Living between the Two Ages

So I am sitting having breakfast in San Francisco and talking with a friend about this being The Age of Constraint.

How in our personal lives we say we have less time and energy than ever before in which to accomplish more than ever before.

How in our professional lives – whether we are in a state of brand famine or brand feast – all of us would love a little more resource, frankly, to be confident of hitting those stretch ambitions we have signed up for.

How as citizens of the planet, we need to lean into solutions that use up much less of the finite resources the earth has left. In short that constraint, and how we learn to deal with it, will be a critical part of what defines us as human beings from now on.

My friend looks surprised. We aren’t in the Age of Constraint, he says – we’re in the Age of Abundance. An almost overwhelming abundance of information, most obviously, but really an abundance of access: look at how the democratisation of all kinds of technology and products is making them available to a vast and ever-increasing proportion of the world’s population.

I was nonplussed by our conversation, until I realised that we had been taking an unhelpfully Western perspective in the conversation – we had been talking as if only one or the other could exist at the same time. And yet in fact it is how we handle the co-existence of both, of course, and the dynamic interrelationship between them, that will drive our personal and business success in the future. Almost like tectonic plates, where they rub together and create the most heat, that’s where the real challenges and opportunities for us will lie. Look, for instance, at One Laptop Per Child: an ambition to create abundance demanded a fierce constraint (making a computer for $100) that led to radical breakthroughs in everything from design to teaching methods to Government relationships. Which in turn unlocked the abundance of the original ambition.

We need to live in between those two tectonic plates. They will continue to create a lot of heat, but where there’s heat there’s opportunity.

This article first appeared in Campaign Asia Pacific. Read more from Adam Morgan in our Clubhouse.