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Look Before You Leap, Part I

I feel for city officials these days. They're caught in a period of tremendous change, driven by technology advances that make possible new ways of looking at things and new methods of tackling age old problems. The Smart Cities I see are minding that adage, "Look Before You Leap." But there's a limit to the power of investigation. At some point, it comes decision time. Then the guiding adage becomes "He Who Hesitates is Lost."

The nature of evolution is that things change over time, and as an environment changes, it behooves those within the environment to do one of two things: adapt or perish. Staying the same in the face of change is sometimes seen as another alternative, but it's really just a slower version of the second, a long slow slide into oblivion, as opposed to a dramatic leap over the cliff. Stasis is inadequate for the simple reason that the environmental change has made the current state less effective. I wrote about the nature of change in our physical world two months ago in the post Rock of Ages, Water of Life. Change is just the way our world and our lives are. Our task is to figure out how to adapt.

Now is a good time for deep thoughts, for as we approach the Christmas holiday, we also approach the end of the year and a new beginning. Perhaps then it's time to go through that annual ritual of looking back before we look forward. I don't know whether or not this analysis will make it to the vaulted form of commentary known as the End-of-Year Top Ten List , but I thought I'd start to capture my thoughts on where we we've come and where we're going when it comes to broadband and cities.

I'd argue that cities now have an ample body of evidence on these new alternate broadband technologies. Those who have done the work to understand these changes and their implications have what they need now to make decisions regarding broadband. They just need to figure out what they want to do about it. They have to decide if they are ready to act. They need to determine who they want their city to be when it grows up. Being on the cusp of change is not only a scary time for an individual or business, but also for a society or a city.

In a previous post, I described how having mobile broadband available as a new option has put cities at a decision point on how to go forward, which I called Makng the Leap. In hindsight, I realize my thoughts haven't changed so much from May 2005, the month I launched this website, also the month I put my thoughts into this white paper On Structural Change. I pointed out back then that the Internet is a big grinder, working away at our institutions and structures, because it is so darn efficient as a distribution mechanism. The issue facing cities is whether they want to go down the path of full optimization by leveraging those Internet efficiencies. If they do, it'll mean dramatic change. Here's how I put it in the white paper back then.

What do all these changes and challenges that threaten the status quo have in common? They rely on what I would call the Five Pillars of Disruption: 1) Technology, which creates new tools and methods to do more with less, brings ever lower costs and greater capability, whose essence is captured in Moore's Law; 2) Innovation driven by a global industry of research and development, wherein smart people apply new scientific discoveries to the marketplace in new ways not just to compete, but to change the rules of competition; 3) Capitalism, the system of economics that provides capital to new compelling business ideas, organizes production and labor, and efficiently distributes goods and services to markets for ever greater consumer value, creating more wealth than ever before seen in history; 4) Democracy, which provides the political stability where capital markets can flourish and workers can find the best way to apply their skills to improve their lot in life; and finally, 5) Diversity, whether of culture or of opinion, which allows differing perspectives to produce creative solutions for problems.

For all its warts, the US marketplace has been the country that best embodied these traits in the past, but a variety of challengers are emerging in the world marketplace.

These five factors combine to drive change at an ever-increasing pace. But the nature of this change, unlike change in the past, is to empower the edges - the individuals in the marketplace are gaining the power to do more for themselves, whether it is to produce the creative content more efficiently, or to distribute the information product amongst themselves, each of the industries above will see its control of the levers of distribution challenged.

Like the recording companies who file suit against individuals for theft, these industries will not go quietly into the night. But the power of change is inevitable, because it is not limited to one government and cannot be controlled. It is Endemic, Pervasive, and Unstoppable and it can no longer be viewed as a unique or temporary phenomenon. It is here to stay. What are we to conclude from this new state of permanence I will call structural change?

I am suggesting that leaders in the public and private sectors consider this paradigm shift.

Adaptation to such structural change must become a core competency or organizations will begin an inevitable decline.

Such change is along multiple dimensions. It can take many forms and I think this topic is as good as any to assess where we are at the end of another year. So in the following posts I'll summarize the changes in city government implied by the structural change we all face. Because whether we acknowledge it or not, the change is here. How each of us chooses to deal with it is another story.

Posted on December 20, 2007 at 08:37 AM

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