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Next week we’ll be announcing the program for our upcoming, brand new Next conference. It’s a project I’ve been thinking deeply about for many years, and am really excited for. 

Here’s some of the thinking that has been going into that.

What the hell is water?

“There are two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on and one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

David Foster Wallace–This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

We “swim” in a sea of ideas, concepts, beliefs, assumptions that we rarely interrogate, call into question, or are even aware of. Foster Wallace’s parable is a near perfect expression of this. One of my key ideas for Next is this question–”what is the water we swim in?” What unchallenged, unacknowledged and so unquestioned assumptions underlie our world view, constrain what we can achieve? It’s a koan of sorts, but more pragmatic and practical than the question “what is the sound of one hand clapping?”

Developing a reflex for asking that question, “what is water?”, and then, more importantly, “what is than nature of the water we swim in?” is a powerful tool for loosening the constraints of so many unexplored assumptions.

Complexity and Emergence

Imagine a flock of birds, each acting on simple rules: “Stay close to your neighbours, avoid collisions.” From these simple rules, emerges a complex, swirling, dynamic pattern – the flock. This is emergence – complex behaviour arising from simple interactions.

ChatGPT when asked for a description of emergence–not bad at all.

You’re likely familiar with fractals, and the idea of chaos. The conceit of butterflies flapping their wings and causing cyclones half a world away–Lorenz’s butterfly. These are ideas drawn from the science of complexity and complex systems. Increasingly everywhere we look in the natural and human world we see such systems. Yet our brains are not necessarily wired to intuitively understand complexity.   

Emergence is the phenomenon where complex systems and patterns arise from relatively simple interactions. In emergent systems, the whole exhibits properties or behaviours that aren’t present in or predictable from the individual parts alone.

Key aspects of emergent systems and phenomena:

• Bottom-up complexity: Simple rules or components can lead to sophisticated outcomes.
• Unpredictability: Emergent systems often behave in ways that can’t be fully anticipated.
• Adaptability: Emergent systems can often respond flexibly to changes in their environment.
• Scalability: Emergent principles can apply from micro to macro levels.
• Interdependence: The interactions between components are crucial to the system’s behaviour.

Just like the weather and ecosystems, markets, economies, societies, groups, all exhibit emergent non-linear behaviour. One of the key ideas of Next will be to explore this idea, and how we can harness it in our work, our organisations and beyond.

Systems and individuals

The concepts of i-frames and s-frames comes from behavioural economics.

I-frames (Individual frames) refer to the decision-making processes and biases that occur when individuals consider choices in isolation, focusing on how the outcomes affect them personally without regard to social context or influences. For example, an individual might choose a financial investment based solely on potential returns, considering personal risk tolerance and financial goals, without any influence from peers or societal trends.

S-frames (Social frames), on the other hand, involve the influences of social interactions and norms on decision-making. In this framing, individuals consider the behavior, expectations, and norms of others in their decisions. For instance, a person might opt to invest in green technologies not just for personal financial return but also because it aligns with social values or because influential peers are doing so.

User Life Centred Design

Over the last 50 years human-centred design was embraced by companies seeking to develop better experiences and to drive innovation. However, there is mounting evidence that placing the consumer at the centre of the design process is actually harming human wellbeing, as its narrow focus is damaging the global systems essential to our prosperity.

Life-centred design – an emerging design framework – obliterates the idea that humans are at the centre of everything. It expands human-centred design methods to consider all creatures and the planet.

Public goods

A public good is a type of good that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous. This means that no one can be prevented from using the good, and one person’s use of the good does not reduce its availability to others.

Public goods often lead to challenges in their provision and maintenance because of what is known as the “free rider problem,” where individuals may refrain from contributing to the production or upkeep of the good since they can benefit from it without paying for it.

The Commons (and their enclosure)

Resources that are shared by a community and accessible to all members. These resources can be natural, like air, oceans, and forests, or human-made, like public parks, community spaces, or even digital resources like open-source software. 

Enclosure of the commons refers to the process by which shared resources are privatized or restricted, typically by entities that convert these resources for exclusive private use. This process can lead to the exclusion of the general public from resources that were once openly accessible.

The Moral Economy

As popularised by British Historian E.P. Thompson, the “moral economy” is a traditional consensus on the economic arrangements and practices that were believed to be morally right and necessary to preserve the community’s welfare. This included notions such as the fair pricing of essential goods like bread, the responsibilities of local producers to their communities, and the right of all individuals to basic sustenance and survival. When market forces or changes in law threatened these norms—such as through sudden price increases or hoarding during shortages—riots ensued as a community defense of these moral economic principles.

The “moral economy” is a lens through which communities view economic actions not merely in terms of market dynamics or legal frameworks but through deeply held beliefs about fairness, justice, and communal well-being. This view often stands in contrast to the “political economy,” which is based more strictly on market logic and individualistic principles.

How are these related?

Next week we’ll be unveiling the program for our conference Next–a one day single track ideas driven conference for product, design and engineering leaders.

We’ve taken the spirit of the keynotes that are often the most talked about aspects of our conferences–a spirit of inquiry and exploration–and put together a program that we hope will challenge and inspire you to think in new ways about the challenges you, your team, your organisation and our broader societies’ face, and perhaps even solve some of those challenges.