Three Things We Have To Do To Fix the 21st Century

Why This Is an Age of Stagnation and Collapse

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Right about now, our organizations are working…in all the wrong ways. They’re solving yesterday’s problems, mostly, still. But those problems have already been solved. Yet today’s and tomorrow’s haven’t. They’re just getting bigger, spinning out of control, and so the future’s unravelling — or what’s left of it.

What do I mean by that? Here are the three problems our creaking old Industrial Age organizations were built to solve, and did solve.

Profit. We know how to build organizations to maximize profits. Profits hit record-shattering levels, and then earth-shattering ones. That doesn’t mean that every organization is profitable, but it does mean that maximizing profits is very much a solved problem. Efficiency, scale, reach, make it all look glamorous, perhaps. We know how to solve this problem — to death.

Scale. We know how to build organizations at massive, and I mean massive scales. Think about how big some of the world’s biggest really are. They employ millions of people, and informally employ even more than that, as contractors and temps and so forth. We have incredibly complex systems of management for all this, from “matrix management,” to the sheer grunt work of modern day “Human Resources,” to the way poor old job-seekers have to send out billions of CVs just to get maybe a handful of interviews. The scale at which we work is colossal. Solved problem.

Reach. We know how to build organizations that can reach…right across the globe. Impress their brands and marketing and messages upon not just millions but even billions of minds. That’s not even particularly complicated anymore — though it can take work. We have, again, incredibly complex systems to manage and manipulate this. Reach means finance, too — now, someone with a pension in Malaysia or Norway can unwittingly be an investor in American insurance company which has to pay for climate-disaster damages in Kansas. Solved problem — we’ve integrated the economy in this way as a thing of unprecedented reach.

But tomorrow’s problems? Which are becoming more and more evident…today? Take a hard look around the globe. What do you see? Here’s what CEOs see, and you can take a look at any number of CEO-agenda style research to back it up. A world of rising geopolitical tension. One of fragmenting societies. Where social contracts are being pushed to the brink, and extremism’s rising. Meanwhile, climate change’s mega-scale impacts are arriving…now…decades ahead of schedule. Economies are predicted to stagnate for the rest of this decade, more or less — and what happens after that isn’t going to be pretty.