Archives: participatory culture+tools

What's next for banking?

I have enjoyed Mosaic Ventures blog on the unbundling of the banks. Their observation that it is not a new bank that we need but a new way of banking. There is in my view an inevitability to the arrival of a new ecosystem, as our world evolves that will serve us even better. But to do so we have to have fundamental redesign of what a businesses looks like. Mostly its design is distributed, networked and peer to peer. Continue reading

July 17, 2015

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The Reformation of Capitalism

In June 2014, Clayton Christensen and Derek van Bever wrote in the June 2014 issue of Harvard Business Review (HBR). “The orthodoxies governing finance are so entrenched that we almost need a modern-day Martin Luther to articulate the need for change.” And they are not the only ones signalling we need a change of direction in how we think our economies work. In Vienna this year the Global Peter Drucker Forum gathered together the great and the good to explore what next for Capitalism looks like. We have arrived at a turning point,” says the Forum’s abstract. “Either the world will embark on a route towards long-term growth and prosperity, or we will manage our way to economic decline.” Continue reading

December 15, 2014

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Yeo Valley Farms, a masterclass in business transformation

The challenge: How do we remove the acute volatility and therefore risk of running a farm? How can we become more resilient and get to a better future? Yeo Valley Farms is the largest organic dairy farm in the UK, and is a great example of how to deal with economic disruption and create lasting transformational change – that delivers better business, without damaging the natural environment. Continue reading

December 11, 2014

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Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid and Darwin

At the turn of the 20th century an exiled Russian aristocrat and anarchist, Peter Kropotkin, wrote a classic book called Mutual Aid. He complained that, in the widespread acceptance of Darwin’s ideas, heavy emphasis had been laid on the cleansing role of social conflict and far too little attention given to the remarkable examples of cooperation. Even now, biological knowledge of symbiosis, reciprocity and mutualism has not yet percolated extensively into public discussions of human social behaviour. Continue reading

November 27, 2014

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How do you rule the void once the party's over?

Earlier this year I read the late Peter Mair’s Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy. It got me thinking, because as I observed in Chapter 5 of No Straight Lines, we are in a process of political transformation. A transformation of how we organise and run our societies. I ask the question, what should government look like in a non-linear world? Are we creating and running systems in the right way? Why is it that so many people are disengaged with the process of democracy and civil organisations? Continue reading

November 1, 2014

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LEGO cultures of creativity

The LEGO Foundation are creating and sharing ground-breaking research on the power of play and creativity in learning, to act as a critical resource for thought leaders, influencers, educators and parents all around the world. Continue reading

October 18, 2014

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Tim Campbell on what makes a smart city

Our urban environments are under strain, whether that be, the birthplace of the Garden City Letchworth, or cities such as Odense in Denmark, larger one like Bristol, or megacities like Seoul (Taking the Seoul Train to the Sharing Economy Part … Continue reading

July 14, 2014

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Cradling the transformative economy

As we evolve for a linear model of economy. What we make and how we make it, what we do with our waste and how we waste that too. We start to see a new horizon where our obituary won’t be what we have sent to the landfill but something more elegaic and life affirming – as we become part of the circular economy. It has been described as cradle to cradle. Continue reading

July 9, 2014

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Waste to Waves a story from the circular economy

This a story about how we can think differently about material waste, upcycling, ans the circular economy. Sustainable Surf (sustainablesurf.org), and Waste to Waves. Sustainable Surf is a California-based 501(c)(3) non-profit charity organization founded by social entrepreneurs, located in the heart of the Southern CA surfing industry. Their Mission: Be the catalyst that transforms surf culture and industry into a powerful community that protects what they call, the ocean playground. Continue reading

July 5, 2014

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Juliana Rotich on Ushahidi mapping humanitarian needs

Juliana Rotich’s talk on Ushahidi where it came from and where it is going. In talking about innovation Julia says, if it works in Africa it can work anywhere. Out of adversity comes innovation. I am proud to be part of the advisory board for Ushahidi. Continue reading

July 4, 2014

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Ex CIA spy says Open Collaborative Cultures Win

A fascinating article (The open source revolution is coming and it will conquer the 1% – ex CIA spy) written by Nafeez Ahmed about Robert David Steele and his thesis that Open and Collaborative systems are the only means by which we will meaningfully move forward. Open Collaborative organisations remove the traditional constraints placed upon any organisation. It permits the asking of powerful framing questions. These framing questions enable us to see what others don’t. Open source regenerative business models and the decentralised organisation become mainstream. This allows the scale of the problems we face to be met by participatory and collaborative systems and cultures. These organisations work towards a higher order purpose. This higher order purpose delivers consistently higher performance with outcomes that are truly authentic, more resilient and relevant. Continue reading

June 28, 2014

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Joel Salatin on the potential of large scale organic farming

Joel Salatin is America’s most celebrated pioneer of chemical-free farming. Here Joel gives a powerful talk on why our current industrial way of farming is so wrong in so many ways. Demonstrating the potential of how we can do it differently – better and more in step with the way of the natural world. Salatin says we can feed the world but not by industrial methods. Continue reading

June 22, 2014

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John Mackey CEO of Whole Foods on Conscious Capitalism

What is the purpose of business, or an organisation? In No Straight Lines, I ask this question – How can we create better for our economies, organisations and societies – all at the same time. As currently it seems we always have to make a choice of one over the other, at the expense always to us. John Mackey CEO of Whole Foods demonstrates it does not have to be that way – and that better much better does not have to cost the earth. Continue reading

June 18, 2014

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De Hogeweyk dementia village

De Hogeweyk or Hogewey is a gated model village setting in Weesp, in The Netherlands. It is notable because it has been designed specifically as a pioneering care facility for elderly people with dementia. The major advances achieved by the approach of all-day reminiscence therapy at Hogewey, compared to traditional nursing homes, is that the residents with dementia are more active and require less medication. Carers, doctors and nurses work around the clock to provide the 152 residents the necessary 24-hour care. Continue reading

June 10, 2014

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Healthcare innovation Integrated Neurological Services

Integrated Neurological Services (INS) was founded in 1999 by Liz Grove and Ellie Kinnear. Its purpose to help patients with Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, stroke and other neurological complaints that affect movement, memory, balance and communication, everything essential to a normal life. The charity works to make a real difference between a life devastated by severe illness and a life that makes the most of the opportunities still available. Continue reading

June 9, 2014

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Shan Williams what do you do when your town is dying?

Up and down the country, our towns are dying. When convenience became the precedent over local, we opened the doors for the conglomerates and they made themselves at home. Our highstreets now consist of the big names, charity shops and abandoned units that reek of recession. You can practically see tumble weeds. In one of the most humbling and emotionally driven DO Lectures, Shan Williams spoke of her organisation 4CG, a group of people that are solely dedicated to the regeneration of their town, and how it all started in a council meeting when a prime site came up for sale in her beloved town of Cardigan. Have some tissues near to hand. Continue reading

May 23, 2014

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Odense working on an innovative template for civic centric systems

Place and community as social and economic networks: Last week I was in Odense, a municipality of Denmark, working with a team of people who are knee, elbow, neck deep in system change. My task was to help this team of wonderful people explore how they could address that change as it presents significant challenges in how people embrace transformation, and work meaningfully with it. This team had healthcare as a key concern. So we went on a journey exploring how one can create powerful systems change inside an existing organisation and, at the same time explored innovative practices that can reduce the significant financial burden of healthcare and more importantly change its purpose to one that was more preventative inspired by reinvigorating the sources of health. Continue reading

May 21, 2014

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The human need to transcend

Kenan Malik writing in his excellent article about the sacred in art, explores the capacity of the sacred to go beyond religion to become a necessary part of what makes us human. Continue reading

April 20, 2014

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The journey to a commons based economy

When astronauts go into space and looking down at the earth, an image we all know, but in another way do not know at all. They find themselves having a deep spiritual connection with the earth, within themselves that is shocking and beautiful. Theirs is a profound moment of epiphany – a realisation, of the inseparable relationship between the cosmos, the Earth and humanity. This is not a ‘oooh woow’ moment, it is in fact a moment of transformation, of catharsis, an irreversible cognitive shift. Continue reading

April 9, 2014

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Lina Bo Bardi shaping the world through a love of humanity

When we design around the the needs of humanity, when we put humanity at the core of our process – we have the potential to create extraordinary things. Not to design humanity an culture out of the process of creation but to weave it in. Sounds obvious does it not? But the truth is we have created too many systems, organisations, buildings that do not acknowledge our humanity. Lina Bo Bardi an Italian who moved to Brazil is an example of someone that believed profoundly in designing and creating buildings around the needs of human beings. Continue reading

March 8, 2014

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Leadership in a commons based economy

the problem of our current economic debate is that we are trying to solve 21st century problems with 19th and 20th century economic thought. That is: our discourse is stuck between “more markets and free enterprise” (2.0) and “more regulation and government” (3.0). In reality, neither of these approaches will suffice. This new philosophy is something that I explore in No Straight Lines -the means by which we can transform. Continue reading

March 4, 2014

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Broke

I have been reading David Boyle’s new book Broke. How to survive the middle-class crisis. Gonzalez de Cellerigo was a lawyer and an economist living in 1600 Spain. He writes, the riches which should have brought wealth have brought poverty. Cellerigo understood that the flood of money coming into Spain, over the last 4 decades had caused the value of money to fall. Boyle makes observation that in modern Britain today we have suffered the same, ‘the cascade of wealth into the City of London, instead of financing production, it was frittered away on interest payments for debt, buying luxury goods from abroad, raising prices and, in the case of sixteenth century Spain, on the purchase of Eastern luxuries from the Portuguese Empire’. Continue reading

March 2, 2014

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The revolt against traditional education

Last year I was working with an extraordinary group of people in Salzburg – where we had come together to explore the potential of systemic transformation. In one exercise we worked collaboratively on an idea that each individually intrigued us. Mine was education. After many rounds of questioning – we were asked to write from the heart, intuitively what we felt. This is what I wrote. The Revolt Against Traditional Education: Continue reading

February 1, 2014

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Zaid Hassan: sensing, and connecting to a whole reality

I am came across this lovely insight by Zaid
 Hassan,
 in The
 U: 
A 
Language 
of
 Regeneration. As Russ Ackoff said a hole is spelt with a W. In my journey this reality that others cannot see the whole, happens 99% of the time in organizations, as Deming points to the 94/6 rule, where 94% of problems can be traced to the process and only 6% to the person – when systems are fixed. Therefore sensing the entire system is key. Continue reading

January 8, 2014

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The restorative economy

Need to rewrite the foundations of economics: The need for a root and branch rewriting of economics produced a book last year called What’s the Use of Economics? Teaching the Dismal Science after the Crisis. Of course it is much much harder than anyone realises to bring into the world a truly viable alternative economy to an existing dominant model. There are many vested interests, and shifts of power that create vacuums’ generate the necessary conditions where waves of multiple dissonance; social, religious, economic combine to make people fearful of change and reactive to perceived threats real or otherwise. Opportunism trying to outflank those that seek a more ambitious goal. Continue reading

December 30, 2013

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Lego's new business model: Pleygo

LEGO has always fascinated me, because of its journey from small to great to almost has been to a company designed for meeting the demands and challenges of a non-linear world. LEGO is launching LEGO The Movie next year and they have also been exploring the idea of building a service / rental style model called Pleygo is like a Netlix-like rental service that allows families to swap Lego sets instead of purchasing new ones and creating more plastic waste in the process. The Lego swap service enables kids to try out and play with lots of different sets. Continue reading

December 12, 2013

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Lee Smolin and Robert MacFarlane seeing the power and potential of a chaotic world

One of our obsessions is to see chaos as uncontrollable, primordial, dangerous which we as a species must strive at all costs to eviscerate from our lives. As physicist Lee Smolin wrote in Time Reborn, “No living system is an isolated system. We all ride flows of matter and energy – flows driven ultimately by the energy from the sun. Once enclosed in a box (in a prefiguration of our eventual internment), we die”. Continue reading

November 26, 2013

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High performance organizations through respect for people

Openness is resilience, leadership with purpose: Whereas one can see what happens when people exist in an open culture, which is led by purpose rather than a kpi. Two very different stories spring to mind, [1] the organisational systems change that was delivered through a process of participatory leadership in Nova Scotia for public health, [2] in Japan with Toyota. If you start to think about designing for whole systems with real human beings operating in those systems – I believe we see a very different organisational design emerge. Continue reading

November 17, 2013

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From a mechanistic to a natural philosophy of science

Rupert Sheldrake takes us on a journey to stand in a different place and look at science from a natural perspective rather than a mechanistic one. Whether we think about science, management, organisational design. Our machine age: Newtonian determinstic thinking has permeated all aspects of our daily living lives. Sheldrake represents a broader philosophical evolution of reappraising how we see our world, universe and cosmology. Continue reading

November 3, 2013

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Russ Ackoff, a system is a hole with a W

a talk by Russ Ackoff – which is both funny and profound. His quote that a system is a (w)hole, spelt with a W was fantastic – his insight that a system is not a sum of its parts but a sum if the interactions that take place – genius for its clarity. He made the point that to understand this concept write a note with your writing hand, then cut it off and see what happens. He is known as the father of systems thinking. Continue reading

October 31, 2013

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The engaged organisation outperforms the disengaged organisation

a recent Gallup poll pulled up some interesting insights. Companies with engaged workforces achieve higher earnings than organisations that fail to engage their employees. Engaged organisations have 3.9 times the earnings per share growth rate compared to an organisation with lower engagement in the same industry. Continue reading

October 30, 2013

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Those Incredible Edibles from Todmorden and further afield

A couple of weeks ago I headed north to a place called Todmorden, or Tod for those in the know. This is the homeland, of a particular beast called Incredible Edible. Incredible Edible has a mission to inspire and educate the world about food, local food, local food systems, locally gown food, local food economies, and how to lead a more resilient life that is also more fun. Continue reading

October 12, 2013

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Ecuador planning a commons based economy

They also say that disruption never comes from the centre, it always comes from the edge, from places where thinking and doing differently has greater flexibility. Perhaps it will not be the power houses of the industrial order where real and meaningful change comes from but elsewhere. So it was no surprise that the Government of Ecuador has launched a major strategic research project to “fundamentally re-imagine Ecuador” based on the principles of open networks, peer production and commoning, Continue reading

September 26, 2013

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What happens when organisations no longer fit reality

In my previous post on Scotland exploring a different reality, I wanted to share Tim Merry’s views on the need to create better systems more in tune wit the nature of humanity. Tim talks about meeting change with dignity. In No Straight Lines the core philosophy is we can do better and we need to deschool ourselves from a linear and mechanistic way of thinking and doing. Here is Tim expanding on his philosophy on systems change at a human scale. Continue reading

September 24, 2013

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Participatory Leadership and transformational change in Scotland

How can we create better, much better? Where we can create better functioning societies, that are regenerative, more resilient. How can we shape the future of a country to be better prepared for a more uncertain and perhaps more challenging world?

An invitation to learn how to lead change at a systemic and human level Continue reading

September 21, 2013

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The lean green business system

The authors argue that things that are good for the planet are also good for business. Studies from the the Economist Intelligence Unit, Harvard, MIT Sloan, and others indicate that organizations that commit to goals of zero waste, zero harmful emissions, and zero use of nonrenewable resources clearly outperform their competition. Continue reading

September 15, 2013

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People embrace what they create in Istanbul

It was Jamie Lerner the Mayor of Curitiba who when he took office and facing many challenges decided to galvanise his citizens into life to make Curitiba work. Lerner said the work they undertook should be fun, fast and above all non-expensive. The idea that we own, or have ownership over our civic spaces is very important. Home, hearth, kith and kin are all about belonging and identity. So this is a small story about those things. Continue reading

September 12, 2013

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True knowledge exists in a network

Lee Smolin describes our universe at an atomic level as curved, open, diverse and highly networked, Manuel Castells describes our society as evolving into a networked one which as significant cultural and political implications, Janine Benyus talks about nature as a highly networked open, diverse eco-system from which we as humans have much to learn revolutionising how we invent, compute, heal ourselves, harness energy, repair the environment, and feed the world. Continue reading

August 26, 2013

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A handcrafted particle accelerator

Patrick Stevenson Keating created a handcrafted glass particle accelerator in what I would describe as an act of true craftsmanship. The piece consists of a series of organically-shaped hand-blown glass bulbs – each attached to a pump via a tube to create a vacuum. When the button is pushed, a voltage of 45,000V is applied across two electrodes. Continue reading

August 22, 2013

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Humanness of network knowledge

when we see things really scale up on the net, as we do with Wikipedia or some of the large collaborative projects like Linux and Debian and the like, the decision making changes, and rather than thinking, oh, we’ll find one person who’s smart enough to make decisions, no, we have a network, let’s do this in a networked way. And what are networks good at? Well, if a decision can be kept local, the person who knows most about the thing is the person who is dealing with it every day, the local decision. Continue reading

August 11, 2013

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Crowdfunding, goteo, localism, and non-linear innovation

Goteo demonstrates a people / community centered design approach to getting stuff done, bottom up networked, where everyone has something to give and something to gain. If we are looking for a pattern one can also point to Mosaic Banking on the sun, a community investing in sustainable energy. Collective crowdfunding is also part of a global movement to go around those institutions that people believe have failed them. Embedded in such design is a philosophy of networked sociability, and trust. As none of this works without it. It points to an alternative model of funding local projects which also mitigates risk. Continue reading

August 7, 2013

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6 steps to transform the way we do business

Published in The Guardian Sustainable Business. Our institutions, organisations and economies were conceived, designed and built for a simpler more linear world. Overwhelmed by complexity, these have become disrupted and unsustainable. There is an urgent need to transform our societies, organisations and economies by better design to thrive in what I call a “non-linear world”. Continue reading

August 3, 2013

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What do we know about participatory cultures?

Henry Jenkins interviews Aaron Delwiche and Jennifer Jacobs Henderson about their new book The Participatory Cultures Handbook. This is of great interest to me because Principle 4 of No Straight Lines is Participatory Cultures and Tools in a recent article for The Guardian (Six steps to transform the way we do business) I briefly explained the principle and why I believe it is a key component to our non-linear world, Continue reading

August 2, 2013

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Where do big ideas come from?

Recently I was participating a workshop that was exploring the question, where do big ideas come from? We were a group of 20 people and asked to bring with us 2 ideas each that we found intriguing, ideas that we were undecided about but wanted to explore. Then through an intense collaborative process over 2 days we explored those ideas, digging deeper into them, exploring their emergence, their context, their potential for good and also disruption. We explored patterns, connections and looked systemically at these ideas. Continue reading

July 30, 2013

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Is it solutions or transformation that we seek?

This where I think organisations need a more nuanced approach to Transformation – being able to describe a new destination, with if necessary new organisational capability. They need innovation to be interwoven into the organisation to deliver business model innovation Continue reading

July 10, 2013

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How big data can help better understand social risks and opportunities

‘Black Swans turn Grey’: The risk landscape is undoubtedly shifting. PwC (PricewaterhouseCoopers), invoking Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s recent book, posit that ‘Black Swans’ are increasingly ‘turning grey’. By this, they mean that previously catalytic and unforeseen events are becoming more regular; betraying an increased level of uncertainty faced by the global community in the face of growing connectivity and dependency. Continue reading

June 3, 2013

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Old World New World, connections, networks, pathways

Pilgrim paths, green roads, drove roads, corpse roads, trods, leys, dykes. drongs, sarns, snickets, holloways, bostles, shutes, driftways, lichways, ridings, halterpaths, cartways, carneys, causeways, herepaths. In Holland there are doodwegen and spookwegen – death roads and ghost roads. In Spain … Continue reading

May 30, 2013

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No Straight Lines keynote @PINC

Alan Moore keynote at PINC: Today’s and tomorrow’s executives and leaders face a complex design challenge, in transforming existing organisations and economies from a linear to a non-linear economy. Executives and leaders must be able to thrive in a world of constant change and be able to create and lead agile organisations that deliver higher performance with lower input costs. No Straight Lines has six framing principles that teach the philosophy and practice of how to design organisations and economic models for a non-linear world. Continue reading

May 19, 2013

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End of the line for mass produced education?

Sir Ken Robinson famously said: ‘We educate our children from the waist up, then we focus on their heads, and then we only educate one side of their brain. The whole purpose of education is to produce university professors who live in their heads, their bodies are only there to transport their heads to meetings. The current education system educates creativity out of us. We need to educate children holistically. Children have extraordinary capacities for innovation and creativity. And, just as Picasso argued that we are all born artists, social philosopher Richard Sennett says we are all born craftsmen and craftswomen. Martha Nussbaum in a short interview explores these themes. Continue reading

May 16, 2013

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I don't see these things as risk, I see them as trust

I came across Amanda Palmer and was compelled by her story. In fact her entire life is non-linear, and through that life she has explored a different way of seeing, and through that a different type of wisdom. It resonated with me and with No Straight Lines. In her words, when we really see each other we help each other – and, Continue reading

May 12, 2013

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What does the imprisonment of Andrew Auernheimer tell us?

No matter what the outcome, I will not be broken. I am antifragile, tweeted Andrew Auernheimer before he was wrestled to the floor in a US courtroom and received 41 months for hacking into the the database of AT&T and redistributing that information into the public domain. Continue reading

May 6, 2013

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Society, organisations, economies reshaped by mobile communications and big data

A few weeks ago I was in Miami, at the invitation of Blackberry giving the opening keynote based on the No Straight Lines project on how mobile technologies are reshaping and transforming our world. From the living breathing communications eco-system that is wrapping itself around the earth, to… Continue reading

May 5, 2013

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una breve introducción sin líneas rectas

En una sociedad mediática, las unidades básicas son las grandes “masas” colectivas. La sociedad red, sin embargo, está formada por individuos que establecen conexiones voluntarias con otros individuos, sea cual sea su ubicación. En una sociedad red, la red se convierte en la unidad básica de organización a todos los niveles (individuos, grupos u organizaciones). Las redes sociales virtuales, las redes de medios de comunicación y las redes tecnológicas actúan como catalizadores de la sociedad red. Continue reading

April 22, 2013

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Upgrading cities through social capital

Paul Ricoeur argued that our ability to be reliable and accountable to ourselves and to others requires us to feel needed, understood and included. This implicit bonding of I and We is so fundamental to our existence that it simply cannot be ignored. It must be embraced, and embedded into a way of doing things that enables us all to exist as fully formed individuals, coherent as a collective entity. Continue reading

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Big data and the sentient world

Chapter 5 of No Straight Lines addresses this emerging issue of data. The reason is that the fastest data set revolution is being created by you, every time we text search travel buy we add to the data mountain some 2.5 billion gigabytes a day we, that’s all of humanity are collectively writing a new consciousness into existence. In fact the architecture of our own brain suggests the future of sentience may reside in a different kind of BIG. The question is how do we make meaning out of this data? How can data help us meet the challenges in our daily lives, challenges for our cities, for our changing climate, the ever increasing demand to better manage the resources we have? Continue reading

April 7, 2013

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The UK's social and economic design challenge

A design challenge of epic proportions: a number of conversations this week that has resulted in this post. One was related to four cities in the north of England and their urgent need to rethink and rebuild their local economies, with wellness as the heartbeat of a resilient economy. Then a conversation in my home town of Cambridge which explored the challenges that counties and regions around the UK now face as the UK divests itself of the structures that we call The State that provides services to society. It is a challenge because there will be a cumulative short fall in revenues over the next 5 years with nothing to replace it. Once we have divested these infrastructures there is no going back. Continue reading

April 6, 2013

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Marilyn Hamilton on wellness and urban life

In No Straight Lines I investigate the idea of what makes life worth living at a fundamental level. Why do we work, what is work, and more importantly what makes us as complete human beings as it quite clearly is not the current model. What price are we going to pay when we strip ourselves of the qualities that make us what we are? As Arnold Heertje argues we have lived in a quantitative and dehumanizing economic paradigm which has alienated human beings from their labour and social being. Continue reading

April 4, 2013

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Arnold Heertje humanizing the economy

Arnold Heertje is an economist, author and a provocative voice in the Dutch public debate. His analyses of the current situation regarding the economic crisis and the symptom it is according to him of a larger social paradigmatic shift. Heertje argues that we have lived in a quantitative and dehumanizing economic paradigm which has alienated human beings from their labour and social being. This crisis is the implosion of that model and should be used to initiate the shift towards the new paradigm, which has in his mind everything to do with sustainability and a return to human proportions. Continue reading

April 3, 2013

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People powered uprisings and participatory media

Why is it Zeynep Tufekci asks that when power does such terrible things to a people, a country directed from above that the collective find it so hard to challenge this authoritarian power. It is a story that is explored in No Straight Lines Continue reading

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Innovating in crisis management with p2p and technology

Climate scientists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have reported that extreme weather will become the new normal. Few countries are prepared for multiple disasters. Does the world need a new humanitarian international project that matches the $150 billion international space station in scope and ambition? A key goal would be to ensure that everyone has access to a mobile phone or data signal during a disaster. Continue reading

March 22, 2013

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Achuar community speaks truth to power in the Amazon

Gregor MacLennan works for an Amazonwatch an organisation that campaigns for the rights and lives of indigenous tribes living in the Amazon rainforest in Peru.

MacLennan explains that huge tracts of the Amazon have been sold to international companies for mineral extraction. Those companies come and extract the minerals but they leave a lot behind: pollution on an unprecedented scale, deforestation, the undoable disruption of the communities that live there. Continue reading

February 21, 2013

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The Gestalt Switch to the Human-OS

In The Life and Death of Democracy, John Keane points out that when democracy takes hold of people’s lives, it gives them a glimpse of the contingency of things. They are, he says: ‘injected with the feeling that the world can be other than it is – that situations can be countered, outcomes altered, people’s lives changed through individual and collective action.’ Do people feel this today? Democracy, says Keane, ‘thrives on humility and a shared sense of equality among citizens needs to be visceral’. Continue reading

February 17, 2013

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The transformation of financial systems

As part of the work in No Straight Lines, and looking at our challenges from a systems perspective it is obvious that unless our financial systems evolve we are stuck in a bad place, as Hazel Henderson observes finance is a part of the global commons, to serve real economies not dominate them. Continue reading

February 13, 2013

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Banking on the sun, a community investing in sustainable energy

Banking on the Sun is perhaps one of the finest lines I have read recently, which I found tucked away in the Mercury News – which is not a planet. So ‘Oakland Solar financing startup Mosaic crowd sources installations’ is the headline – for $25 one can become part of a ‘community’ Continue reading

February 8, 2013

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Competing to innovate in the open society

An aspect of open collaboration literacy which may seem counter intuitive is that of competition. Competitions can attract people passionate about solving real world problems; these need to be open access attracting a true divergence of knowledge, and have a fine pedigree. The Longitude Prize was an act of Parliament (the Longitude Act) of the United Kingdom passed in July 1714 during the reign of Queen Anne. It established the Board of Longitude and offered a monetary reward for anyone who could find a simple and practical method for the precise determination of a ship’s longitude. Continue reading

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Open science part of our non-linear world

Science like other industries faces significantly interlinked challenges; how is science going to be funded in the future, and how does one accelerate scientific breakthrough? Who has the right to access? Because many innovative ideas that have changed society have arisen from the combination of curiosity and academic freedom. Continue reading

February 4, 2013

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The promise of an open innovation platform

The promise of an open innovation platform is that it has the ability to create value writes Jack Hughes of TopCoder. Indeed Chapter Seven of No Straight Lines, devotes itself to exploring the open society which offers better ways of sharing knowledge, power and wealth. In fact it is my belief that Openness as a principle and practice is resilience and that there is indeed a more sustainable approach to the varied and many challenges we face. Continue reading

February 3, 2013

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Henry Jenkins interview No Straight Lines

Henry Jenkins interviews author Alan Moore: Through the years, we have remained in touch. Moore remains one of the most thoughtful people I have met — someone who reads broadly, who asks challenging questions, who is willing to explore alternative perspectives, and who is trying to construct his own theoretical model for the changes that are impacting our contemporary society. Continue reading

January 30, 2013

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Ushahidi: a story of non-linear innovation

As described in No Straight Lines – what we face in a complex challenging world is a design challenge. Here is a story of how without spending any money a group of highly motivated people came together from around the world with multiple-design skills and capability, to create what has become the cutting edge in crisis management, and a new radical design of NGO. This organisation is called Ushahidi. Continue reading

January 21, 2013

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The No Straight Lines Yearbook 2012

2012 was the year No Straight Lines was launched. It felt like a very hard year after hardly taking a breath between the research, writing and production and then onto bringing an idea into the world. But the sum of the parts adds up to quite an interesting year. Continue reading

January 9, 2013

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Austerity will not get us to the future we deserve, but creative entrepreneurial expression will

Britain socially and culturally has been shaped by our responses to successive technologies, harnessing their potential to enable us to play a significant role on the worlds stage. This moment in time really does feel like a turning point in our collective approach to the organisation of the economy and society. If we want our towns and cities to hum along, if we want to educate our young to be truly part of the 21st Century, if we want to create jobs and meaningful work, create breakthrough science and pharma projects, a healthcare system that really works, if we want factories of the future that can create value globally then is time for us to be as great as our finest engineers, industrialists, innovators who sought ways of getting things done that were transformational for our society and our economy. A mindset of austerity will not get us to that place. It is time for us to use one of our greatest assets creative entrepreneurial expression and design for transformation. Continue reading

January 2, 2013

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How to design for business transformation

Speaking at a number of events recently I have been asked, repeatedly whether large existing organisations can truly evolve and adapt sufficiently in volatile business conditions, and whether an organisation needs to be in deep crisis before they take the necessary radical steps. Continue reading

November 21, 2012

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The Radical Re-Design of Business

This week I was invited to Shanghai to speak about the transformational design of businesses at Radical Design Week – Shanghai.

In the Heavy Metal Seminar (heavy industry rather than a debate about Metallica), my topic was car manufacturing and how with state of the art 3D fabrication tools, combined with networked participatory cultures and tools, insights into rapid innovation and build practices, a car company Local Motors can build cars five times faster at one hundred times less the capital cost and sell its first production vehicle The Rally Fighter at $79,000. This is radical transformational business design. Continue reading

November 2, 2012

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Waterstones Cambridge hosts No Straight Lines

On the 7th November 2012 starting at 5.30pm I shall be giving an introductory talk about No Straight Lines at Waterstones in Cambridge.

Humanity shifts gear when it demands fundamental change to its real world circumstances and this moment in time really does feel like a turning point in our collective approach to the organisation of the economy and society as a whole. So what does humanity want, and, how is this aspiration driving systemic change? Continue reading

October 9, 2012

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A story of how a public health authority transformed through participatory leadership

Many organizations faced with the significant challenges of improving organizational capability, creating better services, and becoming more agile—often with less money—forget that the key to the best possible future lies in the minds of the many that use, create, and deliver these services everyday. If an organization can harness that deep knowledge, powerful change for the better can unfold naturally. Continue reading

September 11, 2012

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Tattoos: identity creation in a post industrial world

One of the aspects of the networked that I think is oft overlooked is not to do with technology but with people, something that I explore in some depth in No Straight Lines. How do we create identity, and how do we create meaning? For example, as Michele L. Crossley, explains,

When we ask ourselves, ‘what does this mean?’ We are asking ourselves (or others), how something is related or connected to something or someone else. It is the connections or relationships among events that constitute their meaning. Moreover, such meanings are not produced subjectively by isolated individuals; rather, they are formulated through cultural meaning systems such as language (and narratives) which reverberate with knowledge of connections and relationships across generations. Continue reading

August 19, 2012

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Diane Coyle reviews No Straight Lines

I met Alan earlier in the week to talk about the book, which is about redesigning business models taking into account both the dramatic effects of digital technologies and the multiple crises – financial, environmental, social – crashing over western economies at present. It seemed quite an apt choice of reading material, having seen Danny Boyle’s brilliant vision of a Britain socially and culturally shaped by our responses to successive technologies. This moment in time really does feel like a turning point in our collective approach to the organisation of the economy and society. Continue reading

July 29, 2012

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Incredible Edible: people power creating resilient communities

I saw Pam Warhust speak at Thinking Digital in Newcastle a few weeks ago. Inspirational was an understatement – her story of how a group of people created a movement to get their community to think about a more resilient, sustainable community is one we can and should all learn from. This video tells the peoples story. Continue reading

June 8, 2012

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What makes the Finnish education system work?

“Human nature is not like a machine that is built like a model and set to the do the work exactly proscribed for it, but, should be see as a tree that uniquely grows depending on the diverse and inward forces that make it a living thing”.

Sitting in a packed room in the House of Commons yesterday evening I thought of John Stuart Mill listening to Pasi Sahlberg Director General of the Finnish Education Ministry talk about how and why Finland consistently has topped the OECD tables for continued excellence in education. And mourned the dogma, and industrial top down management approach that still besets the UK education system, from both left and right and fails another generation. Continue reading

May 18, 2012

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Review of No Straight Lines, via Indie Reader

No Straight Lines offers a plethora of examples of how societies and companies around the world are using technology in a collaborative and innovative way, bringing success to their economy and a meaningful connection between the members of the community. Moore successfully demonstrates how many businesses and institutions are locked in all levels of bureaucracy in an outdated and inflexible world vision and makes a strong case about why we should and how to use the tools we have to “effect change and challenge an ideology that’s proven to now be inappropriate for its time.” Continue reading

May 10, 2012

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Frugal Innovation working for the collective good

Last night I settled in to listen In Business with BBC journalist Peter Day. What Innovation and transformation of people’s lives, economies, etc., is very much part of the No Straight Lines project as so I was thrilled to hear Professor Jaideep Prabhu from the Cambridge University Judge Business school and Professor Anil Gupta from the Indian Institute of Management talk about Jugaad Innovation. Jugaad is a Hindi word meaning an innovation; an improvised solution born from ingenuity and resourcefulness when faced with scarce resources. Continue reading

May 4, 2012

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Crafting resilient towns and cities

Recently the Prime Minister’s Office let it be known that Prime Minister David Cameron sees Letchworth as a model community wanting to apply the principles of Garden Cities throughout the UK. So how do you exactly go about creating resilient, and sustainable communities for today’s world? Continue reading

May 1, 2012

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Review of No Straight Lines by Tim Smit

I am honoured that Tim Smit the man behind The Eden Project in Cornwall, got hold of a copy of my book, and sent me his take and personal perspective on why he thought it is valuable. Continue reading

April 6, 2012

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Letchworth the model community in David Cameron's big society?

Letchworth the model community in David Cameron’s big society? Cameron says he wants to apply the principles of Garden Cities throughout the UK. There are indeed beautiful aspects to Letchworth, but I think its legacy has been squandered by those that claimed to be its protectors. Whilst at the same time architectural students and planners come from the world over to admire the vision of sustainable town planning and the worlds first ever roundabout. The question is how do we design and create sustainable communities in the 21st Century Continue reading

April 4, 2012

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Designing and co-creating the best possible future for the NHS

The bitter public battle now being fought over the future of the NHS looks set to continue. Its future shape uncertain, and the mounting resistance that is so visceral is based upon fear, uncertainty and crucially a genuine lack of trust in those that claim to be guiding us to the best possible future the NHS. The Lancet in January 2011 agreed that the current system stifles innovation and that although vast sums have been invested in the NHS we have not seen the benefit delivered as valuable frontline services. So we need transformation. But the question is how do we get to that best possible future? How do we create a more sustainable NHS? Here are a couple of thoughts. Continue reading

April 1, 2012

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Peter Day BBC interview on No Straight Lines

Peter Day hears from Alan Moore author of No Straight Lines: making sense of our non-linear world and asks him ‘what next’ for the industrialised world. In his book he argues that the industrialised world is facing the combined problems of social, organisational and economic complexity. In this edition of Global Business he tells Peter Day how No Straight Lines interprets the disruptive trends shaping our world and how companies can address the challenges and move onwards and upwards. Continue reading

March 18, 2012

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