It often seems that the scale and complexity of our problems are constantly being ratcheted up, while our capacity for coping hasn’t changed. We’re still mired in bureaucracies designed in the 19th century, our managerial initiatives solve for problems that are not actually the problems that matter, and collectively we’re fighting the last war instead of the current one. We know we need to decarbonize completely within the next decade, for instance, yet CO2 emissions are going up, not down. How can you earn optimism in the face of an insanely complex polycrisis?
Some of us devour managerial self-help books in the hopes that there will be some magic pill out there that organizations can take. We hire efficiency experts, try to integrate AI into our workflow, and so on. Yet it still seems like we’re spinning our wheels. Where can we look for actual proof that individuals, organizations, and humanity in general are able to rise to the level of requisite complexity needed to match our current challenges?
The thesis of The Nexus, by Julio Mario Ottino, dean of the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University, and Bruce Mau, designer and artist, is that we are at a critical moment when imagination is absolutely critical for solving our biggest problems, and has simultaneously reached its nadir as a social practice. That is, there are certainly plenty of creative people out there, but we need creative groups, and ultimately a creative society, to make it through the rest of the century. Lone geniuses are unlikely to pop up regularly enough and in the right places to make much difference. So, how do we get from the current situation, to the creative society they say we need?
First off, I’m going to say that I approached this book with a weary, “Oh, another of these,” attitude. There are lots of tracts that purport to teach us how to manage complexity; a glance at my bookshelf shows me Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution, and next to it Don Tapscott’s Wikinomics, Ramez Naam’s The Infinite Resource, and the Autodesk-sponsored Imagine Design Create, edited by Tom Wujec. This is just a random sample. There are lots of books about changing the world by changing our organization, and they mostly appeal to design thinking in one form or another. They’re generally good, yet somehow unsatisfying. With The Nexus, I was expecting a typical structure: diagnosis of the problem, history of failed solutions, proposal of a better way, and roadmap for the future. And, you know, all those things are in this book. Somehow, though, Ottino and Mau accomplish, for me, what no other book on innovation has succeeded in doing: they make the solutions concrete.
For example: if you want a small, creative team, it’ll work best if it has an odd number of members (page 211). Five to seven people are perfect for a core group, and it’s best if two or three of them are incumbents with deep experience in the subject you’re going to tackle, and one or two have deep experience in other areas but not this one. In other words, bring in people you’ve worked with before, but also newcomers.
Okay, I can work with that. The Nexus abounds with similar advice, but what it doesn’t do—and this is where so many other books on innovation fall down—is it does not try to create some overarching theory of creativity, or take one approach that works and try to generalize it to every situation. People who do that are not actually signaling that they have a solution to the problem of creativity; they’re displaying a lack of creativity. Real creativity means taking the full complexity of the world head-on.
My long-time editor and friend, David G. Hartwell, edited some of the best authors of science fiction, and we worked together on nine of my novels. When reviewing one book, he said, “I like it, but the protagonist needs to be ten years older, and chop 20,000 words.” For another, he invited me down to Pleasantville, New York and we spent a weekend going through the manuscript line by line. For yet another, he said, “It’s good but I think you need to take out this sentence on the second-to-last page.” He was a different editor with every book; and when we talked about it one day, he confirmed my suspicion: “I reinvent the process with each manuscript.” David had no theory of editing. For him, each book was an entirely new subject of study.
The Nexus admits that this is true of the most pressing problems we face today: climate change and ecosystem overshoot, coordinating international efforts in relief and economics, systemic inequality, and corruption. War. Each is its own thing; each, in some sense, can only be solved with its own theory and practice. What The Nexus doesn’t do is provide a single approach to solving these problems. Instead, it takes one step back from trying to find a ‘method’ for creativity; rather than trying to solve the problem of creativity itself, it describes the social circumstances that give rise to creative teams. As a result, it ends up being useful because it becomes highly prescriptive about how to bring people together, while not trying to dictate what they do. As you can probably tell, I really liked that.
I also like the fact that The Nexus doesn’t make any assertion that it doesn’t back up with a concrete example. There’s no point where you feel like the authors are saying, “trust us on this one.” Instead, meticulously and in incredible detail, they lay out examples of problem-solving groups, past and present. The basics are familiar: start by breaking down the walls between siloed professions, especially between the arts, the sciences, and engineering. Where this book excels is in its deep exploration of exactly how that’s been done in the past and is being done now.
And finally, The Nexus is a gorgeous piece of art in and of itself. You’ll want it on your coffee table. The Nexus is crammed with beautiful photos, illustrations, and informational design. My favourite two-page spread is pages 104-105, which consists of photos of thirteen chairs. The challenge is to figure out which decade of the 20th century each design is from. A small legend is printed, upside-down, in the lower right. Most of my guesses were wrong; what looks primitive is new, what you’re sure was designed in the past decade or so turns out to be a hundred years old. Ottino and Mau are making an argument about the open-ended nature of 20th-century design, and could have spent pages and pages arguing the point. This one little visual exercise is far more convincing than a big bag ‘o words would have been. The book contains many clever hacks like this, that win arguments and express ideas using the very design tools they’re talking about.
So, if you want to know how to develop an unapocalyptic view of our future, you can’t go wrong by starting with The Nexus. It’s a perfect example of what I’m calling earned optimism: it is full of hope because it has very good reasons to be, and it shows them to you.
—K
By the way, I didn't mean to sound dulismissive of Christensen and the other authors I cited, and definitely not Naam. These are brilliant books and they're on my shelf for a reason. Even The Nexus, by its own rules, cannot be 'the one true approach' to the polycrisis. It's 'all hands on deck' these days.