Ideas + Influences
The ideas, people and questions that shape how I think about change, culture and human behavior.
The Map We Inherit
I spend much of my professional life looking at change—shifts in culture and human behavior, new technologies and changing environments, and what they mean for brands and businesses. As the world moves faster, we're increasingly asked to adapt without an established playbook.
But how we adapt may depend on the map we already carry. I was born in East Germany shortly before the Berlin Wall fell, and grew up as the political, economic and social system that shaped my parents' world was replaced by a fundamentally different one. They had learned to navigate one reality; my generation was growing up in another.
That experience has led me to a broader question: How adaptable are we to change when the behaviors, assumptions and instincts we inherit were shaped by a different world? We inherit more than knowledge—we may also inherit attitudes toward risk, trust, visibility, opportunity and what feels possible. The world can change remarkably quickly. Our maps may change much more slowly.
a. Environments can leave behavioral effects long after the system itself disappears.
Using historical Stasi records, researchers found that areas subjected to greater surveillance subsequently had lower interpersonal and institutional trust, as well as lower self-employment, fewer patents and other persistent economic effects after reunification.
My hypothesis: The faster our world changes, the more consequential the gap between our inherited map and our present reality becomes.
c. The faster the world changes, the more important that ability to adapt becomes.
Technology is now changing how we work, communicate, create, trust and participate in society at a pace that can make inherited assumptions obsolete within a generation. Adaptability, often unconsciously, increasingly depends not just on learning what's new, but on recognizing which parts of our map were drawn for a world that no longer exists.
b. The world can change before our understanding of it does.
Social science has a name for part of this mismatch: cultural lag. Technology and material conditions can change faster than the beliefs, norms and institutions we use to make sense of them. My question takes that further: how much of the confusion and resistance we experience during profound change comes from trying to navigate a new reality with an old map? [1]
Predict the future by creating it
You didn’t come this far to stop
Predict the future
You didn’t come this far to stop