Surfing Temporal Tides
What to do when caught between the opposing forces of the past and the future
Clovelly Beach sits right in the middle of the beautiful Coogee-to-Bondi walk near Sydney, Australia.
It’s protected by a long concrete pier. As a result, it’s branded as a perfectly safe and calm spot for a family day on the water.
In rough seas, however, that same pier funnels the breakers into gnarly churning waves.
Catch it on a good day, and you’re bathing in tranquil waters. Catch it on a rough day, and you’re caught in the riptide.
We swam it on a windy day, a few years ago. Waves a few feet high, cresting over the pier. Our host, a Sydney local, shared the trick with Clovelly. “Dive in when the waves cover the rocks. Then swim to the next set of stairs. Easy. Bye.”
And he dove in. He gracefully bobbed and weaved with the waves and emerged 30 yards down the pier with a big smile.
We’re the same age, same fitness level. How hard could it be, I thought.
I waited for a breaker to cover the rocks then I dove in. Sketchy feeling for someone born by a lake, not an ocean. Treacherous rocks one second, four feet of water the next. Trust the locals. It felt like I dove into a blender, not the sea. The waves broke from all angles. An unpredictable barrage of whitecaps. I started to swim as hard and fast as I could. The stairs I jumped from were now out of reach. The only way out was the next set. The minutes felt like hours, thrashing against the waves. When I finally reached the railing, I dragged myself out and lay in a huffing heap on the concrete.
My Aussie host just smiled and laughed. “You tried to outmuscle the current, mate. You’ll never win with that attitude. Work with the tides and you’ll be alright.”
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His advice applied to far more than ocean swimming. We are pushed and pulled by forces every day. Work, family, emotion, money, neurotransmitters, apps, politics, weather, and so on.
The most powerful force, however, is time.
Listen carefully to any debate and you’ll see the temporal tides in action. Some “future of work” folks are pulled back to the past, to the old normal of 9-5 full time in the office; others are thrust into the future, to the full-remote all the time new paradigm. You see this in politics, progressive v. conservative; in art, classic v. modern; and music, analog v. digital.
What if we could diagnose underlying conditions, avoiding the riptides while riding the waves?
What if we could sense the tone of a conversation before we had it? Or intuit the source of the hesitancy to action? What if we could empathize with the countervailing forces acting on our colleagues, and throw them a lifeline when they are struggling, or cheer them on when they are cresting a wave.
We can. With a 2x2. This is part 1 in a 2 part series.
First, we survive the ripcurrents. Then, we’ll surf the waves.
People feel forces pushing and pulling them and they experience them in different ways. Think about the difference between moving 50km/h vs. standing facing a 50km/h wind. One is exhilarating and feels like progress, the other’s more harrowing, requiring effort just to stand still.
The forces are the past and the present. The domains are the known and the unknown.
Certainty (Future + Known)
What you hear: “Here’s the answer”
What’s happening: Humans have an instinctive need for certainty. We love the simplistic answer and hate “it depends…” even if deep down, we know there’s more to it. Politicians exploit this, as do startup founders, religious leaders, fitness influencers, and others. We anchor in the fact that tomorrow can be better than today, and that there’s a clear path to get there. The subtext is that any deviation from this course – either questioning the veracity of the solution, or straying from it – is somehow wrong, bad, immoral, or misinformed. This is the realm of the overconfident sailor, sure that calmer waters lie just beyond the whitecaps.
What you can do: Probe and explore. Dig into second and third-order consequences. Ask about the reasons behind the need for certainty. Propose an alternative, but equally compelling future state vision. Shift the conversation away from data presented as a certainty, and toward art, culture, and story to explore possible alternative futures.
Impatience (Future + Unknown)
What you hear: “Anything is better than this”
What’s happening: Action via-negativa. The current situation isn’t working, or maybe it’s just stagnant, and people want change for changes’ sake. Mea culpa here. Innovation teams are guilty of this. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. People ask us to help them think differently. How lame would it be to end a workshop by saying “you know what, Status Quo is the best idea we have”? We want a better future even if we don’t know what it’ll look like. This poses risks to order and effectiveness.
What you can do: Weigh the new against the old. What elements are worth keeping. What decisions led to this point. Deploy Chesterton’s Fence heuristic: “A core component of making great decisions is understanding the rationale behind previous decisions. If we don’t understand how we got “here,” we run the risk of making things much worse.”
Regret (Past + Unknown)
What you hear: “But what if…”
What’s happening: People are wary of change at an emotional level, without data or reason to back it up. Regret is a personal feeling – loss aversion at its finest. We value what we have more than what we don’t, even if we don’t know what the alternative is. When the water is murky, you’re only afraid of what you imagine to be there.
What you can do: Compete with an ambitious, compelling, empathetic, and creative vision. Show them what the future holds, and how they play a part. Explore everything they’ve learned and gained from the past; equipping them for the new (even if uncertain) tomorrow.
Tradition (Past + Known)
What you hear: “We’ve always…”
What’s happening: Change is seen as an affront to history. We must respect our elders, our culture, our rituals, and our mandates. Notions of duty, honour, allegiance, and identity are at play here. This ripcurrent is the strongest of the four, and you must proceed with caution.
What you can do: Reframe the intent. Use 5 whys to get at why the original intent of the tradition. [Ed note: an illustrative story from an old cookbook. A couple was in the kitchen, preparing Easter ham. The cook cut off about one inch from either end of the ham. The other partner asked why he cut the end off, proclaiming “that’s a waste of good ham!” The cook said, “that’s the way my mom prepared the ham.” Their partner asked, “why did your mom cut the ends off?” The cook didn’t know. Later, the cook called his mom to find out why she cut the ends of the ham off. His mom said: “so the ham could fit in the baking pan.”] Is there a way you can honor it in a new way? Or better yet, go back to the true roots of it and pay deeper respects than the current model? Paint the future as a homage to the past, building on the strengths, lessons, trials, and triumphs of yesterday.
With ripcurrents, the best start is to acknowledge them. Like the red flags on the beach, beware. You might not need to do anything else. Or, you might not be able to do anything else. Shelve the conversation and come back another day, when the temporal weather has changed, the tides are in your favour, and the sun is out.
These undercurrents are as much emotional as they are temporal. Tread lightly, and with empathy. In a world of great and constant change, sometimes a small tradition is all someone has to hang onto; that last shred of stable identity.
Innovation, then, is as much about identity as it is about invention.
Stay tuned next week, where we spot cracks in the clouds; sun peeking through, and bluebird days are just on the horizon.
A force this powerful can drown you or drive you.
Bring your sunscreen and wetsuit, it’s gonna be a wild ride.
Onward.
What we’re reading (and listening to)
Take Two Hours of Pine Forest and Call Me in the Morning - These days, screen-addicted Americans are more stressed out and distracted than ever. And there’s no app for that. But there is a radically simple remedy: get outside. (Question: how might nature be built into the retirement planning process?)
[Podcast] Becoming Data: Data and Infrastructure -Exploring the different infrastructures that data interacts with and flows through. Whose values get embedded into the algorithms that increasingly govern our lives? How are these data infrastructures complicating what it means to be human?
Farewell, Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy - The price for Ubers, scooters, and Airbnb rentals is going up as tech companies aim for profitability.
Why embracing change is the key to a good life - How we handle change is the essence of our existence and the key to happiness, particularly in our current times of uncertainty.
They Hacked McDonald’s Ice Cream Machines—and Started a Cold War - Secret codes. Legal threats. Betrayal. How one couple built a device to fix McDonald’s notoriously broken soft-serve machines—and how the fast-food giant froze them out.
Last word
“The man who views the world at 50
the same as he did at 20
has wasted 30 years of his life.”
Muhammed Ali