s rate of progress.”

At first glance, it’s a compelling argument. It’s provocative and persuasive. There’s only one problem. It isn’t true.

Compare Kurzweil’s words to those of Elbert Hubbard:

“The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can’t be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.”

Hubbard, a writer, artist and philosopher died in 1915. For all their panicked similarity, Hubbard and Kurzweil issued their warnings 100 years apart. Clearly the feeling that we are being carried along by an uncontrollable current of change is not unique to modern times.

While this may sound contrarian, this idea is fairly well documented by academia. An article by Chris McKenna, of the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School, traced the sentiment back to 1900:

“They said that change was accelerating in 1900. They said it in 1920. In 1940, in 1960, in 1980 and in 2000. So the presumption is that the people who said it before were wrong, but we’re right now.”

But why stop there? Geoffrey G. Jones, Professor of Business History at the Harvard Business School tracks the idea back even further:

“If you go back and read what people wrote in the 19th century, they thought change was happening at an incredible rate we had never seen before.”

It’s easy to see why we perceive today’s pace of change to be so fast. Moore’s Law provides decades of exponential growth in computing power. Data is more abundant and more swiftly processed than ever before. The smartphone supply chain has given birth to an ever-expanding set of smart devices. Yet evidence of a great acceleration is hard to come by. In fact according to Justin Fox, the ex-editorial director of Harvard Business Review, the evidence is almost non-existent:

“In the business community, especially in and around Silicon Valley, there is a widespread belief that we live in an age of mind-boggling economic upheaval and change. But economists have been churning out research for several years now that seems to show a decades-long slowdown in almost every indicator of business dynamism.”

The idea that the pace of change is accelerating uncontrollably is a myth.

But it is not alone.