Systems are powerful. But they are not permanent
The great economist John Maynard Keynes had something to say about change. “The difficulty,” he said, “lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.” Too often, the status quo seems fixed. Yet the evidence of history is that human resilience – and human determination – is a powerful predictor of change.
Recently, I was a guest on Thought Sparks, the podcast of Columbia University professor and Dialogue columnist Rita Gunther McGrath. McGrath and I discussed how the societal shifts of the 20th century tell an invaluable lesson: systems are powerful, but they are not permanent. They are built by people. And they can be changed by people.
The social upheaval of the 1980s was acute in my native South Africa. But it was identifiable throughout the West. Victory for liberty over authority could be seen in the US and in Europe, as the Cold War thawed and the Warsaw Pact crumbled. Powerful systems that had shaped people were changed by people.
I told McGrath that we have reached a similar cusp today. The world is in polycrisis – a period of instability unknown at least since the turmoil of the 1980s. Arguably, you must rewind as far as the 1960s – when the Cold War almost became hot – to find a world as unstable as today’s. Meanwhile, the relentless march of artificial intelligence – an unstoppable force for which individuals, companies and governments remain unprepared – shrouds the future in unimaginable uncertainty.
Those who believe that systems are fixed might preach that the world will now fragment. The twin superpowers of the US and China will grow ever further apart. Global cooperation will become impossible. Economic and societal power will taper into the hands of an ever-fewer number of tech pioneers. Human jobs will be replaced by robots. Yet to presume the future is predetermined is wrong. The world is uneven. We cannot assume that it will remain the same. The status quo was shaped by systems. And those systems can be changed. Paradoxically, AI is a likely facilitator of that shift. It democratizes knowledge. And knowledge is power – and the tool of change.
McGrath describes today as a once-in-a-century inflection point. The march of technology is hoovering global capital; income and power inequalities are growing. Yet businesses – and governments – can shift the system. In the 1940s, a business-led organization called The Committee for Economic Development set out to guarantee demand by establishing a stable middle class, even if it meant corporate profits had to be lower in the short-term. In the US, the CED’s work resulted in the Employment Act of 1946, which made economic stability and employment the responsibility of the federal government. And it sparked the Marshall Plan, a program of foreign aid that helped European nations rebuild after the war.
The CED deliberately broke the system to change the world order – and make it work better. Every organization can play a role in effecting such a shift today. How would the world look if companies found a wider purpose and acted upon it? Change can happen. But it needs willing changemakers to smash the mold.
Dr Sharmla Chetty is chief executive of Duke Corporate Education
