One of the most common errors in judgment when making life choices is to make plans or decisions based on experience.
When making plans, it seems that our narrow field of vision often causes us to believe that all other things remain constant around us and we rarely make room for the impact of possible change.
This has been the death of many great companies and plans and even relationships.
Remember Kodak?
Eastman Kodak, popularly known as Kodak is the world’s most popular brand of photographic film products. For most of the 20th century, this company held a dominant position in photographic film, and by 1976, they practically defined the industry, owning 90% of the market share of photographic film sales in the United States.
Kodak began to struggle financially in the late 1990s as a result of change.
Their planning and strategy failed to take into consideration the impact of this change, as sales of photographic film began to slow due to the growing adoption of digital photography. The worst part of this story is that Kodak actually invented the core technology used in current digital cameras.
In January 2012, Kodak filed for bankruptcy.
The Kodak story is very instructive. Here’s my summary: Even when you are the biggest in the industry, you are not alone for long.
It is essential that we step out of our comfort zone and connect with the world around us, recognizing that every day, people are re-inventing themselves, learning new things and applying lessons learned to create new experiences; in essence, we need to raise our Change Intelligence.
Change Intelligence is the degree to which you are aware of the changing world around you and your capacity to embrace rather than resist change. It recognizes that time and change happens to all of us and that these two factors are the currencies with which destiny transactions are made.
Is change a good thing?
I’ll bet that when you consider that question, your reaction is likely to be ‘of course it’s a good thing’ and yet, when the demand for change comes to us, most of us will resist.
In the bible, we find time and time again that God announces new times and seasons but even then, people would resist and cling to old familiar rituals. Or at the very most, they would try to accommodate required change while keeping the old ways and thus place new wine in old wineskins.
Remember how Peter kept trying to remind God that Jews weren’t supposed to eat unclean things and insisted on this basis that he would not eat what God had served up? He had bought into the philosophy that Jews were alone and had an exclusive franchise on God. This was his wake up call to the fact that God saw a bigger picture and there were so many other nations in the world that were about to be changed. As partners with God, we must maintain conscious awareness of changing times and seasons and use change to our advantage.
Would you like to increase your Change Intelligence? Here are a few tips to help you get started.
1. Stop being a technology sceptic. It is clear that technology has been at the heart of most changes in the last decade. It is the new ‘English Language’ so ensure that you can speak it well enough for the rest of the world to understand you
2. If you are a parent, spend time learning from, and about your children. It’s a different world from the one you came from
3. Every week, make a conscious effort to check out what’s trending (This is today’s word for ‘what the world is talking about’)
4. Read the papers and subscribe to a few blogs (Blog? That’s another strange word. It basically means a web diary)
5. If you are married, every year, spend time talking to your spouse about their changes in terms of expectations. Don’t become a fossil in your marriage.
Here are 5 quick questions to test your level of Change Intelligence:
- Are you aware of what is trending in your area on Twitter?
- Do you actively manage a professional profile on LinkedIn?
- What does Gangnam Style mean to you?
- What is IrokoTV?
- Do you still conduct all your meetings face to face or do you Skype?
‘Peter Coker leads a team of creative solution providers at 1Source Technology Partners. Together they plan, execute and manage Technology Projects of all sizes across West Africa. He is passionate about God, the power of applied human potential and technology’.