This article is written by Isabel Wu from Meta Management and covers all things digital. Meta Management is a consultancy specialising in helping its clients with the organisational assets that drive effective digital transformation and create value in a hyper-connected, constantly changing world.
After experiencing more than a year of protracted COVID-related or accelerated disruptions, what is “normal”?
For centuries, the question was a geometric one. Circa 1500, the scientifically minded like Leonardo Da Vinci, were learning to take a technical approach to design and drafting. To say something was “normal” meant it was set at a perfect right angle.
In the 1800s, mathematicians and statisticians used “normal” to describe data sets. One such statistician was Belgian Adolphe Quetelet who happened to study humans. His 1835 theory proposed an “average man”, with certain features (height, weight, colour), intelligence and morality, described the model citizen. As other anatomists and physiologists built on this work, “standard” and “normal” were used interchangeably to mean “ideal”.
Another statistician, England’s Francis Galton, took things a step further. If the “normal” could be used to create a model society, then abnormal could be identified to rid the human gene pool of “undesirables”. Features such as head size, toe lengths and facial shapes were studied for their link to the “genetic flaws” of disabilities, mental illness, criminality, illegitimacy and poverty.
The emerging field of social sciences burgeoned into the 1900s, behavioural applications normalised “normal” to become synonymous with “natural”.
Using an intelligence scale devised by French psychologist Alfred Binet in 1909 – aka the “IQ test” – society could be divided along the lines of “normal” or “unfit”. In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against a plaintiff, Carrie Buck, the “feeble-minded” daughter of another “daughter of a feeble minded mother”, to approve her involuntary sterilisation. “Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” the Court noted. While the case was extreme, it was not unusual and worse would yet be perpetrated by governments in the name of “normality”.
It naturally followed that “normal” would apply in business, too, to define “things as they should be”. The works of the likes of F. W. Taylor (scientific management), Henry Ford (mass production) and Elton Mayo (the Hawthorne experiments) would cement standardisation with performance.
Somewhere in the morass of statistics, novel experimentation and human and social engineering, “normal” was no longer whatever occurred naturally; it was whatever a certain group decided it should be.
Many early theories may now have been discredited, but the desire for “normal” continues. So much so that even when we can identify all that is wrong with it, we still yearn for it.
The Age of Digital is the first real challenge to the constructs developed in the fledgling days of modern science. It’s not that “normal” has been disrupted; it’s that those early scientists failed to contemplate the world we live in today. Evolution, including rude shocks caused by man and nature, are the true states of normal.
If we broaden our view, we can see that all progress came not from adherence to certain constructs, but from its opposite: invention, innovation and ingenuity. Even followers of the normalist school of thought achieved their success by defying old ideas.
We have never had the ability to generate new solutions as we do now with technology. Over the past 200 “normal” years, we have been limited by issues of cost, scalability and adaptability. Today, the accessibility of digital solutions means invention, innovation and ingenuity should be part of every enterprise’s business as usual. Or should I say, business unusual?
We don’t need technology to survive disruption; we need it to survive the problem of normal. As Da Vinci’s 15th century Florentine contemporary Machiavelli said, “Never waste the opportunity offered by a good crisis.”
About Meta Management
Meta Management is a consultancy specialising in helping its clients with the organisational assets that drive effective digital transformation and create value in a hyper-connected, constantly changing world.
This article is also featured in Edition 38 of The Bugg Report Magazine
