This is the second article in a series about a new role, vision, mission for all small to medium business owners. For the first article in the series, which is a regularly updated, living document of new initiatives, see Living Document.
Imagine you are sunbaking on the beach of a Pacific Island. Suddenly you hear hysterical cries: Massive tsunami waves are heading right for you.
You lift your head from your beach towel and look out to sea. The cries are right. The ocean has receded a long way from the beach. But in the near distances massive mountains of water are heading straight for you.
What’s your response? Ignore the cries and stay sunbaking? Bury your head in the sand? Race like mad to the hills? Head for the top floor of your luxury hotel? Hide in the bushes? Grab your surfboard and run out the face the waves and ride them? What?
You’ll get the point of these questions in just a minute.
Extreme events
We all know, Nature’s tsunamis are extreme events. They can occur worldwide wherever there is a large body of water, including inland lakes.
But, now, with climate change, we can be far inland from the beach and still be impacted. New findings show that the threat of rising sea levels to coastal cities and communities throughout the world show a high chance that flooding from tsunamis will now impact much further inland as well.
Think of the tsunami that devastated a portion of northern Japan after the 2011 Tohoku-Oki earthquake. In addition to its other devastating impacts, it caused a nuclear plant to melt down and spread radioactive contamination.
Obliteration incarnate
Major tsunamis are obliteration incarnate. Typically their impact is destructive and devastating.
For example, the oldest recorded tsunami of 479 BCE, wiped out the entire Persian army that was attacking the town of Potidaea in northeast Greece.
Victims galore
More recent tsunamis have dramatically turned peaceful villagers and carefree holidaymakers into victims.
On Friday the 28th of September 2018, a series of earthquakes struck the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. The six metre high tsunami waves that followed, swept away shore-lying houses and buildings in the city of Palu.
The cold statistics conceal, rather than reveal, the chaos, pain, dislocation and grief that followed: Over 4,340 people dead. 10,679 injured. 70,821 evacuated. And, longer term, 206,524 made refugees.
Bodies were wept over and buried. And major areas of Palu cleared away, rethought, reworked, and rebuilt.
Creative destruction
Horrible, frightening, painful, yes! For, as we also saw with the felling of the Twin Towers in New York on 9/11, tsunamis force us back to the bedrock of our physical, emotional, spiritual, social, economic, and political Ground Zero.
But eventually tsunamis lead to transformation and rebirth, to creativity and innovation.
For tsunamis insist we start all over again. Nothing can go back to the way it was. A new and different structure and order must be forged.
An analogy
Ah, yes, you’ve got it. We’re using natural tsunamis, and the questions about our response, as an analogy for our current world scene.
Other types of tsunamis
For, right now, world-wide, we are experiencing ‘whole system’ tsunamis – social, technological, ecological, economic and political – heading directly at us.
Many of these tsunamis are potentially and actually destructive and devastating. Their combined impact is so strong, that virtually most of the major areas of human civilisation need to be cleared away, rethought, reworked, and rebuilt. A massive series of transformations! Quite different futures ahead.
New ‘whole system’ transformation
Too extreme a statement?
Well right now, in 2019, there is a huge global wave of dis-trust about virtually all our current institutions – banks, businesses, parliaments, religious bodies, universities, schools, mass media…
Only 20% of global citizens believe the ‘whole system’ is working for them.
A massive 50% of citizens claim the system is ‘deliberately’ working against them. The rest of us feel the system is not working for us.
And, according the 2019 Edelman Trust Index, an even larger, 75% of global citizens, are crying out that the tide is out. And the tsunami waves are about to hit. Help! Hilfe! Au secours ! Tolong! Āwhina!
So…75% of us demand ‘whole system’ transformation of our environmental, ecological, social, political, cultural, economic fabric.
Existential crisis and transformation
Put all these tsunamis together, and we’re all facing a vital existential transformation about what it means to be human in a very different, newly emerging, world
So what’s our response?
Bury our head in the sand and hope the tsunamis’ll all go away? Flee? Fight? Scream for help? Adapt? Leave it all to others? Or set out to tame and ride the waves, transform what happening, and create new futures out of the destruction?
At Innovating our Futures, we maintain purposeful transformation is our best response.
And given that existing small to medium businesses are the most practised and skilled of innovators. Now, we have a new purpose, a new mission, a new raison d’etre…
New mission for SMEs
Perhaps, surprisingly, well over 50% of the world’s people see businesses as one of the best agents for whole system change.
They ask, even beg us, to pivot both us, and our businesses. Such that we:
Response of Innovating our Futures
At Innovating our Futures, we take this new role and mission of SMEs, very seriously. We are transforming our own businesses.
In an evolving series of articles you’ll find here on LinkedIn, the team dialogue about the Why, What, and How – of this major transformation of our role and mission in our world undergoing major disruptions.
We hope you’ll join us.
Want to know more? Want to dialogue? Want to be part of the tsunami change?
Contact Neville Christie on +61 420 978 932 or neville@nevillechristie.com
You are warmly invited to share this article.
#wavesofchange #newroleSMEs #businesstransformation #newfutures
Next article in this series: Six cheers for climate change… HipHip…!
In the light of huge global changes…as small to medium businesses Founders and Owners… we must now act to transform our Purpose, role, vision, and
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