What does the future of work look like? Recent reports state that many jobs (42% in the USA) will disappear through machine to machine automation, IoT, and Artificial Intelligence. A terrible thing, or, a good thing? Continue reading →

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 →

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 →

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 →

William Morris once said, If there was ever a golden rule it was this. Have nothing in your house that was neither useful nor beautiful. These are the words of a Craftsman, dedicated to only bringing the good into the world. This quote came to my mind whilst looking recently at the elegance and craftsmanship of Shaker Design. The Shaker guiding principles were of simplicity, utility and honesty. Shaker design is so purposeful in concept and so economical in execution. That is meets William Morris criteria perfectly. And also I believe we have much to learn from the underlying principles of Shaker design. Continue reading →

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 →

Our nonlinear world understands everything is interconnected to everything else. This video is a wonderful demonstration of the interconnectedness of our oceans. We have much to learn from natures design models and understand our own limitations if we believe that organisations or economies work best when they are deconstructed to the point when we can no longer see nor comprehend the whole system. Watch and wonder. Continue reading →

This is how Dickson sees our future panning out. By the year 2050, nearly 80% of the earth’s population will reside in urban centers. Applying the most conservative estimates to current demographic trends, the human population will increase by about 3 billion people during the interim. An estimated 109 hectares of new land (about 20% more land than is represented by the country of Brazil) will be needed to grow enough food to feed them, if traditional farming practices continue as they are practiced today. At present, throughout the world, over 80% of the land that is suitable for raising crops is in use (sources: FAO and NASA). Historically, some 15% of that has been laid waste by poor management practices. What can be done to avoid this impending disaster? Continue reading →

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 →

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 →

In recent years, scientific and technological developments have contributed to major progress in the health of individuals and for societies at large. What are the future roads to increased health in the world? How will science, technology and innovation contribute to this development? Where are the major challenges and possibilities? Continue reading →

Curiosity is part and parcel of the creative process, and creativity is a key component of non-linear thinking. Creativity enables us to discover the new, the novel, to examine and evaluate its possibilities. Creativity in a No Straight Lines perspective is the means to also see the world and its context in a broader context, understanding its richer deeper narrative. A short video on the future of learning from the LEGO Foundation. Continue reading →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

Powerful thoughts from Tim Jackson (professor of sustainable development at the University of Surrey) on how the role of investment must be reconceptualised not to create more money or cater to a consumption based culture and economy but to instead create conditions for people to flourish. We currently exist in a system that systemically creates privilege says Jackson. Continue reading →

Yael Staav’s poignant and emotional interpretation of Dallas Clayton’s celebrated storybook, An Awesome Book of Love, shows us that love is truly humanity’s greatest gift. Continue reading →

National Geographic Creative photographer and North Face athlete Cory Richard talks about learning to become comfortable in the uncomfortable zone. How he found his voice through adversity – and developed his craftsmanship through the lens of a camera to share his vision of the world that has taken him to some extraordinary places. Adventure is anything that takes you outside of your comfort zone, Richards says. I like that. Continue reading →

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 →

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 →

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 →

Myra Goodman runs the largest organic food production company in the USA. In this video she explains why organic farming makes sense. Makes sense, economically, for communities, and of course to help build a regenerative society. She makes the point that nature works at scale – so why cant farming? It is more of how we frame the question and what type of world we choose to live in. Continue reading →

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 →

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 →

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 →

This a beautiful film about life transformation. One of the things I have always believed in is that if you want to create transformation in the world – then you too have to go on a journey of transformation before all the other things happen. In this way one is able to see and perceive the world differently. This is also a story about purpose and meaning. A story about that which fulfills us and sustains us. Continue reading →

Tim Smit – is a rare individual in the English landscape. A man born of passion, commitment who can make the impossible – possible. He recreated the gardens of Heligan in Cornwall and then went on to create The Eden Project. If anyone is ever interested in what it takes to make it happen – this talk will inspire you to do so. Continue reading →

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 →

You have to love the work you do. In our nonlinear world we have to wake up every day and want, really want to do the work we love. It has defined my life, and I always admire people who do the same. The care, the craft, the willingness to share knowledge, and, to give is the way of the craftsman. This is a wonderful film about two French men who are passionate about building bespoke motorcycles. Based in Paris they speak about collaboration, commitment, sacrifice, community and joy. Continue reading →

We all have the capacity for creativity. To be able to express ourselves with confidence and believe in our worth makes in my view one of the most important contributions to society. Our dancer is highly gifted – yet his true expression is hard won. I cant imagine how many hours went into his practice to deliver such a powerful performance. How brilliantly he shines, how effortlessly he moves – yet as metaphor for a creative life it is more. The capacity to bring in the new, to imagine the impossible then create and execute it. And to create value. Continue reading →

Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia strikes me as a true Craftsman. The civilizing craftsman uses his tools and his labours for the collective good. Chouinard wants us to stop being consumers and start being thoughtful global citizens. His work to make us think more deeply abut the world we inhabit. Continue reading →

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 →

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 →

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 →

A short film that explores an alternative approach to agriculture and food economies. The organisation is called Farm Hack. Founded in 2010, by what the narrator calls startup farmers, who were motivated to create a model for resilient agriculture. Continue reading →

In No Straight Lines I explore the what is called the crisis of of the modern world. The crisis of identity. Who are we? Why do we exist? What makes meaning, identity, community and connection? This crisis impacts our communities our organisations (think The Office), our wider society and even nations. What have we become? I present a challenge I+We=Why? It touches every touch point in our lives and is having serious ramifications on how our societies are evolving. E.O Wilson wrote that we yearn to belong and to have a purpose bigger than ourselves. Without that purpose we lack meaning, and context, custom and tradition wane – yet we are meaning making creatures. Continue reading →

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 →

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 →

Reading an article recently about Eliot Perlman who wrote what is considered a masterwork called Seven Types of Ambiguity. This has intrigued me, as Principle 1 in No Straight Lines is Ambiguity. How does one make sense of an ambiguous world. This question is important to ask when there is significant disruption, or change in our lives, in industry, and when we see catastrophic failure and cannot arrive at a true diagnostic. Continue reading →

James Mitchell used this phrase ‘the art of living together’, recently in Edinburgh. A phrase he articulated to mean what politics at its best and most basic should be about. Think of the component parts and what they mean: ‘art’ and ‘living together’: they denote craft, non-scientific discipline, emotional insight, and an awareness and understanding of differences and transcending them. Continue reading →

There is a view that the recovery of our economy in the UK is underway. This, however, is not entirely true, because true regeneration is investment-led, not consumer-driven. In fact, new companies generate 80% of growth, new jobs, and inward investment, despite the contradictory message from the financial press. It is these innovators, through sheer entrepreneurial endeavour, that are largely building the future rather than trying to protect the past. Yet the ratios for capital formation in this country are terrible; broadly-speaking the percentage of GDP that is invested each year. We have the lowest ratio in the OECD and our capital formation rate was 14% last year. China’s is over 50%. Our companies are sitting on some £284 billion of cash. We may as well just be sitting on it like Smaug in The Hobbit. Continue reading →

Here are 10 ways of taking a more humane and commons based approach to how we could live. Continue reading →

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 →

I am came across this lovely insight by Zaid
 Hassan,
 in The
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 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 →

thought of Lewis Hyde who wrote in The Gift, “we’ve witnessed the steady conversion into private property of the art and ideas that earlier generations thought belonged to their cultural commons”. When reading Miranda Swayers piece on the computing company for kids – Kano. Essentially Kano is plug and play coding making computing and the creation of things via coding and computing accessible to all comers. Hydes observation also resonated, when Alex Klein one of the Kano founders tells a story from an experience from Zuccotti Park when as a journalist he was covering the Occupy Movement, he asked the Occupy-ers why, if they hated big business so much, they all used iPhones and Samsungs. Continue reading →

Robotics is on the cusp of reshaping our world – in every aspect of our lives, from the waiting rooms of our hospitals to our battlefields, disaster prone world and our everyday lives. For good and for bad. Continue reading →

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 →

“The important thing for government is not to do things which individuals are doing already, and to do them a little better or a little worse; but to do those things which at present are not done at all.” was the advice of John Maynard Keynes. Continue reading →

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 →

Crowdfunding changes the rules for investing: In many ways Crowdfunding has come about because the Venture Capital market for startups has failed. So it is not surprising that a wide variety of startups are now finding their initial capital from crowdfunding platforms. It is predicted that by 2014 $5.1bn will have been raised through crowdfunding platforms. Continue reading →

This was first posted at the Art of Hosting Scotland What kind of future do we want for Scotland? Today has been a special day. This morning 50 strangers, more or less, came together to begin a journey of, the … Continue reading →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

Flute Office is a pioneering company that is producing an entire suite of products along with a ground breaking business model to change the way we think about what we sit on, what we work on, what perhaps we do other things on (Do its all verb). Continue reading →

Tashi Mannox Tibetan Calligrapher, says, it is commitment that gives you freedom, which reminds me of the truth that, the committed craftsman is the engaged craftsman. And that craftsman is always curious and happy to share the work and their knowledge. Continue reading →

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 →

Last night I was invited to the official opening of the Shoreditch Village Hall, accessed via Hoxton Square. Because of my age and my interests, I am very familiar with Hoxton Square, over 25 years I have watched it rise … Continue reading →

Rupert Sheldrake talking about how science, that great bastion of exploration, still has its mechanistic head on. Mechanistic science, top down, and hierarchical. Sheldrake argues science as an idea still wears the mindset that everything is machine like, fixed like Newtons concept of cosmology. That there is no mystery in this world, all can be ordered and measured, indeed his story about the variations in light speed are compelling, and the attempts to regulate its speed at a constant, when in fact it varies, as does gravity. Continue reading →

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 →

What makes work meaningful? Why do we go to work? Why should we work? For whom do we work? Is work about meaning and identity more than money? Should our work be meaningful? What fulfills us and what gets us out of bed on a Monday morning? It does not matter whether you are a coder, or a metal fabricator like Nicholas DiChiara, work is something that in my mind has always been about purpose and passion. Continue reading →

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 →

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 →

Payday loan company WONGA reported £1m profit per week for 2012. Charging 5500% APR on each of its 1m loans last year it’s now the biggest payday lender in the UK. It’s not alone with many other payday firms reporting increases in turnover and profits over the last 3 years. Errol Damelin the CEO of WONGA states that he hardly thinks a £200 loans get people into trouble. He’s right, cry the campaigners, it’s the thousands of per cent interest you charge on it, so lets cap it. Actually he’s right and the campaigners are wrong, on both counts. Continue reading →

For the last few months I have been working with, and, advising a company called Lawbite. My reason for engaging with the company is that they are offering a viable alternative to legal advice for SME’s and start ups which is sorely needed. It is disruptive to the existing legal profession, but that is no bad thing. Lawbite is well overdue. Britain is sustained by SME’s yet their need of the law and the service they get from the law is not always evenly matched. Continue reading →

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 →

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 →

Below is a beautiful simple film about the craft of making sake. Why did I think it to be relevant? Because the ‘engaged’ craftsman brings the full power of humanity to bear upon his work. His hand is guided by his eye, informed by his creative mind; his productivity the act of unique creation. Indeed, the master craftsman is adept in using a values based philosophical framework, as well as tools and materials, to deliver useful things to the world. Continue reading →

I don’t want to have an impact on leadership in current organizations. I want to inspire young people. And when a child is two or three and starts farming mushrooms on the coffee waste of mum, then that child will never ever accept that there is real hunger in the world. The child will only believe that there is ignorance in the world. Continue reading →

Why do people work hard, and take pride in what they do? A short film about the Almonte horsemen. The narration is very simple but eloquent, that talks philosophically about meaning, identity, nature, belonging, ethics, community and the joy that comes from being committed to ones craft. Continue reading →

It has been said that privacy is dead. Not so. It’s secrecy that is dying. Openness will kill it. Writes Jeff Jarvis, he goes on, Openness is the more powerful weapon. Openness is the principle that guides, for example, Guardian journalism. Openness is all that can restore trust in government and technology companies. And openness – in standards, governance, and ethics – must be the basis of technologists’ efforts to take back the the net. That said its not just about the net, its about the future direction of our societies, what does an open society looks like? Continue reading →

Since genetic information does not determine you, it does not in itself tell you anything really important. It won’t be very important to not have your genetic information in the public domain. It won’t seem very important to people to keep it private. Our sense of privacy is evolving; our pictures, out personal data our views of what needs to be kept private change. So why would our genetic data be different? Continue reading →

John Naughton in his recent column for The Observer, wrote that in 2006 or thereabouts, a phrase that data was new the oil came into public consciousness. At the time I was sitting on the board of a company specialising in large scale social data analytics (in those days mobile networks were large scale social networks), And I liked to use the term raw data has no value but refined data is the black gold of the 21st Century. Continue reading →

A great, short film about a man committed to his craft and how that shapes his life. What can we learn from that? Continue reading →

It was terribly sad to hear the news of the passing to Seamus Heaney, a craftsman if ever there was one. As not only was he a master craftsman of the English language he embodied the other important characteristics of granite like integrity, and a deep empathy of the world around him and the people in it. A quest for truth is always core to the purpose of a poet, to seek that which others do not see and to express it in a way that we can all understand. Continue reading →

Our nonlinear world is about connectedness, our connectedness to each other and in fact to a wider universe. Something I explore in No Straight Lines. I am deeply interested in our humanity and the human spirit. I am interested in humanities capacity for a higher yearning, which inspires us to work towards a greater good. Our pioneering spirit today should be more about the quality of life, and better governance of this planet. When we see the world as a deeper system, we see the world differently as this moving film explains. Continue reading →

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 →

One of my interests is how and why we work, what motivates us, and how can a values based systems help us make meaningful work. Here is an excerpt Chapter 6 of No Straight Lines: Continue reading →

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 →

I am almost finished reading Lee Smolins book Time Reborn, which is as fascinating as it is challenging. This book is about time and cosmology. A little out of my remit in some ways but I find that at times reading at the far edges of ones knowledge can lead to some interesting insights.
In No Straight Lines I use Openness as a principle, arguing that it can lead to a number of outcomes which are far more beneficial than closed systems; from accelerated innovation, to new ways of organising and providing a more invigorating cultural context for organisations to exist in, even new business models. Continue reading →

John Naughton raises an interesting point about the proposed installation of data monitoring smart meters in 26 millions homes and its security implications in his Observer column. Continue reading →

This Horizon documentary called ‘Monitor Me’, is an intriguing journey into what the future of medicine may look like, with blends of cutting edge medicine, technology and data that monitors all and everything, we can imagine entirely different ways in which we can manage our daily health like weight to high performance sport to discovering at its very earliest stages serious medical problems. Continue reading →

I picked this up from the wonderful p2p Foundation wiki about open source manufacturing, interesting to me as principle 3 of No Straight Lines in Open and Openness – Openness is resilience. I came across the idea and practice of open manufacturing when writing the book, exploring how far openness as a principle and practice can take us, and how it can play a key role in the transformational re-design of business Continue reading →

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 →

I am a big fan of David Boyles work, and this book is one I think is as relevant today as it was when he wrote it in 2004. In this book he writes about the determined rejection of the fake, the virtual, the spun and the mass-produced, in the search for authenticity. Continue reading →

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 →

TED banned this talk, I wonder what was so controversial? Of particular interest to me was the idea of variations in light-speed and gravity the big G. Sheldrake goes onto talk about the big idea that the laws of nature at an atomic level are never set, are not constant as Newton proposed but are in a permanent state of evolution. Continue reading →

Mark Blythe gives us a lesson in austerity economics Continue reading →

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 →

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 →

Sometimes, we need to feel something rather than analyse it. To feel time, to feel space and pace, the feel love and to reflect, to touch and go into nature and revel in the crafting of of something unique. Sometimes we need to be open to a new experience, to take its crooked path to a deeper meaning about who we are, and perhaps where we belong. Sometimes its good to feel humbled by nature and reflect on how we only exist within her nurture, as much as we might abuse it. Sometimes its good to feel the mystical as it as much a part of our non-linear world as our current obsession with technology. We have not harnessed the cosmos. Continue reading →

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 →

Who would have thought even in 2005, that consumer politics and societal politics would revolve around data, who has it, who owns it and how it is used, combined with the legal frameworks that protect us as citizens. our destiny with data is complex. There are legitimate concerns about who actually owns this information, and when our identities can be pieced together via data flows, privacy becomes a key battleground. And there will be a pressing and increasing need to respect the sovereignty of the individual whether that be in a commercial or civil context. Continue reading →

Principle 5 of No Straight Lines is Craftsmanship. Here artist Miyoko Shida demonstrates the idea of what it means to be fully engaged in an act of creation. Continue reading →

In No Straight Lines, technology plays an important role, it must do. Because to deny our umbilical relationship with technology is to deny ourselves. But it always seems a struggle to get people to reconcile the important philosophical, anthropological and societal relationships to technology that we indeed have – where it comes from, what drives our longing (on a large scale) which consequently affects what we imagine, create and make. Doug Englebart died recently, Continue reading →

As the shape of our world evolves, we are also in political transformation, both in terms of the political relationship between the individual and commercial organisations and the large Politics of how we organise and run our societies. What should government look like in a non-linear world? Are we creating and running the right systems in the right way? How does data change/impact the process of democracy and civil organisation? Continue reading →

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 →