5.1 On learning faster than the competition

Learning fasterDo a Google search on the term ‘learn faster than the competition’ and you’ll come up with a number of sources to which that quote is attributed, Arie de Geus and Peter Senge getting the most mentions.

Google is better placed than me to answer the question of where the phrase first came from, because it can call up millions of documents and do a source check far quicker than any human.

At maybe that’s the real point today about learning faster than the competition.

When people discuss the future of work today, they often describe the importance of learning faster than the competition.

But when that competition is code and algorithms and the runtime of an executed script can go a million times faster than you can, faster than any human is capable of… what then?

In a quest for utility, businesses and people alike are discovering the pinch points.

Global connectivity and always-on technology has meant we have lived in a 24/7 world for a while. And as humans we struggle to keep up with factory productivity.

It’s time to be clear on something: No matter how fast we go, a race against machines is one humans are going to lose.

Real adaptability isn’t only about speed.

Maybe learning faster than the competition in this kind of situation means asking the question, ‘What shall we do instead?’

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