Riding A Bicycle

I remembered how I learnt to ride a bicycle. My dad spent many afternoons teaching my brother and me. I was probably about 4 or 5 years old. As with many others, my experience was filled with many scrapes, falls, bruises and cuts. But I soon got the hang of it and took off the training wheels shortly after.

The key advice that my Dad gave me then was to keep pedalling and to keep going. If you slow down, you will start to wobble and that's when you will fall down. This advice was echoed many years later, in a different context, by my Politics tutor, Prof David Goldey. He said to some of us that constitutional engineering and political arrangements are like riding bicycle - you either keep moving forward, or you fall down. This idea - that you have to keep moving forward or you fall - has stuck with me ever since.

Organisations, too, have to consistently evolve. They have to innovate, reorganise, rejuvenate and stay relevant. If they don't, they fail. Prof Clayton Christensen, in The Innovator's Dilemma, explained this with many convincing examples. Outside the business world, there are also examples of organisations that didn't stay relevant and failed catastrophically - consider the French military at the start of World War II. There is resonance at the personal level too. Life is like a bicycle in some ways too. The only way to avoid falling down is to keep pedalling forward - to learn, to change, to adapt, to grow.