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.

5 February 2013 46 Permalink