Marcin Jakubowski tells us how. In many ways this story is very much part of the story of No Straight Lines that I have been researching, evolving and developing over the last 7 years. You can find out more about No Straight Lines here and pre-register for the free browser book, or indeed lets us know if there are other formats of the project you are interested in.

Marcin’s story is at a very human level, but it also asks big questions about ‘WHAT NEXT’ looks like, economically and, organisationally. His story is about questing for a more sustainable and enduring world, something that Gabriel Branby also talked about.

Marcin asks the What If? question, but he is one of a growing band of people, and these questions are pushing harder and currently deeper into the consciousness of our everyday lives. and I think Marcin is a trailblazer but he is also connecting up to and creating an entirely new eco-system, a ‘human operating system‘ that wants to get stuff done in very different ways.

As Tony Judt argued in Ill Fares the Land, why is it that we struggle to imagine a different world to the one we currently have, when that world could be built upon a philosophy of a more humane sense of the world we live in?

First off less than 2% of Congress totaling 535 members, have professional backgrounds in science, whereas there are 222 lawyers.

When in 1987 the Federal Communications Commission removed the fairness doctrine of how difficult or controversial news was reported it open the door to more extreme punditry, take a bow Rush Limbaugh. And we have witnessed an increasing line of anti-science perspectives from Rick Perry, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, with the whip held by Newt Gringrich.

And Otto argues right now science is under threat by anti-climate change organisations – between 2009 and June 2010 the energy industry spent half a billion dollars fighting climate change legislation. He writes that 96 of the 100 newly elected Republican members of Congress deny outright that climate change is real or are voting against it in one form or another.

That said Otto argues there are complex forces that are shaping the debate on public perceptions towards science, ‘the moral ambiguity createdafter the dropping of the Atom bomb and living in a nuclear MAD world’, or some of the terrible excesses of toxic pollution that killed and maimed ordinary people – coupled with the culpability of government, the effects of postmodernism on the one hand and the rise of fundamentalist religion on the other smashing into each other. A deep distrust arouse around government and science.

This is the volatile cocktail that combines – commerce, science, truth and politics and results says Otto on an assault on American science that is unprecedented. Though the Barack Obama administration does not get away with it scott free

President Obama’s not much better. Running strong on climate change in 2008, he has since totally de-prioritized it, apparently marginalizing his scientist appointees like Chu, Holdren and Lubchenco, all of them outspoken on climate change, and now appears to be moving ahead with offshore oil drilling, lower air pollution standards, poor carbon standards, and the Keystone XL oil pipeline. In a time when the science has only advanced further and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences says anthropogenic global warming should be “regarded as settled facts” — a time when China’s leapfrogging ahead on clean energy investments in the next economy, that’s not going to take America where we need to go.

Finally Otto refers to ScienceDebate2012 as he describes it, ‘a grassroots campaign for a presidential debate on science, technology, health, medicine and the environment’. Which was born out of Science Debate 2008 which was the largest political initiative in the history of American science.

We are on a journey from a linear world to a non-linear one (click here for more information) and we need good science to come with us. To attempt to shout down science, diminishes us all and limits the possibilities of our world.

For more information on Otto’s perspective read New Scientist October 27th 2011 (subscription required) or the Huffington Post- The un-American war on Science.

Shawn Otto has written book called Fool Me Twice: fighting thee assault on science in America

Why Andrew Lansley is not talking to people like Mohammad demonstrates why BIG GOV struggle with designing for a better world. Its not top down with lots of expensive consultants. Designing for transformation is flat, emergent and networked. And the clue is in the name of Mohammad’s company PATIENTS KNOW BEST. Better thinking, better world. Its about blending technologies of cooperation, with data, platforms and people. Designing around people, for people, not inspite of them.

Mohammad’s story is the reason a patient knows best is because they are the only one who goes to all the consultations. So Mohammad has come up with a simple program so a patient can access their health records.

No Straight Lines, argues that we have reached the nadir of the adaptive range of our industrialised world. Now faced with an unsustainable trilemma of social, organisational and economic complexity, we have entered an era in which the rules we have previously organised our lives around no longer apply. Leaving us with both a design problem and a design challenge which we must urgently solve. By describing an entirely new way for true social, economic and organisational innovation to happen, No Straight Lines presents a revolutionary logic and an inspiring plea for a more human-centric world.

That quote has always resonated with me. As it leads to the question, what makes work worthwhile? And how do we define work? This thought cropped this morning reading an article that Per Håkansson had flipped over to me. It was Douglas Rushkoff musing on the mantra of jobs, jobs, jobs Are Jobs Obsolete? – yes he agrees we all want to be doing useful things – but the jobs our current politicians describe he feels are built on a dying age, an industrial age. Perhaps he suggests we could envision a far better way of filling our time…

This sort of work isn’t so much employment as it is creative activity. Unlike Industrial Age employment, digital production can be done from the home, independently, and even in a peer-to-peer fashion without going through big corporations. We can make games for each other, write books, solve problems, educate and inspire one another — all through bits instead of stuff. And we can pay one another using the same money we use to buy real stuff.

Its a great big idea and some I guess are already doing that. The big issue is also that jobs have come to define us as people. “What do you do?” is the line of interrogation that goes when first meeting someone perhaps for the first time. Brain surgeon or bank robber? Work and identity become hugely important.

In a post entitled Modern Life is Rubbish I refer to the work of Richard Sennett,

In, The Corrosion of Character: The personal consequences of work in the new capitalism. Richard Sennett describes how the sense of hopelessness, and isolation, deconstructs our character in the workplace, with ultimate tragic consequences. For Sennett, “character” is defined as the capacity to construct and keep commitments – not just in marriage, but also in friendships, communities, and workplaces – and the ability to provide continuous, coherent narratives of personal experience. In Sennett’s view, the “unfettered capitalism” that describes our recent history in labour markets, work schedules, institutions, and technology – renders “character” impossible. Contemporary capitalism demolishes the social and cultural foundations of “character,” and upholds instead the punishing ideal of incessant change.

Rushkoff concludes, “for the time being, as we contend with what appears to be a global economic slowdown by destroying food and demolishing homes, we might want to stop thinking about jobs as the main aspect of our lives that we want to save. They may be a means, but they are not the ends”.

The nature of work and identity appear in the forthcoming book No Straight Lines: making sense of our non-linear world

Because what Ross has done in that time is travel the length and breadth of the United States, photographing and documenting the life of juveniles in “Juuvie”. Juvenile prison. This work builds upon his last project called The Architecture of Authority.

I think its an important piece of work, its a very political piece of work, and it is a very powerful piece of work. Ross annotates one of his photographs, a picture of a boy with a massive head scar that covers the entire side of his head, The scar is from a traumatic brain injury. Many of the youth in the system have been the victims of violence, on the streets and at home, resulting in TBI and PTSD. Scars like this, while not common, are not infrequent.

What's the worse thing you can do to a human being? Solitary

Harpers Magazine have run a story on Ross’s epic journey which you can read (here) and (here).

Ross himself writes on his website,

Juvenile In Justice documents the placement and treatment of American juveniles housed by law in facilities that treat, confine, punish, assist and, occasionally, harm them. My medium is a conscience.

For the past five years, I have interviewed and photographed both pre-adjudicated and committed youth in the juvenile justice system. To date, I have interviewed and photographed over 1,000 juveniles and administrators at 300+ facilities in 30 states in the U.S. I have made sure to keep the children’s identities unknown, by either photographing them from behind or obscuring their faces.

I have photographed group homes, police departments, youth correctional facilities, juvenile courtrooms, high schools, shelters, Montessori classrooms, CPS interview rooms, and maximum security lock-down and non-lock-down shelters, to name a few. Earl Dunlap, the Director of Cooke County Detention Center, welcomed me to his facility with the words: “Welcome to the gates of hell.”

In the past I have photographed for major magazines, newspapers and institutions. At this phase in my career I am turning my lens towards the juvenile justice system and using what I have learned in 40+ years of photography to create a database of compelling images to instigate policy reform. My products are unbiased photographic and textual evidence of a system that houses more than 100,000 kids every day.

In the US all prisons are privatised – when you run a ‘for profit’ organisation, you need to input raw material to extract value – cash. In this instance the raw materials are juveniles from whose incarceration cash is extracted via the tax payer. So here’s a simple game plan one invests in prisons, and then lobbies to ensure the law accommodates easier sentencing and longer jail terms – because the more raw material one inputs the more value is extracted. Some Senators are in jail today for doing precisely that.

Ross tells me another story of a young boy, who has mental health problems, and is under 14. He shot his father with a gun. Why? Because his father had systematically raped his son since he could remember, then he started on the boys younger sister – so to protect her he shot his father dead. The boy is in Juuvie. As Ross would say, ‘Go figure’.

In a New York Times article from 2010

Gladys Carrión, New York’s reform-minded commissioner of the Office of Children and Family Services, has been calling on the state to close many of its remote, prison-style juvenile facilities and shift resources and children to therapeutic programs located in their communities. Her efforts have met fierce and predictably self-interested resistance from the unions representing workers in juvenile prisons and their allies in Albany. A recent series of damning reports have underscored the flaws in New York’s juvenile justice system and the urgent need to shut down these facilities.

Not surprisingly, these institutions do a terrible job of rehabilitation. According to a study of children released from custody between 1991 and 1995, 89 percent of the boys and 81 percent of the girls were eventually rearrested. New York’s facilities are so disastrous and inhumane that state officials recently asked the courts to refrain from sending children to them, except in cases in which they presented a clear danger to the public.

We don’t think about the system of prison, or at least very few of us do.  But in talking to Ross, and watching him work you can see the unfairness, greed, and a great inhumanity oozing out of every pore of this system. And this work profoundly resonates with me, and with the work I have been doing with No Straight Lines. This for me is an indicator of the fact that we live at the edge of the adaptive range of our industrial society, where we are deconstructing humanity almost to the point of deconstruction.

We must ask ourselves the question, what role does any organisation play in our society? Is it there to serve humanity and society, or is it there to create power? To generate huge revenues for a few at the cost of the many? And we then have to go on and ask and why do we stand for it? Will our conscience stand for it? Is this really the American Dream or is it time to reinvent it?

Juvenile In Justice will be on view at the Nevada Museum of Art in Fall of 2012 and Feldman Gallery in 2013.

We can see that things could be done better – but the question is how. Is it right to use free market thinking as an invasive form of ideology into all aspects of the fabric of British Society? My view is that its a form of toxic creep. Cameron stated he would, and I quote verbatim, ‘that his government would ring-fence the NHS’. It hardly looks like that to me. Also, because of the research conducted over the last 7 years on No Straight Lines, we can see that people like Andrew Lansley and this government, are struggling with complexity, and trying to take an old model which has failed and attempting to apply that to a new paradigm. The fact is there are enough great answers to these problems which in fact are far superior in the service they deliver, at a fraction of the cost but are in Lansley’s view unorthodox, so therefore cannot be looked at seriously. As John Berger wrote in Ways of Seeing, “what you see is defined by what you know.”

Not far from where Andrew Lansley lives is Cambridge, there is some very interesting innovation happening in healthcare in Cambridge. For example Patients Know Best enables people managing long term chronic healthcare to engage in a more meaningful dialogue with clinicians, which can deliver far better, for far less, and avoid wastage in unnecessary hospital visits which happen for a whole host of reasons. in Ontario, through a Participatory Leadership programme, the entire community and healthcare system are engaged as participants in working on evolving a more relevant form of healthcare service – without the need for consultants, with their flip charts and powerpoint decks. (more on this in the No Straight Lines book). This is an entirely different form of innovation, that has an entirely different though common sense approach to solving wicked problems.

In No Straight Lines we look at the problems of a US led style healthcare system, its unfairness and its entire design based upon procedures done to patients (which is how private companies make their money). More procedures = more money. This is what Lansley does see – its machine age thinking, its linear, its not networked, nor design led. Its not human centric, its money centric, and as my Grandfather used to say, “when ready money changes hands some always sticks”.

In a paper I received yesterday entitled: Liberating the NHS: source and destination of the Lansley reform

The authors write, The Financial Times Public Policy Editor has noted of the current NHS reform: 

“what is still missing is a narrative that explains how these changes, carried out in this way at this time, will help the NHS to address its central task – making £20bn of efficiency savings over the next four years in order to meet rising demand within a budget that is flat in real terms. Instead, the opposite is more likely.”

 A narrative for this reform, far more transparent than the double-speak of the White Paper, can indeed be located. It is described in the following pages. It maps a move away from the tax-funded NHS based on the principles of contribution according to ability to pay, and use according to medical need. It takes the NHS towards a US-style arrangement of individual health insurance with access to care based on payment of health insurers at a level based on the insuree’s state of health. In other words it removes the pooling of risk which underlies the post-war social solidarity compact, involving subsidy of health care for poorer and less healthy citizens by richer and healthier compatriots. A plan for the end-state system to be jointly funded by the state and the individual solves the perplexing riddle of how the new system could generate £20 billion of savings, given that it involves more providers, fragmented procurement, more complex administration, the marketing costs involved in market competition, and multiple layers of profit extraction from the NHS budget,. Cost reductions will be achieved through de-skilling and poorer employment terms for medical professionals as the NHS hospitals which employ them are shifted into the private sector.

You can read the rest here – and share it with those that you believe should be reading it.

Liberating the NHS: source and destination of the Lansley reform

In fact the question is: Is online piracy and ubiquitous free content killing our culture? I believe we must always be open to divergent and different perspectives of the world. We must be prepared to see the world from anothers’ perspective. I do think this is at times a good question to ask.

Morozov writes: Levine’s call to arms – “it’s time to ask, seriously, whether the culture business as we know it can survive the digital age”

But then one has to ask the question for example is Fox News culture? meaningful culture, worthwhile culture. Rupert Mordoch famously said he would make Sky News in the UK more like Fox if he had his way. Just have a read about the delightful Roger Ailes that runs Fox. The mainstream media that presents information as truth that plays a key and important role in shaping the debate about our world, has been found wanting. Is this system worth preserving?

But I persisted with the review – some good points raised. However,

In a chapter subtitled “How the internet could kill Mad Men”, Levine frets about the future of cable television, seemingly unaware of the fact that, back in the 1960s, American broadcast networks did their best to wipe out the nascent cable industry, which survived only thanks to a ruling by the US supreme court. Had the judges followed Levine’s conservative logic, a more fitting subtitle would be “How the networks aborted the parents of Mad Men”.

And how many times have incumbents fought bitterly and viciously to stop others. The telegraph versus the telephone for example. Morozov goes on…

Are new technologies really that much of a threat to the culture industry? Google TV – one of the projects Levine lists among the greatest threats to cable television – seems dead on arrival; at the moment, product returns outnumber sales. According to a recent survey by BookStats, in 2011 the publishing industry earned nearly 6% more revenue than in 2008, while selling 4% more books – in part, thanks to ebooks. The global march of streaming services such as Netflix and Spotify has made piracy less appealing.

None of this excites Levine, who complains that the internet has not encouraged innovation. “Like TV, the internet is only as good as what’s on,” he writes. Statements like this underscore the danger of setting internet policy based on the interests of the content industry alone. For those in this group, the internet is merely TV on steroids – its impact on the Arab spring, economic and human development and the future of learning be damned.

I arrived at the conclusion that Levine is representative of a certain form of market fundamentalism – and this fundamentalism is dangerous. Born out of not understanding, not wanting to understand. An arrogance about what is “culture” and who has the right to create it. He sees markets not as cultural but purely economic, he sees people only as consumers. Culture in his view, and people that he represents, see “culture” as a means to extract money from people. Simple. As the economist John Kay wrote,

“Capitalists are capitalism’s worst enemy, and particularly the market fundamentalist tendency which has been in the ascendant for the last 20 years”

For me, and Morozov saves it for last, is that in “Levines opinion James Murdoch was a saviour of Journalism.” The same James Murdoch who may have perjured himself, who along with his father owned a newspaper that in its quest for monetary gain, hacked into the voice mails of dead children, to get “the edge” on their rivals in the tabloid newspaper wars. If that is what Levine thinks is culture, then God help us all.

But the real frenzy isn’t the exposure of the scandal – it’s the scale of corruption, collusion and cover-up between News International, politicians and police that the scandal has revealed. As the cast of hacking victims, blaggers and blackmailers has lengthened, and the details of the incestuous payments and job-swapping between News International, government and Scotland Yard become more complex, it’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture that is now emerging.

If it were not for the uncovering of this cesspit, the Cameron government would be preparing to nod through the outright takeover of BSkyB by News International, taking its dominance of Britain’s media and political world into Silvio Berlusconi territory. But what has been exposed now goes well beyond the hacking of murder victims and dead soldiers’ families – or even the media itself. The scandal has lifted the lid on how power is really exercised in 21st-century Britain – in which the unreformed City and its bankers play a central part.

What concerns Milne is the moral lassitude that seems to pervade all parts of the systems that are supposed to be edifices of British Life. Read: Barclays Bank The Real Indoor Pirates, or The Problem with Murdoch’s Media.

Is it time to truly Reboot Britain, which is different to playing lip service to it? A far too many people and organisations have done and are doing.  A people will only be free when they can control their own communications. And that fact has been drawn into sharp focus.