From Forestburg, AB (coal) to Canal Flats, BC (forestry), we have worked with single resource communities faced with the closure of their primary employer.
When a foundation of community economy disappears, communities die a little, or a lot. Generations have found comfort in the rhythm of predictability. A community’s character – its every fibre of being – is rooted in the culture and traditions of an industrial tie that binds. And how unique those traditions can become: from winter’s day folk songs sung round the table at a Newfoundland fishing village, to the summertime lumberjack festivals that celebrate proud traditions and heritage.
Similar to how a person experiences loss, when stability becomes unstable and everything familiar is being questioned, a community with a new hole in its soul mirrors the five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance). There is no easy path forward, and all options are hard: Give up and leave the community; Have hope – some might say blind faith – that what is gone will come back; Fight an uphill battle to make it come back; Participate in setting out a new horizon line for the community. If we believe our community is worth fighting for, we are going to have to find “acceptance” amidst our grief more quickly. We are going to have to move on.
One might imagine that change was disruptive when humanity invented the wheel, discovered the world wasn’t flat, invented the printing press, or put the first car on a road. The fact is that change is a constant. The challenge these days is that it’s not change we have trouble with, it’s the pace of change. And it’s accelerating.
Kurzwell’s Law of Accelerating Returns (Src 1) argues that in the 21st century we won’t experience 100 years of progress. It will be more like 20,000 years of progress – because we are building exponentially on everything we have learned to date.
The iPhone, which has upended the way we communicate and interact with the world, just turned 10. The first manned NASA Mars Mission – a 55,000,000 km journey skittering across space and time – is a little over a decade away. A headset puts virtual realities in our eyes. Robots already have adaptive thinking abilities – from chess to ability to hold real-time conversations. We are 3D printing houses. “Ask Google” has and is transforming how we learn – the challenge is no longer about what you know, but rather knowing the right questions to ask. The industries we talk about tomorrow are not what most of us think about today: nanotechnology, biomimicry, green chemistry, predictive analytics, biometrics, the Internet of Things – just to name a few. The combustion engine will soon only be found in a museum.
More communities are going to face these choices. Case in point – automation is predicted to displace 40% of our workforce in Canada within 20 years (Src 2). Small town Canada will bear the brunt of the rise of the robots (Src 3). The pace of change is a genie that has been let out of a bottle and it’s not going back in. The future will simply not be at all like the past.
As a result, in our personal lives and in our communities we will be presented with a stark choice at many junctures in our existence: adapt or die.
We may have three to four careers in our lifetime. Our communities will have to face this choice on a more real-time basis if we are to achieve next generation prosperity and enable life well-lived.
What are we to do? We are going to have to get comfortable with our discomfort created by frequent up-ending of the way we know our world and our community. The right attitude will help us be better prepared; leadership, decision making style and process, and community development planning must see the future through a prism of opportunity presented by being open to the world vs. insulating ourselves from it. We must be willing to experiment with new ways of doing things. We will need to nurture our capacity to adapt: one year plans not 20 year plans; education systems designed for life-long learning and teaching of core technologies & skills that will shape our future; labour force training and re-training; enablement of entrepreneurial pathways, and shaping of the adaptable attitude in community dialogue and capacity building to start.
It’s been said that when we fear the future, we fight for what we know. We have to resist the temptation to look through the rear-view mirror, appeasing the voices of those who are afraid, unsettled, or displaced by a new future that arrives at the doorstep ever day. Turning over a new leaf requires a view squarely through the front windshield.
Charles Darwin’s words are as appropriate today as they have ever been: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, or the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.” We are not in control of change. Whether we adapt – pursuing a destiny vs accepting fate – is a choice we have. It’s the only choice we have.
Rynic (www.rynic.org) – for breakthrough strategy and communications.
Src 1: http://www.businessinsider.com/ray-kurzweil-law-of-accelerating-returns-2015-5