That was then, this is now

Three centuries ago, it was a fact that the world was flat and that the universe revolved around us.

A 150 years ago, no one knew that washing your hands significantly reduced the spread infection.

50 years ago, doctors were prescribing cigarettes to clear a patience’s cough.

It turns out, people are wrong. All the time. We are not as good as we think we are at knowing what’s real and what’s fake.

Here’s the thing: We cannot fix problems unless people admit they exist.

It’s easy for people to blame themselves or to point the finger at others for incorrect perceptions of how the world really is. But human error isn’t the root cause of the problems we face today. No, if you look hard enough and deep enough, you will find the true cause is a system that allows these type of problems to keep re-occurring.

(History loves to repeat itself.)

When we blame people though, it makes it difficult to convince governments, organizations, corporations to restructure and eliminate these problems. It makes it even more difficult to build a culture we can be proud of.

The good news is with more time and more knowledge, history has shown that people want to move from disorganization to a place of clarity. But it doesn’t happen without first destroying the perfect and enabling the impossible.

The amount of knowledge and information and the level of access is un-paramount then any generation before us. It’s right there at our fingertips to do something remarkable.

We just need to dig deeper: Moving the blame away from each other and focusing on solving the actual cause of the challenges we face today.