Are you stuck in the fur-lined rut?

Unusually, I was a young child when I learned about calculus for the first time. A fun children’s maths book I was reading introduced the concept in a kid-friendly way, and the authors did well to make young readers feel proud we could follow along. The same book included accessible introductions to algebra and trigonometry, plus some insights into the highly eccentric life of Pythagoras.

It was several years later that I came to formally study calculus in high school. My physics teacher, Miss Nolan, was a kind and funny woman with a loud, infectious laugh. She sported stiletto heels everywhere, and riposted when school administrators tried – and failed – to stop her from wearing them. Naturally, in her class we differentiated and integrated between displacement, speed and acceleration as vectors, measuring values with toy cars and stopwatches and charting our results in pencil on graph paper, squinting to imagine our lines of best fit matched the theory among all the experimental noise.

Nowadays when I hear acceleration, it’s normally of the business kind. How can we do what we already do, but faster? How do we increase the rate of getting faster? I nearly always observe at this point that while our big-picture business goals are not about to change, the everyday processes we use to get there will need to evolve with time and context. One group continuing with the same old unchanging workflows, day in and day out, is actively damaging to any groups who are trying to move faster.

Every rejection of the current way of being pushes us slightly further away from the comfort zone. But according to pop psychology at least, beyond that safe and friendly state lies the optimal zone. Here, we have just the right amount of courage to pursue our inspiration, without facing the unpredictability of the complete unknown. However, go too far and you reach the danger zone of low control and high anxiety. The more stressed and worried people are, the harder they resist improving even their own lives, lest they risk stretching too far and hitting the danger zone.

This is such a risk that most of us perceive the danger zone as looming much closer than it really is. A friend warned me not to get stuck in ‘the fur-lined rut’: a warm, fuzzy feeling of acceptance of your lot when nothing is wrong enough to change things. Predictability belies stagnation and unfamiliarity with the needed discomfort for growth.

The need to accept progress

It’s not that something new and shiny is inherently better – that is often not the case. Billions of dollars and centuries of people’s lives must have been spent on exciting new things that weren’t quite scoped right, or just didn’t work. And the old adage about not fixing what ain’t broke still applies – however, the context of research and development is constantly shifting. New chemical methods and bigger data opportunities launch constantly, but without similar step changes in the way we accept progress, these can become useless. And then it becomes easy to say, ‘look how little this has changed the world’, while being complicit in its lack of impact.

A few years ago, I was involved in a project to transform how we kept track of the chemical bottles stored throughout a chemistry department. It was less an upgrade and more a critical need, since the status quo system was actively degrading, with infrastructure that was held together by sticky tape and Post-Its. This rut was very much not fur-lined. I was quite new to digitalisation at this point, so it was an insightful introduction to a (literally) messy, real-world data problem.

Months later, thanks to the help of many chemists, we had a futuristic setup where you could essentially wave a magic wand (okay, a handheld radio frequency identification, or RFID, scanner) at a cupboard to see every chemical inside it in seconds. The technician who kept the lists updated went from spending weeks on the task every six months to taking just an hour, but now more regularly for higher accuracy, just because he could.

Since our starting point had been so desperate, it felt easy to make the leap. Well, for most people anyway – change is hard, and one extremely disgruntled chemist still decided to reply-all with a bilious complaint. It’s notable that when instead, an inventory system is already good enough to have some issues but no showstoppers, the idea of advancing to such a useful platform is so much less enticing as the need is not so high. It’s disappointing, but perhaps it makes sense.

If we’re serious about progress, the way we accelerate has to be practical and leave no part of the machine behind. However, parts that are dragging must also fulfil their responsibility to adapt and engage with the opportunities that will change our world.