We are in the capitalist’s dilemma today. Investors continue applying doctrines that were appropriate when capital was scarce. But because today capital is abundant and the cost of capital today is essentially zero, the same rules are the wrong rules. It’s as if our leaders in Washington are standing on a beach holding fire hoses full open, pouring more capital into an ocean of capital.

Clayton Christensen writing on why pouring more money into banks won’t jumpstart the economy. Money has become a commodity, and investors have lots of it, but no safe (‘relatively safe from uncertainty’) investments.

We have uncertain tax policies, uncertain political alignments, uncertain geopolitics: so everyone is waiting on the sidelines as the temperature rises, droughts continue and the water wars start, food prices rise and the poor begin to go hungry, and the liberal/conservative face-off yields no answers.

The postnormal is an era defined by dilemmas to face and straddle, not problems to be solved. Our analytic approaches — that worked reasonably well in the postmodern industrial era and earlier — bring little insight here, if any.

And the majority of the elites and nearly all of the average citizens think we are still in the past era, expecting a conventional roller coaster ride through boom-and-bust, wondering ‘when will things get back to normal?’. But we have moved past that, into a time where we can’t get back to normal. The only way out is ahead, into a postnormal frame of reference, postnormal responses, and a postnormal realignment of the challenges and resources we share, and new perspectives on how to get clear of the trappings and entanglements of the past.

CNN

5 February 2013 46
welcome to the postnormaldilemmas not problemsuncertaintypostnormalchristensenclayton christenseneconomics

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Web anthropologist, futurist, author. My focus is the future, and the tectonic forces pushing business, media, and society into an unclear and accelerating future. more.

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Socialogy

  • John Hagel | John offers up some great insights, like the fact that passion is lower the larger that businesses get.

  • Euan Semple | A chat with my old pal, and the author of Organizations Don't Tweet, People Do

  • Will McInnes | The author of Culture Shock and managing director of Nixon/McInnes

  • Jennifer Magnolfi | An interview with the woman who said, 'Work is not a place you go, it's a thing you do'.

    • Hot Now

  • What Drives Us? | A draft chapter of my book, discussing motivations, Maslow's hierarchy, and fluidarity.

  • Socialogy: Interview With John Hagel | I Speak with Joh Hagel about the innovation at the edge.

  • Complex organisation arises from webs of interaction among causal factors | So, it turns out that DNA is, in fact, a great metaphor for business culture, but only after you realize that DNA is not a few hundred off-on switches, but instead a universe of unknowable complexities, that we can interact with, and understand at some abstract cartoonish level, but not control, and never fully comprehend.

  • Bitcoin May Be the Global Economy’s Last Safe Haven | Paul Ford

  • Innovators Get Better With Age | Companies make a mistake by relying too much on the innoations of the young, because Nobel laureats don't come into their prime until their 50s.

    • Oldie

  • Infodemics | 2009 | Passing incomplete or inaccurate information about some risk event can make people take actions that increase the damage of the event itself.

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