A little bit technical

Let's face it, nowadays you're just not allowed to be untechnical. Time was, I could quite easily get out of anything remotely complex by flogging the old "I'm just not technical." line. Website management: "Why would I know? I'm not technical."; setting the video: "You'll have to do it, it's too technical for me."; or even turning on the oven "Goodness these buttons are all a bit too technical." But if I tried that these days I'd be laughed out of the kitchen, the living room, my job! In short: I wouldn't survive.

To give you a working example of how technology has infiltrated my life: in the last half an hour I have created an Open ID and discovered how to 'whitelist' email addresses. I've even enabled the macros in a document (I hear the techies amongst you shudder with disbelief). Hardly complex or revolutionary, but for a natural technophobe like me, these sorts of achievements feel like climbing mountains. Albeit small ones.

The problem is that with all these changes in technology, we just can't afford to ignore all the tools and tricks that allow us to get by on a daily basis. So integral to our lives has technology become, that saying you aren't technical is akin to saying you can't write in your mother tongue. Of course there are different levels of aptitude: in the same way that some of us can write in full sentences but can't spell, whereas others of us are journalists, copywriters and novelists, technical skills range from base to brilliant. The point is that we should all have them to some degree, or we'll soon start to struggle.

It can of course go too far one way and I appeal directly to all those companies that knowingly or not have penalised the very elderly by making it mandatory to access services online, thereby making some services inaccessible to those that desperately need them. Unforgiveable, even in this day and age.

Having said that, for the rest of us, with regular access to PCs, mobiles, blackberries, iphones and the like, we simply need to accept that we can't ignore technical advances anymore. Technology is an integral part of our language and we need to embrace it.

What this really means is accepting the pace of change. Accepting that knowledge isn't fixed and confined to reference books. Knowing that despite what we knew last year, we always need to build on it, expand it, challenge it and keep apace with a mutable technical economy.

This is often to our advantage of course. New technology means new ways to reach people, faster ways to access what we want and most importantly, the opportunity for expansion, innovation and growth. For anyone that's stood scratching their heads over the 'opportunities' section of a SWOT analysis, this is where technology gives you all manner of options. Staying ahead of the technical game makes you leading edge and often inspirational.

But remember: it's not for long. Look up McKinsey's 3 horizons of growth and you'll understand that improvement is a constant process. I'd even go so far as to say, much as I'm loathe to quote anything I've read in the gym: 'success is a journey, not a destination.'

And finally, to the person who recently decried my efforts to understand social media: It's most definitely not about sex, I promise.