Change is a dam — or damn change?
This week, someone in my network shared on LinkedIn that “Amazon received its Part 135 air carrier certificate from the FAA” clearing the runway for the company to use drones to deliver packages. This is a significant step forward, but what caught my attention was the range of reactions this received.
I know, it’s the Internet in the 2020's, so any announcement is bound to get a pretty extreme range of responses, often from people who don’t know what they’re talking about but won’t let that prevent them from getting entrenched in a particular position and blasting everyone who doesn’t share it.
However, in this case there were some interesting comments from knowledgeable people who had a very negative reaction to the news. In particular, a trained commercial pilot expressed skepticism and shared his prediction that these drones would be “falling out of the sky” due to problems such as ice accumulation.
Now, I’m not a pilot myself, so I can’t really weigh in on this technically, but I assume that problems like this (and many more) have been considered by the brilliant team at Amazon Prime Air, and that the FAA probably gave this some consideration. One of the commenters, presumably someone on the team, responded to the pilot’s comment saying that he was like the people standing around at Kitty Hawk commenting “this will never work.” A pretty tame burn, by current Internet standards, but I assume it cut pretty deep.
This got me thinking about people’s attitude towards change. The comments were coming from an airplane pilot. This is a job that I would describe as
someone who regularly stuffs himself with a bunch of strangers in a large tuna can, drives it really fast down a short road, counting on the air over the tuna can’s wings to go slightly faster than the air below so they’ll take into the air before they hit a fence and explode
This was (almost) inconceivable 115 years ago when two bicycle shop owners first flew a heavier-than-air contraption. According to the World Bank, there were over 4 billion air transport passengers in 2018. This pilot who was questioning the feasibility of drone delivery has benefitted from that change in many ways, including his livelihood, but feels threatened by the next one.
Change is hard. Most people believe that change is something that happens a little bit at a time. I actually think that for some type of technology and societal changes, a more apt analogy is that change is like a dam.
Putting up the dam in the first place is hard and requires ingenuity: you need to divert the regular flow of water, build the dam, then restore the flow, which faces the unyielding resistance of the dam wall. For most of the dam’s life, there’s a steady, controlled flow of water. Then one day, due to a change in conditions and the intense, unrelenting water pressure, the dam breaks.
OK, so maybe this is a bit overly dramatic, but it mmay help us undertand the cycle of innovation and people’s attitudes towards new technology, new customs and new ideas.
Most people have a hard time understanding changes that follow exponential growth — we got a rude education in that earlier this year with the inescapable charts about COVID-19 contagion (remember #flattenthecurve?) Perhaps this dam model helps people understand the significant effort required to create change in the first place, the strong resistance that people and incumbents will put up, and the seemingly instantaneous change that follows once the pressure to adopt break through the adoption wall.
For the majority of people, change is not welcome. It may impact their routine, or their jobs or sometimes their lives. Change is messy — outside of Silicon Valley, disruption has negative connotations: it means disturbance or problems which interrupt an event, activity, or process. Most of us don’t like being interrupted, we just want to keep on doing what we were doing.
In fact, it’s so upsetting that many people will think: “Damn change. I was going about my business and all of a sudden this thing happened to me. Why can’t we go back to the way things used to be?”
But once the cracks appear in the dam walls, it’s tough to turn things back.
