Dive into the Stream

For more than 20 years ago I was together with other HR personnel conducting a management development program in DNV under a broader concept that we called "Motivation for Change".

We used, among other slogans, the Heraclitus sayings "The only constant is Change" and "You cannot step into the same river twice" in the process, and wanted our employees to be aware of the ongoing changes in ourselves, in time, in professional tasks, tools, organization, markets, and thus be more adaptable to their own needs for adjustments in competence, working methods and understanding of the society as a whole.

Confusius has said “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”

Activities to improve team building was therefore an important part of the program.  Crossing a stream from stone to stone with only planks and ropes, was one of the challenges. Here visualized by Senior vice President HR Gunnar Rostad: "Walking the plank"

However, today I invite you to PLUNGE INTO THE STREAM.

In an article from 2009 by Erick Schonfeld Jump into the stream he talks about "Information is increasingly being distributed and presented in real-time streams instead of dedicated Web pages. The shift is palpable, even if it is only in its early stages.". He  quotes John Borthwick (founder and CEO of Betaworks) talking of

the real-time web: "A stream. A real time, flowing, dynamic stream of information — that we as users and participants can dip in and out of and whether we participate in them or simply observe we are a part of this flow."

and Schonfeld gives us an advise:

So jump into the stream and let it carry you away. Or you can stand timidly on the banks until everyone else around you has already taken the plunge.

My son-in-law David has in his blogposts written:
From January 23rd Real-Time Streams and the @Cloud

The way we have traditionally thought about the Internet has been in terms of pages, but we are about to see this changing to the concept of ‘streams’ (see Berry 2011). In essence, the change represents a move from a notion of information retrieval, where a user would attend to a particular machine to extract data as and when it was required, to an ecology of data streams that forms an intensive information environment. This notion of living within streams of data is predicated on the use of technical devices that allow us to manage and rely on the streaming feeds.

and from February 13th The Ontology of Twitter

the quality of media conversations are changing: instead of multiple, discontinuous, heterogeneous and unsystematic conversations, we now have single, continuous, homogeneous, nearly real-time updates of news, stories, lives, events and activities, all streamed through a common format that is distributed in real-time around the world. This, I think, helps us to think about the way in which a particular limited platform of data transmission has become a mass media and in doing so is preparing/teaching users to cope with real-time streams of information,

In the Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss book "Livsfilosofi" (Philosophy of life) he writes: ..... both I and my life is a kind of Stream. I am not going into the river (like Heraclitus) I AM THE RIVER.

Welcome to the evolving world.