Straight line thinkers struggle in a world of no straight lines

May 5th, 2009

John Naughton writes about CP Snow’s big idea that in the UK we were divided by “two cultures”.

Snow’s Big Idea was that there were “two cultures” in our society – that of the “literary intellectuals” (as he called them) and that of the natural scientists. His argument was that there existed a profound division – characterised by mutual incomprehension and distrust – between the two cultures, and that this division had disastrous consequences for society.

Naughton uses this as a metaphor to explain that htere are two cultures emergent in the networked society. Those that embrace this new world and those that choose to lock it down.

In our case, the gap is not between the humanities and the sciences but those who are obsessed with lock-down and control, on the one hand, and those who celebrate openness and unfettered creativity on the other. The odd thing is that one finds arts and scientific types on both sides of this divide.

But this clashing of cultural gears is inevitable in moments of epochal change. This particular communications revolution will be bloody. As all revolutions are. As Joshua Coper Ramo recently wrote

We are at the start of what may become the most dramatic change in the international order for several centuries, the biggest shift since European nations were first shuffled into a sovereign order by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.

And

There is no chance those conservative places could ever compete. They were locked, from top to bottom, from young to old, and in every level of their bureaucratic life, in a vision of the world that was out of date and inflexible.

Unfortunately, whether they are running corporations or foreign ministries or central banks, some of the best minds of our era are still in thrall to an older way of seeing and thinking.

The problem is that our leaders lack the language, creativity, and revolutionary spirit our moment demands. In many cases they have been badly corrupted by power, position and prestige.

Its the lacking of language and creativity that inspires me here… Naughton again

The cultural agoraphobia from which most of us suffer leads us always to overemphasise the downsides of openness and lack of central control, and to overvalue the virtues of order and authority. And that is what is rendering us incapable of harnessing the potential benefits of networked technology. Industries and governments are wasting incalculable amounts of money and energy in Canute-like resistance to the oncoming wave when what they should be doing is figuring out ways to ride it.

Innovation comes from the edge, those in the centre will always resist especially if they dont have the language they need to interpret the changing world around them. We need fresh large scale ideas, and to see the world as a ceaselessly complex and adaptive system and that requires a different way of thinking. When systems change you have to change the way you think about the problem or else carefully assembled data becomes meaningless mush. So if the networked society is a different system to a mass consumer/mass media/industrial system – we have to change the way we think about the problem.

Think about it like this – the only straight lines made in nature are made by man, and similarly our industrial world has been built with the same straight-line logic and, philosophy. Yet nature is not like that, it has no straight lines. Nature flows, nature is more connected, grass roots and interdependent. It suggests a different type of process and logic at play that is not; centralized, bureaucratic or inflexible. This is the world of no straight lines.

For straight-line thinkers the world of no straight lines is akin to living in a foreign land; the customs, language, symbols etc., are dis-lo-cating-ly alien – they are outsiders, unable to fully participate, as they do not have the comprehension, nor the insight, or the necessary capability to fully engage. They have become concussed observers to the vital world around them.

The visceral shock however, is, that this is happening, not in some foreign land, but, in our own backyards.

Our world of business, media, and communications is evolving from the straight-lines of an industrial era to the more complex and networked world that mimics nature. This interactive networked world isn’t about vertical silos, traditional notions of product and service creation, mass-production and mass media and marketing. It is about the massive flows of people, who are connecting, collaborating, organising and creating in a manner that has nothing to do with a linear approach too much at all. This is truly an engaged and participatory culture.

For over 150 years our economies, culture and society have been shaped by a straight-line logic producing considerable economic success. However, in the dawn of the Networked-Society, a straight-line logic of getting stuff done becomes a barrier to progress. Why? Because, the change wrought by the networked- society is structural – challenging how markets and organizations have co-evolved over the last 150 years.

This creates a dilemma. And the dilemma is this – How can firms and the people that work in those firms, develop coherent strategies/products and services that are premised upon No-Straight-Line principles – when they have been versed only in Straight-Line thinking – at least for the over 35’s – from birth?

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