Martin Stewart-Weeks – The Mandarin
If it is hard to think and act systemically about the long term, it’s also worth reflecting on patterns of behaviour which get in the way even of the attempt. The rhetoric of innovation, of openness, of fearless honesty runs into a reality which seems designed to punish and constrain precisely those behaviours. And of course ‘design’ is precisely the wrong word here: these characteristics are emergent rather than intended (which does not, of course, mean that it would be impossible to design them to be different). There are many reasons why that is an unfortunate state of affairs, one which is rightly given some emphasis is that it risks crowding out the strategic and the systemic:
The real dilemma is that we’re so busy honing the efficiency of the pieces that we’ve failed to work out how to put the puzzle together or work out what the puzzle is or should be.