Too Big to Fail ? Think Again  

Alex at WorldChanging has a post on Clay Shirky's widely commented on piece on the decline of the newspaper industry and looks ta other vulnerable industries failing to adapt to the winds of change that are blowing - Too Big to Fail? Think Again..

Clay Shirky, makes an excellent point about the collapse of newspapers, which could just as easily apply to a host of other North American industries that are so unwilling to even consider the possibility that times have changed that they've entered a period of surreality:

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.

A whole host of North American industries have allowed fabulists to set their agendas for resisting reform: sprawl developers, auto manufacturers, coal-dependent power companies and cattle feed lots.

What they refuse to see is that a business model is not a mandate. People still want good stories and quality information today, just as they will want housing, mobility, energy and food tomorrow: the newspaper is still a doomed model.

The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ’90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!” The details differed, but the core assumption behind all imagined outcomes (save the unthinkable one) was that the organizational form of the newspaper, as a general-purpose vehicle for publishing a variety of news and opinion, was basically sound, and only needed a digital facelift.

You could very easily rewrite the last sentence to read "the core assumption behind all imagined outcomes (save the unthinkable one) was that the organizational model of American industry, as a general-purpose vehicle for delivering prosperity, was basically sound, and only needed a sustainability facelift" and it would ring just as true.

The single biggest delusion in North America today is that the interconnected planetary problems bearing down on us can be faced with slight alterations to the current order; that a model of delivery prosperity based on suburbs and big cars and consumerism and profligate energy use and the careless spewing of pollution in all directions can be fixed through the swapping out of some of its constituent parts for slightly greener parts -- that green-built McMansions and hybrid cars and compact fluorescent light bulbs will prop the model up indefinitely. They won't, because we are in a situation where incremental reform has already been made meaningless by a revolution in context, and industry CEOs who demand incredulously to know how we're going to run an economy if car-dependent, high-consumption suburban lifestyles go away would do well to understand what Clay is saying here:

When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

We're moving more and more quickly into a period of rapid transformation. We could be embracing that change and setting out to build the next smart, bright green economy. Instead, we allow ourselves to be deceived into thinking that the current models are "too big to fail." They're not, and the longer we listen, the more epic the failure will be.