A case for lifelong learning

In his book “Thank you for being late” (2016), Thomas Friedman echoes what Reg Revans was saying more than 60 years ago. In quoting Eric Teller, CEO of Google X research and development lab, he says that “even though human being and societies have steadily adapted to change, on average, the rate of technological change is now accelerating so fast that it has risen above the average rate at which most people can absorb all these changes. Many of us cannot keep pace anymore.” Later he adds: “When the pace of change gets this fast, the only way to retain a lifelong working capacity is to engage in lifelong learning.”

What the graph shows is that in order to enhance human adaptability, we need to optimize for learning, introducing and applying features that drive technological innovation to our culture and social structures.

I believe that coaching circles provide such a structure. They enable people to face complexity and to deal with change creatively by engaging in collaborative design and learning. At a different scale, this is like what is being done through open source design on the web, where the creative genius of thousands of engineers, programmers and plain enthusiasts is combined and constantly built upon to generate new solutions and applications for business, science and society at large.