Professional Documents
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Contents
Introduction: the last of our Kodak moments
1 The challenge of living in an ambiguous world
The trilemma of our current age
System upgrade: to a better social, organisational and economic future
Chapter One
The challenge of living in an ambiguous world
When faced with disruptive ambiguity few embrace that ambiguity, to understand it, to listen deeply and think very
hard about transformation how to transform, and how to design for transformation. This is a challenging thing to do
and few do it well, and increasingly more organisations are vicariously living in the groan zone as we transition from a
linear world to a non-linear one.
I would argue that our industrial world has reached the edge of its adaptive range, the failure of large corporations,
the banking crisis, pensions, venture capital, healthcare, and media organisations crossing the moral rubicon by
hacking into the voice mails of murdered school children to sell tabloid newspapers to harvest advertising revenue
are all exemplars. We are witness to a systemic failure of many of the institutions that have brought us so much
prosperity, health and the promise of better future and it is this convergence of failures that requires us to understand
the challenge from a new perspective.
The trilemma of our current age
The institutions, organisations and systems that we still use were designed and built for a less complex world.
Consequently, fault lines are running through our society as we are overwhelmed by a trilemma of social, economic
and organisational complexity. The design challenge involved in resolving these questions comes because this nonlinearity is causing a comprehensive restructuring of society at large.
Still there is deep institutional and cultural resistance to real change. And, as the forces of disruption increases often
the resistance of organisations under threat does not abate but intensifies, until flailing against this unknown or
misunderstood enemy they exhaust themselves take your pick from the slew of industry and organisational failures.
Their demons are pretty much the same.
My challenge to organisations is that they need to reflect mindfully on the significant shifts in our society today,
although new technologies are the tools for change our research shows that this is a social revolution where in the
face of institutional failure people are learning to get what they need from each other. So what do we as humanity
need? We need I would argue: greater opportunity, greater freedom, greater empowerment, a revitalised sense of
justice; a world where mutualism and participatory cultures are the default setting, where openness is seen as resilience
and diversity is understood as a good thing. Where we have greater autonomy and that seeks a greater aesthetic in
everything we do: beautiful buildings; civic spaces; organisational design, it is as easy to make something beautiful as it
is to make it ugly. So why choose the latter over the former? In many ways these demands can be defined as a
Human-OS (operating system).
This OS is the key driver to the systems change we are witnessing. I see this Human-OS in the transformational
change of all the examples cited in No Straight Lines: from agriculture, hospital design, and healthcare service design,
educational programmes, the response to complex civic challenges, manufacturing, NGOs, the nature of finance,
innovation and commerce itself. This OS is the story of why our networked world with its new Human OS is directing
the shape of our post industrial future, which is why on the floors of our factories, in the waiting rooms of our hospitals,
the classrooms of our schools, people are asking not, what if, but how? How can we create a world designed around
the wider needs of humanity, and that serves humanity in ways in which our industrial society no longer can?
The level of disruption for our institutions cannot be ignored nor repressed. It also at the same time presents us with a
unique opportunity and design challenge.