Change & Learning

Change usually occurs as a result of newly acquired knowledge or experience. It happens after we have learned or experienced something new. Based on this learning, we can form a new opinion or make a new decision on something different from the one we held before.

At the same time change appears for most of us as something unwanted and thus it is common to express resistance to any change. This resistance has been described and also categorized in some books (e.g.  "Beyond the wall of resistance" by Rick Maurer). However, what is important to remember is that change always happens -either we like it or not - thus we must learn how we can handle it.

When thinking about Change it always reminds me of the beautiful quote from Heraclitus “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.”. In a nice way, he captures the essence that the only thing constant in our life is actually change.  Every aspect is affected by this from professional to personal development and even life values. 

The idea here is not that we should always blindly accept change without a second thought, far from it; linking to the Values & Ethics topic we need to be critical, as there are some core elements that it is better to remain unchanged - the ones who make us who we are. So it more that we learn to embrace change and also to look for the changes that are closer to where we would like to be. 

Information Age

Nowadays it is easier than ever to acquire new information. The advent of new Information Technologies has changed how the whole society operates, behaves, and exchanges information. Besides, the speed at how these technologies improve and grow is tremendous. No wonder why we call our times the “Information or Digital Age”. With new information comes new knowledge which is an element that leads to change.

On the other hand, we acquire and change our existing knowledge through the process of learning. Learning is something that takes place in our minds, and it is something that happens over time. Thus, it becomes important that we become efficient and critical on which information we choose to select and acquire. So in the past, we had to work much harder to identify and acquire the information we needed; today we have a vast amount of information available that we need to sort and select in terms of relevance and accuracy. If we could judge the result of learning from its final output in the past and today after a time-bound period -  e.g. a year so in totality in both cases, the time to process and learn remains the same  - as long as we become experts on identifying fast which information is accurate and important, we can come much further today in the understanding of a topic, acquiring a skill, etc. due to the easiness and also forms that the modern technology offers. However, acquiring such type of "sorting" skills and critical mind is something that we also have to learn but also something that we can reuse as we develop further.

Impact of the technology change

Technology developments can be pointed easily as a clear example of rapid change, especially information technology. This in return drives expectations in peoples' behavior, businesses, and organizations to adjust and progress accordingly. For several businesses, currently, it is very much in focus on how to transition to the "Digital Age" to survive. For people, we somehow are expected to react faster, familiarize faster, understand faster, etc. This causes frustration and also sometimes concerns if these rapid changes are in the right direction. It is especially true if you compare how different generations view and understand technology development improvements.

At the same time, we should not weigh this heavier than it really is, and even more, it should not concern us more than it is needed. After all, not all the Technologies we hear and be informed about will become the norm. Accepting and be critical to the information we receive as we discussed before also holds for when it comes to new Information Technologies. That we take the time to evaluate to what degree something that appears disruptive for the world today will be there in the long run too. It is the changes that will be here in the long run that will affect after all and thus impact our life.