CHAPTER 1 Building the Future

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.

—Machiavelli, The Prince

 

BUILDING THE FUTURE. TAKE A DEEP BREATH AND CONSIDER WHAT THIS means, living in the twenty-first century. It doesn't mean the next iPhone, the next electric car, or even the first molecular teletransporter (à la Star Trek). These could all certainly qualify as life-changing, history-shaping innovations, but building the future does not mean building isolated products. The lone innovator bathed in cathode-ray green lights in his garage late at night designing the next amazing thing is not the protagonist of our story.

We are interested instead in innovations that constitute a new order of things—interacting elements that must work together and simply aren't worth much alone. When we talk about building the future, we're talking about bringing new complex systems into being. This book explains why this is so hard and what leaders can do to make it easier.

The very phrase building the future has two critical parts, the verb and the noun. Building captures the process of constructing something, of putting pieces together into a new integrated whole. The noun, the future, is the target. Envisioning the future is only the first step toward building it. What's the next step? Read on.

You could say that with every step each of us takes, we are, in fact, building the future: each time we use resources carefully, each time we remember to turn out the lights, each time we choose a bicycle over a car. While it is certainly true that the future is always unfolding—arriving whether we actively pursue it or not—some pioneers glimpse technological or societal possibilities before the rest of us do, and they set out to make them happen. Building the future is about bringing a desired future into being on purpose.

Today we have the opportunity to build the future consciously and proactively. Building the future is by its nature audacious innovation. Inherently creative, building a desired future is fueled by vision and realized through experimentation. Our research focused on the built environment as a particularly timely and vital arena for future-building. We studied people from organizations in several industries that contribute to innovation in the built environment, and we learned that it requires intense collaboration and a particular kind of leadership. As we will see, future-building takes time—and failure is a necessary part of the journey.