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“I have scars on my hands from touching certain people.”

J.D. Salinger

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Some people come into your life and scar your heart.

Some people come into your life and scar your hands.

Here is the difference.

The ones who scar your hands effect what you do.

The scars are best practices, “the way things are done” and any number of rules of the road. Simplistically, scars are rules that suggest principles, or being principled, are less important or even unimportant. The consequence, or cost, is lost craftsmanship. The ability to craft things – life, events, work, etc.

But then there is a different scar. Values. Yeah. I just said values. From the moment you are born you have people suggesting what you should value, what life values and what people think is valued. Every parent, teacher, school, club, coach you touch will scar your view of life’s value exchange. But it gets a bit worse from there. Not only do you get messages on what is valued, and they are rarely aligned among all input, you begin getting counseled on values. This spans from the general vapid ‘value’ to some specifics. It can become a confusing mix of scars.

Honesty is important, but its okay to keep some things to yourself.

People’s dignity is important; but some people are deemed more important than others.

Integrity is important; but winning may trump integrity on occasion.

Oh. Winning. Yeah. How you win matters; but losing makes you a loser, so do what it takes to win.

And the churches tend to offer some specific values and, yet, offer a parachute in terms of “everyone sins.”

So. The values are rigid; until they are not.

And then the business world starts whispering “shared values” (which is different than shared attitudes) which morph into some posters on the wall, some nice words in a handbook, and some inevitable chafing on existing scars you already have when you touch the new shared values construct.  Why? Well. Sometimes the values of an individual (the values you value most) are a bit different than what is outlined in shared values and it is like trying to jam a round peg into an elliptical hole. And maybe just a bit worse is that these ‘shared values’ aren’t really principles, just broad words that create some massive spaces within which some fairly dubious behavior can be justified.

All that said.

I began with the thought that hand scars effect what you do. Actions. “Doing” choices. And that is where the rubber hits the road. Doing choices, for the most part, are individual choices. Scars or no scars, they are your hands and you can do with them what you choose to do. Ponder.

“Each moment is a place you’ve never been.”

Mark Strand

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Innovation can embody some seemingly innocuous inspirations. This is also true of social behavior and social dynamics. What I am referring to is that a nonlinear “exaptation” occurs.

In biology ‘exaptation’ are variations on the usual variations of natural selection. Unlike adaptations, which are changes to an organism that respond to environmental conditions, exaptations are novel, unexpected applications of these new traits. For example, wings evolved as an extension of reptile’s webbed forelimbs wherein evolution was in search of a stronger limb, yet, somewhere along the way the ‘newly winged’ discovered its capacity for flight.

“An organ initially constructed for one purpose may be converted into one for a wholly different purpose.”

Charles Darwin

I say all of that to talk about technology. And I don’t mean anything specifically within technology, just technology itself. I read somewhere years ago that the most profound change brought about by technology will not be some new program, AI or even involve some whizbang software, the most profound change will reside in our generic expectations of technology itself. Through its ubiquity the broader shifts will occur in corollary effects that trickle in, and out, and throughout, everyone – the subtle gradual changes that shift the foundation upon what we know and what we think (about Life and ourselves). Living in our technology-created-“memory palaces” (or information spaces always nudging us) will inevitably engineer a social transformation which, in turn, inevitably cascades into the pragmatic functions of life itself – education, healthcare, business, etc. In other words, maybe technology will offer us ‘exaptations’ of which we cannot envision. And maybe worse is that some of these exaptations we cannot envision, will make our lives easier, but worse.

Norbert Weiner, Alvin Toffler and Marshall McLuhan all invested a lot of energy and brain power thinking about this and even telling us in the 1960’s and 1970’s – but I am not sure we actually listened. We fell in love with all the technology things and widgets and embraced, for the most part, how we adapted. But. What they were warning us about were of exaptation.

Which leads me to effectuation.

A causation approach focuses on a predefined goal and then goes about finding the means to attains the goal. An effectuation approach focuses on the means at hand and then have them coalesce with the intent to achieve some outcomes which inevitably achieve some goals (not all predefined).

Effectuation is most often discussed within business and how entrepreneurs shape performance. I bring it up because I fear someone truly thinking about what I am bringing up will jump to designing a goal and pursuing it (causation). I fear it because in a dynamic environment like technology and society, by the time we attain that goal, the goalposts will have moved – most likely dramatically. The truth is that this technology-society battle we are fighting is currently asymmetrical and technology has the leverage. I am not a fan of the word ‘scale’, but the reality is technology is scaling exponentially AND with velocity, faster than human brains can scale, and attempting to address it solely with causation approaches is doomed to fail. The real conclusion anyone should take is to embrace effectuation. Take what exists and use it, and the skills that developed all those things, to materialize real progress in real time and outcomes occur making predefined goals irrelevant. Its kind of like nudging at scale.

Anyway.

As the saying goes, ‘the street always finds new uses for things,’ and with technological ubiquity in most lives, we should be paying attention to ‘the street always finds exaptation while we are not looking and maybe technology will encourage people to fly when they have no wings and, well, we will crash’.

Yeah. There is a lesson lurking in that bad metaphor I just shared.

Ponder.