In NO Straight Lines: I argue that we now have the possibility to truly transform our world, to be more resilient, to be more relevant to us both personally and collectively, socially cohesive, sustainable, economically vibrant and humane, through the tools, capabilities, language and processes at our fingertips.

The key to unlocking this opportunity, so we can design for transformation is through understanding the interlocking concepts of the six key principles of No Straight Lines, which our research shows are the 6 big challenges that organisations have to navigate to thrive in a non-linear world.

These are:

[1] How do organisations of all creeds deal with a more complex and increasingly ambiguous world?

[2] How do those organisations push through from living in an ambiguous world to one in which they can begin to design for adaptation?

[3] How do organisations learn to design for a more open world – which will be necessary for survival?

[4] How do organisations learn to design for a more participatory world?

[5] How do organisations develop a methodology for craftsmanship at a personal and more organisational level?

[6] How do organisations prepare for and design for transformation?
The six key principles of No Straight Lines, these are:

[1] Ambiguity [2] Adaptiveness [3] Participatory cultures and tools [4] Openness [5] Craftsmanship [6] Epic (designing for transformation).

What our research shows us that whether executed digitally or in our analogue world or indeed blended together – those organisations that have addressed these issues with conviction are the ones that have moved from being stuck in a world of concussive ambiguity.

Click here for NSL Store

Related articles

• Why Britain needs a mentoring eco-system for entrepreneurs (no-straight-lines.com)
• LEGO CUUSOO – the WHAT’S NEXT for business in a non-linear world (no-straight-lines.com)
• Celebrating Craftsmanship (smlxtralarge.com)
• No Straight Lines: making sense of our non-linear world (communities-dominate.blogs.com)

Some people struggle to reconcile Apple as a company with the idea of Open, one of the principles of No Straight Lines.

Apple is not open, it is in fact the complete opposite is the pushback – and so we go into big discussion. Which is good as part of the process of No Straight Lines process is to really challenge our perceptions, so we can move beyond them, where we can imagine and then create our best possible future.

For me, Open as relates to Apple, is about the curiosity of the craftsman – tinkering, learning through the felt fingering space of play.

In this way as Arthur C. Clarke wrote,

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible

So one has to be open to new ideas, tools, technologies, process and organisational capability. And we have wonderful products like the iPhone because Apple were prepared to play in the closed eco-system that was the old Telco world. (I know, as I was there).

Apple created for the first time a phone that was relevant to the world it lived in – whereas before then it was the carriers that played Nero to its empire. Consequently the products were dull. It was Jobs that ruthlessly forced that market to change.

Jobs also went to Nokia, and I am sure a few others, offering a mutual relationship with the iTunes eco-system and was shown the door. And I also know of plenty of innovative Japanese companies innovating over a decade ago in mobile/web who were also shown the same revolving mechanism. Whilst these behemoths went back to counting their ducets.

So my challenge is – who was open and who was closed? Who saw the best future potential for us, as users of products and services and who only saw “the money”, and were only motivated by how much money they could extract from our wallets whilst giving back as little as humanly possible.

Apple built an eco-system and a platform. It has created great products because it was OPEN – it may not operate under a cc licence, and it may come across as über controlling. But, there is much more to this story than rejecting Apple as a closed, tight lipped organisation.

Apple thrives on diversity, and to accommodate diversity one has to live in open knowledge eco-systems. The story of many organisations and even industries that die is because they lived in a closed knowledge system. Unable to change their perspectives of how they saw the world, and operated in it and so became disrupted – to the point of catastrophic failure. Open is about learning philosophically, instinctively, new literacies to create new and novel products and services that create value.

Now how many companies do that?

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.

I was taken by his post on innovation, constraint, and design, he quotes Dave Snowden, and Aydin Örstan.

It is interesting that Africa is innovating in mobile and tech in amazing ways – simply because of, the hunger to make for a better life, and, to use what is available to hand, even though constrained. Those that do not see Africa as a place to study for why innovation happens almost in spite of so few resources – are looking through the wrong lens. Steve’s edict for his own operation is, make a telco as easy to operate as a wordpress blog, I LOVE THAT. And also – be as open as possible Principle #5 in No Straight Lines.

So over to Steve…

Constraint and Complexity

Interestingly, about the same time as Ethan was writing about constraint, Dave Snowden was offering his own tentative rules of complexity in the 5 Cs of Complexity.  The first of which is, you guessed it, constraint.  He says that

Constraint is key to understanding complexity, it governs the transition between the three ontologies. Increase constraint and you create an ordered system; do that inappropriately and you create the conditions for catastrophic failure; remove constraint and the system is chaotic…

Understanding the boundaries and critical variables in the environment that you are operating in is the key to intervening successfully in any complex system.  Too constrained and there is no innovation, witness most development projects based on a logframe.   With no constraint, innovation also doesn’t happen because (I believe) that innovation is a dialogue involving people and things.  With no control, innovation is easily dissipated in many possible directions.

Innovation and Evolution

Aydin Örstan has a great quotation from François Jacob (The possible and the actual, 1982) in an interesting post on evolution.  François says:

In contrast to the engineer, evolution does not produce innovations from scratch. It works on what already exists, either transforming a system to give it a new function or combining several systems to produce a more complex one. Natural selection has no analogy with any aspect of human behavior. If one wanted to use a comparison, however, one would have to say that this process resembles not engineering but tinkering, bricolage we say in French.

 

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.

Craftsmanship can and does manifest it self in many ways – we need to celebrate them all. This lecture from The Do Lectures given by the charming Nick Hand.

In an age of fast, there’s slow. In an age of quantity there’s quality. On a bike ride around Britain Nick discovered his appreciation of the craftsman and women of Britain. And how we need to keep these skills alive.

A video of my take on design. No Straight Lines more info.

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