Cultural Shift

Our culture has long been one based on competition, and that's a hard core value to shake. So every time I see evidence that someone else has beaten us to an idea or solution, I have to suppress the gut reaction that we are too late.

Our culture has long been one based on competition, and that's a hard core value to shake. So every time I see evidence that someone else has beaten us to an idea or solution, I have to suppress the gut reaction that we are too late. Because in a competitive world, that's a fail. But in a cooperative world where the goal is finding solutions, other people's solutions become our collaborative success.

We are trying to cure poverty, and it doesn't matter who figures it out. Just do it already.

It's all about connections. Joan Foster sent me a link to an article about some progressive ideas in DC, and that led me to start following the work of their Director of For-Hire Vehicles, Ernest Chrappah. And he just posted their proposed revisions to code governing For-Hire vehicles.

Peruse those a bit, and I think you will come to the same conclusions I have:

1. Managing the interaction of 6 million people is trickier than 100,000.
2. We are going in the same direction.

Remember how difficult change is? Well one of the problems we are facing as a society is that we continue to look to the big players for solutions, but it's much harder to change the direction of a massive ship than it is a kayak. The scope of the regulations proposed in DC is almost impossible to take in, with many more classes of vehicles and markets and populations and variables that will interact such that a change here may have unexpected consequences over there.

We make a better test site.

We are smaller, with less variables to deal with, faster moving, and better able to react to those inevitable unintentional consequences (yes, it's OK to try something and see if it works, and if it doesn't, try something different).

These changes are inevitable.

We are going in the same direction (in this case, a continued evolution of what defines a for-hire vehicle and how we manage cooperative transportation solutions in our society).Once this stuff starts, you won't be able to hold it back. When someone makes a change that works, everyone is going to go there. When someone builds a system that works, everyone is going to want it. Once we move to a place where we work cooperatively and we see how much better life can be, we will all go there, and we will never go back. And when we go cooperative, the faster anyone gets to the finish line, the faster we all get there.

This all just makes me excited to dive into some progressive proposed regulatory changes concerning for-hire vehicles! And that is certainly a change.