Change: Amplitude and Frequency
In order to think about the future clearly, we must first understand the nature of change.
I found a lot of the noughties/teens ideas about accelerating change to be simplistic at best and nonsensical at worst. I live in a 140-year-old house. We all sleep in beds, not anti-gravity fields, and use toilets that were invented 400 years ago and haven’t changed much since. Much of our diet would still be recognisable to people from a thousand years ago.
If ‘change happens faster now’ then why haven’t these things changed as well?
To better explain why so many of us feel like change happens faster now, but lots of things are staying the same, I spent some time thinking about the nature of change and I came up with an idea.
Instead of thinking about change in one dimension - something that can be ‘fast’ or ‘slow’ - think about it in two dimensions, like a wave. Change has both amplitude - what is the scale of change - and frequency - what is the speed of change.
When you start to think about change like that, it’s much easier to understand why we all feel so destabilised, and why there is so much conversation about ‘VUCA’ - our volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environment.
The big changes - like replacing our housing stock, or advancing equality - are still happening at very low frequency (speed). But technology has increased the frequency of small changes - like the flow of new TV content, fashion, music and consumer technology.
High frequency change overwhelms our senses so that we feel like everything is changing faster.
More of this in the section on High Frequency Change.
