The ability to adapt to change is fundamental to the success of individuals and businesses in the modern world. This programme is about working with change as individuals, in our teams and in our organisations.

Many of our physical systems are designed to work against change. Much of this is managed in the body by the hypothalamus. The main function of the hypothalamus is homeostasis, or maintaining the body's status quo. Factors such as blood pressure, body temperature, fluid and electrolyte balance, and body weight are held to a precise value called the set point. Although this set point can migrate over time, from day to day it is remarkably fixed. To achieve this task, the hypothalamus must receive inputs about the state of the body, and must be able to initiate compensatory changes if anything shifts off balance. However, for survival the rate of change of an organism must equal or exceed the rate of change of the environment in which it exists.

A reaction to change, be it physical or psychological, is perfectly normal. We all react to change, we have a range of reactions, and we are all different. Some like change; they thrive on new ideas and challenges. Others don't like change; those people thrive on stability and familiarity. As Jim Ewing says, some of us like the curves whilst others like the straights. Against this context we will look at a map and methodology to explain our reactions to change in a way that allows us to anticipate and to take account of it in our work. Managing change effectively allows us to enrol others effectively and minimise wasted time and effort in moving forward.

Read on to learn how to understand the forces of change, and to utilise all reactions in a positive way in Meetings, Communication, Leadership, Coaching and during Change itself.

How we spend our time in meetings and what constitutes the real work of a meeting changes as the uncertainty in the work environment increases. Here are some ways to think about this and what we might expect to have to accomplish.

When life is stable, meetings tend to operate in Voice 3, all about the targets we are trying to hit and our progress towards them. When improvements are needed we may dip into Voice-2-Lite, if you will, where we can do some redesign to invent a fix or two and move on. Shifting back and forth between Voice 2 and 3 can be done quite easily without any challenge to our mental models, and hence, no real change going on, just new arrangements of the same idea set. Most all of us know how to deal in these times as they represent the status quo most of us are most comfortable doing business within.

As uncertainty increases in our environment, meetings take on a much larger component of Voice 2, since there will be more and more unknown to be explored and workable choices to be created. As uncertainty grows further, past our ability to invent a way out of the mess from our present point of view, Voice 1 emerges, many positive feelings turn south and we recognise that we are in a change. From here on, no matter how urgent a direct, clear, agreed action may be needed, there can be virtually no agreement reached on the matter when Voice 1 is in charge.

Meetings are a critical component in making it through change with the least wasted time, resources and angst and creating the most robust possible future.

If we insist on conducting the meeting as if there was no uncertainty or change, or if we just want to suppress fears and feelings, then the opportunity to re-align will be missed. Uncertainty will ripen.

When we gather, there is the opportunity to hear the finite range of worries, possibilities and goals. We can collectively struggle with them, agree on them and get finished with each in a way which brings us all together. The energy of the people in the room, if facilitated well, is both healing and energising to all. A willingness to engage the change aggressively makes the group far more potent than the sum of the individuals assembled.

The meeting agenda must adapt to the degree of uncertainty in the room. In uncertain times, we need to be taking more time to let go of the past, invent better temporary structures and see to learning efforts which give us a platform on which to evolve clearer direction for a longer period. We may hold a meeting with some noble purpose and find that no one can get past Voice 1. This can either devolve into a session which carries people further into a depression or evolve into a completion experience where the feelings are heard, just once instead of over and over, the avoidance behaviour is acknowledged, but not judged, and we help each other to test the validity of our fears. This is the completion process for Voice 1. As meeting owners, facilitators or members, we can keep the meeting as part of the evolution. Without knowing how to spot Voice 1 language and knowing the elements of the Voice, we are stuck to just hope for the best. When we know to proceed to complete Voice 1, we can keep things on an evolutionary track.

There will be more possibility work to be done in Voice 2. Once the work in Voice 1 is well underway, I want to attempt work in Voice 2. As core fears are cut down to size there is always something left that endures and needs to be part of our future. I move the essential good stuff to Voice 2 and make it a claim on the future. With such claims and a couple of newly imagined possibilities on board the Possibility domain, we can begin inventing experiments and measures to learn how the world is really working. The dance between finishing Voice 1 and attempting Voice 2 is a form of coaching. Some might call it teasing. Voice 1 eventually recognises its limits and will let go to Voice 2. That happens most richly when both are in the room. It is a dance, and not a stepwise method. Some days it is mostly 1 and others mostly 2 and then back again.

Now, all this choreography may well occur, to the Voice 3 addicts, to take away from 'getting somewhere'. In fact, with uncertainty running at the level that drives humans into Voice 1 and 2, 'getting somewhere' is measured strictly by completing Voice 1 and 2 as richly as we can. The targets, disciplines and commitments of Voice 3 need to be directed at sanity checking and demystifying the fears, spotting and acknowledging the avoidance behaviour, creating the richest set of well understood options for the future and learning as much as possible about the true nature of the situation we find ourselves in.

Eventually, the more usual Voice 3 work will emerge. In the real world of business there will always be some in the room. But, in high uncertainty, without completing on Voice 1 and 2, the effective work in Voice 3 will be limited, and pushing it will just be unclear and unsatisfying and will likely have us wasting the energy to move Voice 1 and 2 along.

The formal communications organisation has a critical role to play in keeping the organisation nimble and change-worthy. But they aren't alone. A viewpoint and some ideas for creating a comprehensive, change-worthy system of keeping the folks on the same page.

The answer here is "More" - more authentic, more consistent and more client-centred communication.

Most young and way too many old-guard leaders confuse leadership communications with giving orders in wartime: clear, hard edged, confident, and delivered with the voice of absolute authority. This bunch, confronted with a high uncertainty, shuts down communication because they don't think they have much to say. After all, they aren't certain, and, leaders should be certain. Or at least they need to appear certain. In fact, as uncertainty grows, leaders must not attempt to 'appear certain' and they must 'certainly appear'.

Human beings caught up in more uncertainty than is comfortable for them need to participate in a healthy, evolving dialog which confirms what is changing and what is not and keeps up a natural momentum of the group through the change. People need to know they are not alone. They need to have a sense of where the whole community is located. They need to get a whole story, which will include the dimensions of the new uncertainty. They need to be engaged in a conversation which, by its very nature, assists them to evolve through the change. They need to be continually invited, in subtle and non-subtle ways, to express their feelings, thoughts and urges to action. They need access to their fears by sanity checking them with their peers. They need to make enquiries and participate in learning experiments with others.

The formal communications activity in the organisation has a most profound access to the cast of characters. This access is wasted if the communications program is simply designed to pass top-down spin to the troops. Communications needs to be creating generative, useful engagements between stakeholders which, in uncertain times, keep the evolutionary dialog going.
In uncertain times, the really good stuff almost never comes top-down. It bubbles up. The best leaders show up as collaborators, listeners and role models of empathy and coaching, rather than answer givers and experts.

Communications need to be as real-time as possible, backed up by thought pieces that put the immediate into a realistic context from past into future. This is a bit like watching CNN for an hour to get the latest bits, reading the Economist for an hour to get a fortnightly view, and spending an hour with a non-fiction book exploring an in-depth history and an over-the-horizon futurist view of some aspect of the present.

Communications need to be learning-centred. We need to be prompted to explore from wherever we sit in the organisation. We need to be stimulated to ask questions of other learners. We need to write up and contribute whatever we think we discover and place it in a mix of what everyone else is discovering.

If I had to implement a change-worthy communications scheme using contemporary corporate technology I'd try something along the following lines:

Every manager of people would be writing a personal weblog. The deal would be to make at least three entries a week on whatever subject he or she is curious about or stimulated by.

All managers would subscribe to and read the other managers weblogs and add comments.

All the direct reports of every manager would read and would contribute to their manager's weblog.

Each manager would provide links to those weblogs from anywhere in the stakeholder community which seemed to have the most compelling, effective insights, ideas, and links.

The weblog system would be searchable. I could put in some key words that mattered to me and see in an instant what people from across the system are thinking and talking about.

All this stuff remains private to the company, of course, but it is not moderated. It is the real stuff. It might appear chaotic. But there will be rich patterns occurring over time. Thought leaders will appear. The formal communications entity will find all manner of material to use in their own work of building and reflecting coherent themes.

In times of high uncertainty, every manager would be required to spend an hour every fortnight with each of his or her direct reports doing a bit of coaching which includes a collaborative retelling of the current organisational story and the employee's specific place in the story. Adjustments are made. The deeper story evolves. Employees remember where they are in the big picture. Leaders have a living sense of where all their people are. Managers find recurring themes, insights and questions which they add to their weblog. Employees get into doing searches and making exchanges with others in the organisation which further evolves the place. In times of low uncertainty, the hourly sessions might slide out to every six weeks. But no less than that. It will vary from employee to employee. This, of course, requires leaders to see their employees as their clients rather than as their slaves. And this requires a view that management and leadership are at least as much about coaching as they are about planning, organising, staffing, directing and controlling.

The communications department peruses the logs, finding overall themes to explore in depth, explorations which will move off the electronic system, into hard copy, bill boards and baseball caps. Managers engage other managers on hot topics. A round table discussion with ten employees from all levels with the most senior manager is transcribed into a print article worthy of the Sunday Times magazine. A movie of the proceedings is posted on the web. MP3 audio of the event is available to be downloaded to one's iPod for listening on the train going home.

The communications department and HR and the Change Management team will be making sure that everyone learns about the realities of change and how to make something of it. Articles on the subject are presented. Workshops, master classes, and facilitation of change-critical meetings by visiting gurus all contribute to the change-worthiness of the organisation.

Change-worthiness organisational measures are invented and become part of each manager's performance contract.

The communications department keeps a weekly process going where thought leaders in the organisation tell their story of where we are and where we are going. Four or five of these pieces are combined with similar pieces from senior management and appear in print, web-video and web-audio. The idea is not to make anyone wrong, but to build the story from a wide variety of voices from a wide variety of corporate, customer and supplier perspectives. This is as much for the leaders as for the employees.

Alignment builds, uncertainty can be stated without bringing down the house, leaders begin to borrow material from the workgroup level and vice versa. Trust ensues. Sweetness and light emerge. All becomes better, even though the changes go on. The whole place gets the feeling they are engaged in a collective, creative process where uncertainty and chaos are experienced as opportunities rather than impediment.

The above is hardly exhaustive. But if we could actually deliver on half of it, our lives in enduring uncertainty might go far better.

Thoughts on how leaders may have to adjust their agenda with their charges when uncertainty grows and the ground is shifting rapidly under their feet.

Uncertain, change-filled time requires the Leader to manage with shorter, more temporary time and work structures, spend increased time re-telling and re-vising the group's story to keep people aligned when they might quickly fall out of sync, and increase a coaching approach to their engagements with everyone.

Among other things leaders have a role in shaping, keeping and telling the story of the business to their charges. The story telling keeps the group on the same track and gives everyone the basis for their own story about where they have come from, where they are now and where they may be going. Our own story gives us a sense of our place for a time. The duration of the story and its effectiveness depends on the amount of change and uncertainty we face. The more uncertainty, the shorter the duration. In uncertain times, the leader will be spending more time telling the story more often. We could say that the uncertainty makes it harder to tell a good story. Surely that is true. Such is the challenge.

Leadership in uncertain times requires mastery of the art of the temporary structure. Temporary structures are built on what we actually know and last no longer than the point at which we will know more. Temporary structures must be designed to give us some needed stability to get things done as well as to enhance our learning so the next structure can evolve.

Leadership in uncertain times requires the mastery of saying "I don't know" in a useful way. Saying "I don't know" is not an admission of weakness. It is a statement of fact which leads to the next question: "How will we proceed in order to know a bit more?"

Leadership in uncertain times requires the mastery of inviting another person's truth into the room without hearing it as wrong or something to be corrected or fixed. When there is no uncertainty (not a likely occurrence though useful for making a point) objectives, methods and timing are completely known and we will be operating completely in voice 3. Nothing will be under development and nothing will be ending (I said it was unlikely). As uncertainty increases, Voice 2 must emerge to come up with some adjustments. Reinvention requires exploration and possibility thinking, acts of drawing out and calling forth rather than directing and controlling. With even more uncertainty, a sense of stability has been lost and Voice 1 emerges. Something is perceived to dissolve. Chaos is felt and seen. Worst fears unfold. The leader is tasked with listening, sanity checking and demystifying the worst fears as well has holding the occasional wake.

I refer the leader here to my discussion of Change and Coaching, as the coaching attitude is a requirement for these times.

Some thoughts on coaching as one core ability of all of us to live out our responsibilities to each other in a world where uncertainty and change are running high, invention and expression is a must, or where effective learning is required. Or in a world where we just want to show up as fundamentally good, helpful folks.

Coaching is the art of creative relationship for all seasons. Good coaching empowers people from within themselves. Coaching draws out and demystifies the feelings and fears of Voice 1, invents experiments and possibility in Voice 2, and clarifies objectives and stands for the disciplines of Voice 3. In a sense, coaching is the perfect strategy for people whose worlds are changing.

Coaching - good coaching - is all about learning. In that sense, it is all about change, since learning, transition and design are all about letting go of the known, re-inventing possibility and enacting a commitment to a new work of a new order. Coaching may just be the highest form of the art of leading/teaching/guiding others on a one to one basis. Leadership of groups is another matter, though not unrelated. Coaching assumes that there is always a new potential lying just below the surface of current knowledge. This edge of new possibility, or the Learning Edge as I've called it, can be found, integrated and enacted. As edge after edge is crossed and each little bit of learning is integrated the individual is constantly re-empowered at a higher level. Taken over some time, one might perceive an immense transformation. The individual would not experience it as a step change. Rather, he or she would just be doing the work, day by day.

Like learning and good design, healthy transformation occurs day by day. If we are learners we do it without thinking about it. A learning organisation has this coursing through its veins. The most devoted artists of all stripes are naturals at it, or at least have given themselves to the process. It is not easy or without anxiety and pain. In fact it always has anxiety and some struggle. Sometimes immense struggle and discomfort. When a big discontinuity strikes us, imposed from the outside, we are tossed into a change not of our personal making. In a sense we have to catch up with our life. Our mind and body go right to work on it, looking for the right path and, at the same time, avoiding the whole thing. Coaching offers the fastest path through it, with least angst, least waste and most reward.

The luxury of long times of stability between upheavals was always an illusion. Given the speed up of all things in the world, we can no longer maintain the illusion. Change is a constant. Or maybe it is not. Perhaps that which is constant is the constant increase in uncertainty and the level of chaos we all live with. Chaos has two edges. If we look to the outside world to tell us who to be and how to be, chaos will be increasingly destructive to our psyche. We are quickly overwhelmed, at sea, adrift. In order to get-a-grip, we may immerse ourselves in a human-made system of ideological thinking, be it religious, corporate, scientific, sexual, athletic or political or some other which provides 'all the answers' for living. Taking these at face value produce their own chaos of divisions, proselytisation and warfare of all kinds. The other edge of chaos provides us a rich field for creativity, assuming we are looking within for our own story, our own heart's desire, our own wellspring of creative expression. From this point of view our job can be a place to get our life's work done rather than pleasing the company bosses. From this point of view the chaos of all things provides massive, undisciplined resources to be harnessed to effect our purposes. But, for this to work our purposes must be OUR purposes and they must rise, over our lifetime, from within.

Coaching is the one most potent role for a parent, a teacher, a guru, a manager to learn, if he or she is truly committed to seeing their charges evolve most fully. Decent, caring parents probably come closest to the experience of this commitment as they raise their kids. Parenting can start off as wanting to have kids to fulfil ME - I want the experience of raising a kid. If this persists then the child is used as a tool to generate a lot of keen anecdotes, or to make me feel like an insider in the parent game. Of course, the real experience, for caring people, quickly transcends such limited, selfish pre-conceived notions of what parenting is all about.

All of us carry some appropriate selfishness. I want to evolve as fully as I can. But I am apt to want to use you to help me fulfil that desire before I get interested in your actual evolution. Some people do go to their grave wishing their kids had turned out better so as to give the departing soul a higher stature in heaven. Some, who are called teachers, just seek tenure and power and their own research. And, some managers see their employees as resources to ennoble the manager's stature in the eyes of the almighty gods of the-next-great-assignment. We woo the potential hire as if they are magical and valuable beyond reason. Once on board we expect them to jump to our every order and treat us as gods, just as we jump to please and kiss up to the various gurus, geniuses, smarty pants and morons who inhabit the upper reaches of our own client set.

Fortunately, most of us know we aren't terribly saintly, yet we still do our best to be good people. And for the others, well, hope springs eternal. Those who truly aspire to being satisfied with a life and sense the need to give something back, can find remarkable well-being by showing up with a coaching attitude to their kids and the other ones in their sphere who want to be more. The generosity of attention and the curiosity and finely tuned listening and invention and story telling that comes with coaching is well advised for almost every encounter we have with other humans and most every other species we choose to hang out with.

Other species? Can one coach a cat? Can one think like a cat, get interested in what the cat may be interested in, imagine something new to interest the cat, aligned with its apparent curiosity, and successfully fascinate the cat into the new game? I think so. Getting a stranger of a cat along the road to trust the traveller is all about being more interested and attentive and inventive to the cat then the cat can imagine a human being being. And this is precisely the pathway to a great coaching relationship with another human, who, after all, is not nearly as crafty as the cat. A mahout coached an elephant into playing hide and seek. Yup. I have it on tape. A woman coached a fish into playing basketball. Really. But, you'll have to trust me on this one.

This is a long piece. An attempt to get at the roots of the speedup of damn near everything in our lives and work. It raises more questions than it answers. It argues that as technology allows information to move fast enough and organisations continue to pursue ever faster profit cycles, the genetic cycle time of natural change in our bodies will be more and more assaulted, an effect we have seen in the last decade. Our most fundamental, cultural and religious assumptions about the nature of the universe and how it is supposed to go may well be mistaken. Though there are others in the world, with far older systems than ours who may well have got it right. This is exploration not answers.

Change just isn't good old 'change' anymore.

Used to be that we could expect change in fairly predictable time frames. A mid-life crisis happened at forty or so. There were births and deaths in the family, graduations, marriages, divorces, the seven year itch, the occasional business failure. There was the first, second, third and last age of life. For the golden billion people, as Comrade Putin recently put it, that was the story. To an extent it still is. And we got along pretty well, discovering these and learning how to handle and even make the most of them. Short of calamity, most of these changes are inner driven and all such milestones still and will occur. And handling these used to serve to handle the issues of change, transition and transformation which came along in most lives and businesses. With these changes came periods of uncertainty and unknowing which raised our anxiety levels and which eventually passed as we sorted out the next phase of our lives. From 1978 until the middle nineties this view of it all worked pretty well. But, during that time change was changing. And suddenly, we are all caught up in this unsettling awareness that everything is not what it seems, events are happening too fast for us to stay up with, respected societal roles whether in business or government seem to be increasingly populated by liars and thieves and virtually everyone is being manipulated by the few to extract as many dollars from us as fast as they can by any means at hand. At least this is shorthand for my experience of it as a sixty something red blooded white boy from the US of A.

Change just is not the same anymore. The level of uncertainty and chaos in life has increased. Time is getting shorter and shorter. Shorter for me now than what I recall my parents complaining about in the nineteen seventies when they were getting into this age.

Recently I made some short films explaining the TransforMAP. I used the underlying analogy or driving a car through straights and curves. Depending on one's perception the curves might be there to get you between the straights or just the other way around. If I take that model back to when I was in my thirties, it seemed that there were long straights. Enough time to learn what I was doing, get things really completed, have a life besides work and acquire mastery in something or other. Job changes came along every three to four years. I made one big career shift in my first fourteen years of work. And my friends and fellows had similar time frames. Now, when I engage people who are at the ages I was, and who are at similar levels of competitive organisations, their experience is quite different. I would suggest that the straights have disappeared and life is one continuous flow of curves and switchbacks which include lots of rapid ups and downs to add to the ride. It suggests to me that it is time to think further about how we perceive and measure change and how we go about making the most of our life experience in this more rapid, ever shifting context.

There is much to be explored. In the remainder of this piece, I take a look at three timetables which affect our experience and how they might be at the root of the end of the straights.

The Natural Pace of Change - Genetic Time

It still takes nine months to create and bear a child. A good run of living still lasts eighty five or so years. Death of a loved one requires a minimum of eighteen months to complete the dark journey through Voice 1 with another year or two tacked on for the Voice 2 exploration of who and what we are on our own. Then there is Voice 3 still ahead.

It still takes months for the most dedicated user to grasp the nuances of a sophisticated piece of software. For most of us it may be a year or two.

It takes multiple readings over many months or years to grasp the essential meanings of the great novels, films, plays and music.

There is the Seven Year Itch in relationships. Not seven weeks or seven months, but seven years.

The most rapid ascenders in corporate jobs still hang in to an assignment for an average of three years. A year to find all the ins and outs. A year to make a mark and a difference, and a final year to complete the learning and do the explorations to find the next assignment.

I think of my life as a series of decades; my teens, twenties, thirties and so on (I dare not go on as the list gets desperately long).

It takes months to gain weight and years to take it off, years to diminish health and years to restore it, years to go crazy with love, fear, work, power, money or religion and years to get sane again.

Such is our Genetic Time. Genetic Time has held as long as we can see back into human history. The Greeks and Shakespeare described all this well. And it hasn't changed a whit.

Physical Movement - Transport Time

Most of the audience reading this have been born to the age of jet aircraft, high speed rail and motorways. We do not know about horse and buggies, covered wagons, intercontinental sailing ships and twenty mile per hour rail travel. My grandfather did.

In 1980 I flew from Los Angeles to Cleveland with a ninety year old woman whose kin were moving her from her fifty year home in California to a nursing home in Ohio. This was enough of an insult. That she was making the journey in under four hours was devastating, as she told me. She would have preferred three months in a covered wagon so she would have had time to really complete the change by experiencing it in Genetic Time rather than Transport Time. To watch, daily, California recede in the west. The sun would rise and set at imperceptibly different times in the eastward journey, her body adjusting easily, one day to the next. The climate would change as well from region to region. In three months she would truly BE in Ohio. Not still in California with an Ohio address.

That said, transport time has now been very stable for the last fifty years, and it shows no sign of hurrying up anytime soon. The world had a supersonic airliner for forty years. It is being decommissioned in 2003. The speed of sound requires that jet transport aircraft move at about 600 miles per hour for economical travel. Cars with human drivers can safely average about seventy miles an hour on really well maintained roads over a day's drive. Railroad trains, the best in the world, average around one hundred and some miles per hour. Star Trek is still a marvellous fable. These numbers have held for fifty years. Nothing suggests that even the most developed countries will make more than small percentage increases in these rates in the next fifty years. I look forward to being proved wrong on this one every time I get on a plane that will be stuffy and uncomfortable for an eight or nine hour journey somewhere. While I can hope for changes in the stuffy and uncomfortable bit, I truly don't think the travel time will be reduced much in my lifetime. Of course, if we commute to work in our automobile, transport time is creeping the other way, slowing down thanks to all the increased congestion.

We have all grown up, used to these rates. And we will likely all die with them still in place. That said, while jet lag is not changing, jet lag is still hard on our bodies because it short cuts the Genetic Time needed to adapt to changing sunrise and sunset times.

Information Movement - Market Time

Once upon a time, a letter took the same time to get from England to Virginia as did the person carrying it. Today it takes milliseconds through the E-mail.

Once upon a time, producers in America were in competition with producers in England. Today, it is highly likely that the competition is between world-wide entities with holdings in many countries around the globe.

Once upon a time, product design was all accomplished on paper which had to move in Transport Time between people in different locations. Today, much product design occurs in three dimensional mathematical spaces on computing workstations. And with networks, individuals can collaborate on the design from anywhere in the world at any time.

Once upon a time, "consulting with my people" implied a process which might take weeks for the information to move between the stakeholders and for a decision to form. Today, a few pushes on the cell phone buttons put all the stakeholders on line together, immediately.

The list of our life and business processes impacted by this speed up in information movement includes practically everything. In my view, we have been most profoundly impacted by the reduction in the time it takes to invent and update and bring a product to market. Ford Motor Company has a twenty four hour automobile design process running. By distributing the specialties around the world, the sun never sets on the design process. The folks in Germany working on the engine design go home at night knowing that the effects of their day's work are used by the drivetrain designers in the US, whose work is used, in turn, by another design team in Japan, followed by the others in Asia. All of this sets the stage for the next morning in Germany, when the engine work continues with the added work from around the world. Theoretically, we could invent a new car in one year if it had taken three years before installing the global design scheme.

Faster and faster product and service revs are the mark of competitive strength in the global marketplace. When a trend in adolescent hair design is spotted in the south of France, it can be packaged with a plastic clip and a hair spray product and put into test markets in days instead of months. So, a fashion statement which would take months to propagate to the marketplace through magazines before anyone would ever imagine it as a trend, becomes an instant trend through the web, advertising media and the rapid product development cycle.

A trend used to spring from the Genetic Time process of discovery, trial, investment and use. Now a trend can be manufactured by the marketing department in days, and supported with things to purchase at your local store within more days, which further reinforces the perception of a genuine trend. Genetic Time has once again been short circuited. I call this Market Time. And I suggest that this new reality is at the root of the end of change and transition as an occasional matter.

When I buy a product I expect it to last for a while. I expect it to last in value to me and others until I have outworn my need for it and am ready to sell it on and buy the next thing that suits me. That is my plan and expectation. But now, by the time I have genuinely completed my use for it, the product will have been evolved and re-defined in the marketplace many times over. The product line may have disappeared, not to mention the company that produced it. It is possible that the product runs out of value in the market long before it runs out of value to me. The loss of the value, the speed up of new features and the need for products to work with other systems - which are also revving rapidly - lead me to make a new purchase decision. I must almost literally throw away the product and buy a new one to stay current and functional. This is seen widely in the computer and cell phone world where the product revs are measured in months. I suspect it is also true in every other industry which has gone the route of global integration and competition. It is simply the system.

Of course we need to ask why the speed up in product revs? Just because we can? Perhaps. Perhaps the 'Market' of Market Time is really the market for profitable financial deals. Stock markets now hammer industry to deliver quarterly profits and value gains to the shareholder. Organisational goals have become centred on delivering shareholder values. Every quarter. One solution to this is to consolidate competitors, integrate across the world and get rid of spare human capacity and become competitive in a benchmarking sense. Once that is complete, the next step is to have a product mix of a nature which can be revved very rapidly and manufactured for the lowest world costs and sold at the top of the market in each market segment. This keeps the pressure on the consumers to have the latest stuff. People look forward to the latest stuff in fashion, personal toys, automobiles, computers, kitchen appliances, pornography, travel destinations, convenience foods and so on and on. The marketing forces make sure there is compelling emotive reasoning going on and that our credit cards come out of our wallets based on the right primal urge. We are no longer a patient race. We will trade instability for a quick buck most any day.

Show me a company that has 'world class' mentioned anywhere in its literature and I will show you a company going through this 24/7, speed-up-optimisation-world-competition game.

So Market Time adds to our uncertainty in many overt ways. As consumers, products and services come at us faster than ever and we can't 'settle-down' with things before our desire is whipped up by the marketing blitz for the next absolutely must have thing. As workers, the Market Time acceleration means that the foundation businesses which our work life serve are changing their inner structure and assumptions faster than our Genetic Time bodies can integrate the changes.

In TransforMAP terms, uncertainty has gone up to a level where we cannot complete the Voice 1 and 2 work to get ourselves back to a level of certainty which feels stable.

Is any of this going to slow down any time soon? Hardly. The question is, is what I've called Genetic Time, the time it takes for humans to actually process and complete the work to finish, re-invent, and re-commit, really Genetic? Is it hard wired or am I missing something?

Beginning the enquiry takes me off in a new direction.

If we assume straights and curves we expect straights and curves. Especially straights. Any race driver will tell you that hurtling along the Mulsanne Straight at Le Mans at 275 mph is a chance to rest. If we assume we have to have a profound straight on every lap to stay rested and centred and those times are increasingly fleeting, and unpredictable if not downright just not there, then what?

If we assume that engaging chaos and uncertainty is anxiety producing we may not start looking for other life assumptions and mental models which allows for chaos and uncertainty and even find live giving quality within. What does our Mother Culture tell us? What about the pervasive Judeo/Christian monotheistic system offer us? Would an animistic model based on the robust diversity and unfathomable chaos of the natural world suit us better for thriving in the times that are ahead?

And we have to ask whether, just as Transport Time has stalled under the speed of sound, Market Time will stall out at some absolute reference speed. And if so, are us old folks just caught in a singularity which our kids will not be troubled by?

Perhaps we are just in one of the hugest curves of all, the curve of a change in change. Maybe there is a straight coming up which will serve for another couple thousand years or so. Or maybe what is being revealed to us now is that there never were any straights. Just the illusion.

When my principal mentor told me about his view of transformation in 1977, he said that short of a calamity, there was no such thing as a big transformation, unless we personally ignored all the signs and signals along the way. Our job was to stay tuned to ourselves and keep doing the work in small ways that kept us up with ourselves. That way the big cataclysms were far rarer indeed. That was good advice then. I think it remains so. I believe a really well maintained learning organisation probably is weathering all this pretty well. Nimble design companies, generally out on the edge of things anyway likely see all this as opportunity and aren't nervous about it. The reaction of governments and big public, slow moving, organisations is a different matter.

So it all may depend where we sit. But then again it may not.

More to wonder and scribble and argue about for all of us. Meanwhile, how come the car we just bought for $24k is suddenly worth $3k? And it isn't any less effective transportation than the day we bought it. And 'They' say it isn't as safe or as green as anyone of our intelligence and taste would really want it to be. Damn.