Something occurred to me as I looked at how we respond to change. We can project forward to some degree what will happen as the status quo ante becomes the status quo post, but only to a certain point. It is very hard to imagine what things would be like if nobody ever remembered the way things were before.
Remember analog music?
... life before e-mail?
... traveling without a GPS?
... pay phones instead of cell-towers?
... slide rules?
Some of you reading this don't (I forgive you for being young). Could you have imagined at the time these things entered our lives what life would be like when these things became so pervasive to the point that our children grew up never knowing a world without them?
So it is with change. Not only can we not really imagine what it would be like to do this different thing, but it is very hard to imagine a culture where this new idea is the new baseline, the new normal, and our old way is completely forgotten.
As hard as it is for a technologist to do this, think again about how conservative we are in healthcare with respect to change in process, which makes it even harder to think this way. But this is what we have to do every day. Or will will just be the status quo ante, and then, the forgotten.
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