revenues? How do we create a service to better manage people’s chronic healthcare. Reducing; wrong diagnosis, over prescription of drugs, clogging up hospitals and specialist time? How do we rapidly build a platform that can take eye witness accounts of atrocities and crimes against humanity and deliver this information as text, pictures, eyewitness accounts, with Geo-location and time tagged data to help build a comprehensive story of an unfolding crisis – with no money, no time and no infrastructure?


Compare that approach to the institutionalisation and the accompanying waste to innovation in many organisations and industries, populated by a culture that simply would not allow ‘heretical’


Embracing an ambiguous world


In 2006 IBM produced a report called ‘The Enterprise of the Future’. Their survey of CEOs revealed that 8 out of 10 CEOs saw significant change ahead and yet the gap between expected levels of change plus the ability to manage it had tripled. Why? Because, I would argue in part, these leaders did not have the means to understand, embrace, nor articulate the emergence of a new world defined by new organisational structures,


In this non-linear world, companies and organisations are still premised upon old orthodoxies


legal frameworks, systems thinking, new production and design processes, ways to attract highly motivated individuals, that brought into this world better capabilities and new skills. Which all add up to a new philosophy and defined by a new language. And, of course, the reality is that it is not only business which is feeling the impact of a new way of living unfolding and decoupling from the dying system of our industrial age.


thinking, constrained by conventional


orthodoxies, siloed budgets, misaligned needs and wants all wrapped up with a struggle for power.


In this non-linear world, companies and organisations premised upon the old orthodoxies, linear, industrial- scale models must think and embrace the unthinkable and work out how they innovate to survive. Whether we survey the political, media, engineering, NGO, educational or healthcare landscape, we can identify an increasing sophistication in how we are responding to the challenges of living in a more complex world. At the same time, there is the ever-increasing acceleration of the collapse of the old ways of command and control. Every work of art, said Wassily Kandinsky, is a child of its time.


Be realistic, imagine the impossible, then create it


Technology is important and digital low-cost communication tools can be powerful enablers. Legal frameworks and networked thinking are of equal importance, but it is critical to remember that although the world is increasingly brought together by digital communication tools, the lessons of non-linearity, for example, demonstrate it is the intelligent and creative blending of all these things together where true long-term success lies. Humanity is in a constant state of evolution, and now we have the means to progress, where we can tread more lightly, and provide a more sustainable future both for the sake of this planet but also for humanity, which has over the last 150 years paid a heavy price for our fast-paced industrialised world. As I pointed out earlier, throughout large swathes of our world we have become more machine like than perhaps we understand, and I make the case that as a species we are rebelling against living our lives as constructs of the machine age that can no longer support us. It is time to hack the future. No Straight Lines looks at how we can build better more sustainable societies, organisations and vibrant economies through innovative practice. It argues we need to design and create for the needs of humanity not industrial systems.


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