Yesterday’s Logic

I recently attended a meeting where leaders from businesses, nonprofits, churches, and government gathered to grapple with the significant changes affecting their community. Declining revenues, shifting demographics, generational differences in attitudes and thinking, and troubling shifts in cultural norms had left everyone up in arms and down in the dumps. As I’ve seen many times before, the attendees were lamenting the loss of the “good old days” and trying to figure out how to return to them. But if we’re honest, the good old days weren’t always as good as we remember, and even then, some people longed for an earlier time. Time is a funny thing—it only moves forward. As Peter Drucker wisely said, “The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence—it is to act with yesterday’s logic.”