How Societies Learn – Early Phase

Posted on | June 7, 2010 | No Comments

Books about the peak oil phenomenon have sold in volumes of hundreds of thousands. Some of these have described the tremendous technical challenge of transformation, telling readers that it takes decades to develop and implement new energy technologies and fuels on a large scale. Yet, there is very little debate of how we are going to deal with this seemingly insurmountable issue.

Some of these books have also told us about the perils that may befall society if we fail to act rapidly enough. Still there is little debate of how to transform energy systems rapidly and on a large scale.

In fact, sometimes I get the impression that colleagues and people I meet in business meetings avoid discussing the issue of Global Energy Transformation with me, despite the fact that I have spent the last four years learning and writing about it.

Some may believe that this is because the energy issue is very sensitive. Had it been a less sensitive subject people would have found it easier to talk about it.

Yet, in 1998 I had written a book about e-business, together with my then colleague David Lundberg. It was published by Palgrave Macmillan and the title was, and still is, “The Transparent Market.” We started to write this book in January 1997, delivered the manuscript in November of the Same year. It was published in October of 1998, if I remember correctly.

During the writing of the book we both worked with a major IT and business consulting company, yet none of our colleagues or managers showed any interest in what we were doing. They never asked us what the book was about or what unique contribution we thought we could make to the subject. Around the time of publication we started to work with a small management consulting company and our colleagues there told us that they hired us because they wanted to add IT-competence to the company. Yet they showed little interest in understanding, at the time, how electronic business would impact business strategy.

It was not until the “Internet-boom” around 2000 that people started to take an interest in e-business. Still, few wanted to know what we had written about in this area. Instead, people started to tell us the gospel of e-business of the time, saying that the companies who were the first movers in the electronic marketplace would take over whole industries due to the cost advantage of e-business. They told us other things as well…

In “The Transparent Market,” we took a more analytical approach, arguing that electronic business would change some aspects of business, but not dramatically and over night. Instead, companies would need to learn how to do business electronically, because it had some significant advantages, which I still believe it has by the way…

Regardless of who is right and who is wrong about the details, it is interesting to consider how societies learn. We will not be able to get around the need to transform energy systems on a large scale. We need to deal with this challenge head-on. Still, there is little debate about how we are going to do it. I believe we will experience a similar awakening in this respect, that we did in relation to e-business around 2000. Let’s only hope that the people who get to take the lead in the debate will be able to grasp the subject and take nuanced views on the overall challenge!

I did expect a greater level of interest and response from my Swedish colleagues regarding the importance of this. We have never been known to bury our heads in the sand.

Bookmark It