Quantcast
  • Material change is a line. A vector, really: the arrow of time, moving ever forward. This is change that cannot be undone. It moves from one place to another, never to return again.

    Material change works by incorporation and ejection. Something becomes different by introducing an agent of novelty or by jettisoning an agent of stasis. The “disruption” common to Silicon Valley style innovation is obsessed with ejection.
  • The consolidation common to markets is obsessed with incorporation. But more ordinary examples also persist. The desire to change jobs or careers, for example, or even significant others, assumes that the best—and perhaps the only—change is disruptive change.
Deep change is a helix. It spins round like cyclical change, but deeper into itself. Like an auger, the helical-bitted drill that bores holes into the ground.

Deep change works by play. But not the play of doing whatever you want. Not the play of leisure, not the play that opposes work. The deep, deliberate play that works something.
Deep change is the change that makes people and things more what they are. And in particular, deep change allows people, places, and things to better commune with other people, places and things by offering them renewed reason to engage with them.
In this sort of play, we accept the constraints of a thing (or person, or event), and proceed with the hard work of figuring out how that structure makes it what it is.
Deep change is an underdog. It’s far more desirable, fashionable, and perhaps even profitable to pursue material and cyclical change. Disruptive products that unseat old industries. Supposedly life-changing advice and practices. Services and habits that maintain and even protect against cyclical repetition.