“Recalculating.” The voice on your GPS never loses its cool when you make a move it wasn’t expecting. The graceful pivot belies the calculations happening out of sight.
Our survival is going to depend on this kind of equanimity in the face of sudden change. From the acutely personal (our primitive brains challenged by the digital onrush) to the relentlessly global (planetary re-contouring due to climate change), the quickening churn is scrambling our co‑ordinates and redrawing our maps. The future belongs to a new kind of human, homo universalis: nimble, sensitive enough to detect trouble, decisive enough to snap into action.
“Privately I was thinking, ‘What am I going to do now? I’ve set up my life to be a journalist at a newspaper!’” says Karen Unland, ’94 BA, co-founder and COO of Taproot Edmonton, an online media outlet that has become for many a go-to source for trusted intelligence. Few industries better reflect the disruption Big Tech has inflicted on the old models than journalism.
Taproot is an evolutionary workaround. A kludge machine.
Unland, a longtime Edmonton Journal writer and editor, jumped ship in 2011, and in 2016 co‑founded Taproot with fellow U of A grad Mack Male, ’07 BSc. It’s digital, focused on metropolitan Edmonton, and it keeps itself going with a novel business model. It has diversified revenue across membership, advertising and sponsorship, and a business-to-business service that gathers information for organizations, using the technology and methodology of Taproot’s editorial product.
But Taproot’s greatest innovation is its stance. The current cultural climate demands that media outlets stake an ideological position and defend it like a Trojan. But instead of polemics, Taproot trades in explanations. The news outlet’s values (courage, curiosity and care) chart a higher course. Unland says, “We’re trying to show people the common values and causes that overarch political divisions.”
But when it comes to adaptation, the best teacher is surely the natural world. And the U of A’s many bioscientists are taking notes. At the Beaverhill Bird Observatory, biologists have been tracking the behaviour of a bird called the least flycatcher. Cute little songbird. Feisty, concise, heroic in endurance, now in a spot of trouble.
“They’ve been hammered hard, largely due to habitat change and pesticide use affecting insects they use for food,” says Augustana Campus environmental scientist Glen Hvenegaard, ’87 BSc(Forest), ’89 MSc. The least flycatcher’s numbers are down 40 per cent. “And that’s over only the 32-year period we’ve been studying them,” he says. Hvenegaard, along with colleagues Myrthe Van Brempt and Geoff Holroyd, noticed that, in response to local climate changes in Alberta, the species was setting out almost two weeks early on its fall migration to Central America. That’s the birds’ adaptation. Temperatures are changing, bugs are scarce, gotta be movin’ on. But an adaptation to one variable can’t take into account the dozens that knock-on. These birds can’t know that their early departure has put them out of sync with food sources along the way, safe rest spots and chances to avoid storms during the long haul over the Gulf of Mexico.
“At some point the missed connections the least flycatchers are encountering will hit humans too,” Hvenegaard says. We need to be ready to pivot, for there are changes we can’t see coming. “But I hope that we don’t think about everything in nature only in the ways it affects us. I mean, these little guys deserve to live, regardless of their value to humans.”
If adaptability is emerging as the prime survival skill of the 21st century, can it actually be taught? “Absolutely,” says Melanie Dreyer-Lude, a U of A theatre professor, actor and author.
Actors cultivate skills useful in real life, she says: persuasion, storytelling and human connection. Life is improv. A theatre production is a master class in rolling gracefully with setbacks. Theatre-grade adaptability stands out like a superpower at a moment when digital natives emerge into the workforce with more technical proficiencies than human ones.
Dreyer-Lude undertook to prove the business case of a theatre education after reassuring parents of theatre kids that they weren’t throwing their tuition down a hole. “I gathered the data, and I can say with confidence that theatre grads will find work,” she says. “Maybe not in theatre, but their degree won’t be wasted. These skills translate into jobs.” That conclusion inspired her recent book, The Adaptable Degree: How Education in Theatre Supports the Economy of the Future.
The world’s best ideas never make it to market without a great pitch. In her consulting work, Dreyer-Lude helps scientists, engineers and business people hone their message to One Big Thing, and express it with brio. If you can’t inspire, you’re not going to get the lab funding, attract collaborators or pique the interest of investors. Opportunity passes you by, unless you’re adaptable.
When you think about it, adaptation is about doubling down on common sense. Common sense means doing what works and pivoting when conditions change. That’s an evolutionary response that author Angus Fletcher once coined as “primal intelligence,” and it may be the one thing AI can never possess. So it may be just the thing to save us.