Next week I will have the great pleasure of attending and presenting at the DisruptHR Cleveland event to be held Thursday, February 5 at 5:30PM at the Music Box Supper Club - (event details and registration here).
The presentations at the DisruptHR events follow the popular 'Ignite' format - each presenter has 20 slides that auto-advance at 15 seconds per slide resulting in a total of 5 minutes to tell their story. It is a fun and exciting, (if a little bit frightening) format for both speakers and the audience.
My little talk, (and it is almost complete, please relax DisruptHR Cleveland organizers, I will get it to you soon), has a working title of 'It's hard in the modern world'; or, 'A 5-minute review of humanity's relationship with technology'.
As I said, the presentation is not 100% complete, so I won't post it here yet, but I did want to share the central theory behind the talk, and also solicit some ideas and feedback if readers are so inclined that I may consider as I finalize the slides.
Here it is:
While 'modern' advances in technology seem incredibly disruptive, the entirety of human history has been nothing but a series of (mostly), technology driven disruptions. Fire, the wheel, metallurgy, farming - these and many more tech advances were just if not more disruptive to humanity than Candy Crush Saga.
At the end there will be some profound conclusions/recommendations/wisecracks to help sum up and interpret that assertion, but that is the basic idea behind the talk.
My questions to you, dear readers, are these:
Are we really in the most technology-driven disruptive period in (at least recent) human history?
Are things really different now?
Do I have a chance of convincing the good people of Cleveland that the modern age of technology is not more disruptive than the transition to the Bronze Age from the 'Run or be eaten alive age?'
Hope to see lots of folks out in Cleveland next week!