We are entering an era of incredible technological innovation that will spawn profound change in how we live and work.

Disease will be eliminated, we will colonize Mars, and robotics and artificial intelligence will displace untold workers.

And the speed at which change occurs will make your head spin.

These ideas belong to Howard Yeager, who recently spoke to about 70 business people at the Palliser Hotel in Calgary. A researcher in leadership, he was addressing clients of Framework, a management consultant firm in the city.

Photo courtesy of Ross Mason
Howard Yeager looks to the future and says business leaders can't control the pace of change.

Yeager encouraged his audience to examine leadership issues and to take time to understand the big picture about to unfold.

“I envy children who today are five years old,” Yeager said in a later interview. “I think they will live, perhaps, in the most exciting of all times.” In an intriguing discussion, Yeager said leaders must understand that technology waits for no one.

“We can become participants,” he says, “or victims.”

“A lot of leaders say: ‘Oh, we’ll deal with it when it gets here, just like we’ve done before,’ ” says Yeager. “But this time is different, it is unique.”

Yeager retired from the University of Calgary two years ago and now lives on Vancouver Island. He has spent much time applying some “good old-fashioned research” to the role of leadership and change: why it works and why it doesn’t.

As a leader in a major restructuring initiative at the U of C in the late ’90s – one with which he wasn’t wholly satisfied – and as a chemistry researcher who dealt with large organizations, he uses his experiences to create perspective for today’s businesses.

“I’m no guru, I’m not a futurist,” he says. “I’m drawing on the ideas that come from some great thinkers.”

Organizations must address two key issues if they wish to survive, he believes. Attitudes, values and behaviour patterns must be challenged. And it’s crucial that leaders rise above their daily work life and understand “historical flow.”

Yeager says many current management practices are rooted in theories from the 1920s. “Command and control isn’t dead,” he observes.

Leaders may give speeches about the empowerment of workers, but it isn’t always the talk they walk.

Many leaders have traced identical steps to the corporate boardroom. Typically, they were managers who didn’t create much of a disturbance, who took problems and found solutions through independent action without shifting responsibility to others.

In the CEO’s chair, however, the problems become more complex. The world can be turned upside down in minutes. Business markets can disappear overnight.

Leaders must understand that frontline people are the ones best able to recognize impending change, and the best resources to help create solutions to difficult problems.

It’s why leaders must understand historical flow, a concept Yeager suggests is vital.

Look back to 1890, he urges. No one went to high school. People who did were children of the rich who took algebra, Latin and the classics.

Once the manufacturing era began, universal free education evolved. Boys took woodshop, girls bookkeeping. Universal education was a prerequisite for stepping forward culturally.

As growth occurred, technology required more education. Creative talent was added to the culture, and more knowledge was created. The cycle has kept repeating and shortening.

Today, we are presented with the reality of nanotechnology, robotics and the human genome, where we’re “literally at the doorstep of having human beings go in and make adjustments to what it is to be human,” says Yeager.

“It’s really important that people (leaders) understand it. There are several technologies coming our way that are going to make the 20th century look like a leisurely paced era.”

Computing speed may double every 18 months, but the time frame is actually accelerating, he says.

“I don’t think that notion has hit the boardroom. It’s: ‘We’ll deal with it when it comes.’ But this is very different. When your desktop computer essentially has human intelligence, things are going to change.”

He strongly believes, and hopes, that this century will be one of exploration. Earth no longer has frontiers, he says, and just as Europeans came to the New World, so we need to expand.

“Benefits flow back, it’s the incubator for technological innovation,” says Yeager, noting that NASA, the Russians, the European Space Agency and the Japanese – with an orbiter on its way to the Red Planet – are surveying Mars. (Russia has announced it will have cosmonauts on the surface by 2020.)

Yeager talks to audiences about Mars and historical flow in order to create excitement, and a sense of engagement.

In today’s changing world, organizations must understand that the keys to success rest with their employees.

Leaders must give up control, he adds, allow two-way communication and provide support.

It’s not about being altruistic. It’s a survival strategy – because business leaders can’t control change.

“Technology does not knock politely to get in,” says Yeager.

“It barges in.”

Is he pessimistic? Not by a long shot.

People have always adapted to change, says Yeager. The most successful understand it the best.

To catch the wave of the future, however, they’ll have to be even faster about it.

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