Editor’s note: Besides tracking technological advancements and innovations, our author is a Juilliard-trained musical composer. Listen to “Sudden Perspectives”, an original extemporaneous improvisation by Howard Lieberman, composed for this column.
Because conditions are almost never perfect for change, Innovation requires flexibility and a willingness to move forward even under less-than-ideal conditions. Innovators rarely have complete information, ideal resources, or perfect timing. Instead, they proceed regardless, adapting as circumstances change and shifting their perspective as the situation develops. Understanding someone else’s point of view is therefore not just about empathy; it’s a vital skill that innovators rely on. I was reminded of this principle in a very personal way a few days ago when I woke up early and realized I couldn’t put any weight on one foot. Clearly, something happened the day before: maybe a sprain, maybe something worse. At that moment, the diagnosis didn’t matter. What mattered was that, for my entire life, I had been able to stand and walk whenever I wanted, and suddenly, I couldn’t.
It was still dark. I couldn’t reach the light without waking my wife, and I had no clue what time it was. Usually, getting out of bed and walking a few steps to the bathroom takes about ten seconds. That morning, it took several minutes. Standing on one foot in total darkness is surprisingly tricky. I finally made it to the bathroom, mostly driven by necessity, only to realize I couldn’t walk back. The pain was too intense, and I wasn’t sure if putting weight on the foot might make things worse. When you can’t walk and have nothing to hold onto, you quickly see why nursing homes have rails everywhere.
After trying several times with crocks and flip-flops, none of which slide well, it hit me that I could crawl into another room and grab an office chair on wheels. Even that was a challenge, as I had to navigate thresholds between hardwood floors and carpet that suddenly felt like mountains. By the time the sun rose, I had spent nearly an hour doing what normally takes about a minute. Same house. Same furniture. Same person. Completely different experience of reality.
This is exactly what happens in innovation when constraints suddenly change. A staircase that is invisible when you are healthy becomes a barrier when you are injured. A threshold between rooms becomes an engineering problem. The environment itself has not changed, but the context in which I experienced it has. Innovators constantly operate in this kind of shifting landscape. Resources are incomplete. Information is uncertain. Markets move. Technologies evolve. The comfortable path that existed yesterday suddenly disappears, and the problem must be reconsidered from a different perspective.
Forty-eight hours later, my situation had already improved. I could move around using a walker and an office chair, make breakfast, ice the injury, and resume some of my normal routines. The body adapts quickly when it needs to. But the deeper change was perspective. When something like this happens, you quickly realize how many invisible advantages you normally take for granted. A working leg. A warm house. A partner who can help. A car in the driveway. Heat, electricity, and a laptop. Half the human race doesn’t have these things. Perspective is always shaped by context, and context can and does change very quickly.
Technology exemplifies how dramatically context can change. Fifty years ago, a basic open reel tape recorder cost about three hundred dollars, equivalent to roughly seventeen hundred dollars today. Each reel of tape cost around ten dollars and could record about an hour of sound. Around that same period, cassette recorders started appearing in homes and cars, bringing recorded sound out of studios and into everyday life. A cassette deck cost about half as much, roughly one hundred and fifty dollars, and blank cassettes sold for around three dollars each. When adjusted for today’s money, those cassette decks would cost roughly eight hundred dollars. Both technologies could record about an hour of audio, and at the time, they seemed remarkably advanced.
Compare that to today. You can buy a small digital voice recorder for about forty dollars that easily fits in a pocket. Many have hundreds of gigabytes of memory, record high-fidelity stereo audio, store hundreds of hours of sound, and connect directly to a computer as a storage device. They run on built-in rechargeable batteries, feature stereo microphones, and can also serve as music players. To an audio engineer in 1975, such a device would have sounded like science fiction. Today, it barely draws attention.
The same pattern appears in computing. Last week, Apple launched a laptop designed for general use, priced at about $600 (and less for students). Microsoft Windows-based machines and Google Chrome-based machines, all of a sudden, are blown out of the water overnight because Apple essentially dropped the price of their lowest-cost computers in half! I bet they did not see that coming. And a little before that, Apple introduced a Creative Studio Suite of 10 Apps, two of which had been priced at $200 to $300 for students, for $30 per year! Compare that to Adobe’s offering at $300 per year. I am sure the folks at Microsoft, Google, and Adobe are as unhappy as I was when I immediately realized I could not walk or stand.
This $630 device-and-software combination has more computing power and capabilities than computers costing millions of dollars in hardware a few decades ago and would not even be possible a decade ago. Musicians, artists, writers, photographers, filmmakers, and spreadsheet jockeys now have truly unbelievable tools. Yet we tend to take these advances for granted. Healthy people assume mobility is normal. Wealthy people assume resources are normal. Technologists assume progress is normal. But change can come suddenly. One moment, you can walk easily across the room. Next, it might take an hour.
Innovation often demands intentionally shifting perspective in the same way. It involves seeing problems through someone else’s eyes, understanding constraints that may not exist in your own environment, and imagining solutions that don’t yet exist. Artificial intelligence, global economics, and new technologies are now transforming the world at an incredible speed. Two weeks ago, oil was about seventy dollars a barrel. Last week, it briefly hit 120. That single figure impacts transportation costs, food prices, and many other aspects of daily life.
The world has always been changing, but the rate of change keeps speeding up. The best way to stay prepared is flexibility, the ability to rethink assumptions, view problems from different angles, and adapt as circumstances shift. Sometimes that shift comes from technology. Sometimes from economics. And sometimes from something much more personal, like suddenly discovering one morning that you can’t walk. Innovation works similarly. When the context shifts, the problem shifts, too. What once seemed impossible becomes clear, and what once seemed obvious becomes impossible.
