Re-Tuning Your Radar

Guy Kawasaki pointed me to an interesting report about internet trends done by Avenue A/Razorfish. You can get the 104 page report for free as a PDF. While the whole area of internet advertising and web site design is not my specialty, the title of the report caught my attention: Fast Forward: Designing for Constant Change.

We hear a lot about the accelerated pace of change these days. Certainly changes on the internet and in web design are outpacing changes elsewhere, but I think it’s safe to say that there are scarcely any areas where the pace of change has slowed down!

So their question is important: how do you design (think, plan, manage, lead, implement…) in an environment of constant  (or at least accelerated) change? It requires careful attention, but I think we get caught up in simply getting things done so we take it for granted.

If you are making moves in a fixed environment with relatively limited possible changes (a chess game, for instance), your “radar” ends up being tuned in a particular way. You notice particular things, while others slip by. The world operates much less like a chess game than it used to, but we have not re-tuned our radar, or at least not enough.