A New Order of Things

Future-building is hard. When success requires introducing what Machiavelli, in the sixteenth century, called "a new order of things," success is likely to be elusive. This is because bringing together diverse elements (technologies, plans, people, or organizations) to create a functioning whole presents countless ways for integration to break down. Teaming across disciplinary and industry boundaries is needed to respond to the spectacular challenges the world faces today, but it requires a new way of working, a new way of thinking, and a new way of being.

Future-building challenges are not limited to the built environment. The 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa was a terrifying example of a specific need for a novel systemic response, enacted by diverse organizations working together around the world. A response had to be designed on the fly under enormous pressure, while more and more people inside and outside Africa were diagnosed with the disease. Government, healthcare, university, and nonprofit organizations with varying priorities were forced to work together. President Barack Obama appointed Ron Klain as (the unfortunately titled) "Ebola czar" to help coordinate the diverse inputs of all of these groups. The idea, as reported (and hotly contested) at the time, was that the situation called for someone who could set priorities and get government agencies and private-sector organizations of all kinds to work together to innovate. Its success was also contested.

The 2010 rescue of 33 Chilean miners trapped beneath 2,000 feet of rock harder than granite was another such situation. Against all odds a magnificently coordinated and highly innovative rescue operation unfolded—knitting together the ideas and efforts of experts from multiple countries, industries, and sectors to produce a novel process and a remarkable outcome. The leadership practices that allowed this success are remarkably similar to those we develop in this book.

In these examples crisis-motivated innovation required cross-boundary collaboration. Other cases of future-building involve pioneers setting the forces of complex innovation in motion. Consider the emergence of the telecommunications system a century ago. It starts, of course, with the invention of a telephone, and before that its subcomponents—the mechanical acoustic devices for transmitting speech and music over a distance greater than that of normal human interaction. But to function in its intended way, the telephone required a complex infrastructure of components—wires, poles, monitors, switches, protocols, regulations, and more, extending over vast geographies—to be developed around it.

Sometimes future-building requires little in the way of technological innovation—just system building. When Fred Smith, CEO of FedEx, wrote a college term paper on the idea of an overnight-delivery service, he could not possibly have imagined—or single-handedly developed—all the moving parts that would be required to turn that vision into the $27 billion company it is today. What he did imagine was "a completely different logistics system."

Working as a charter pilot, Smith could see the extent to which air travel was used to fly packages around, primarily for big companies like IBM and Xerox. The logistics, as reported by fellow pilots, were a nightmare. Airfreight at the time, Smith noticed, relied on passenger planes. What was needed was a whole new infrastructure that would take the logistical burden off passenger airlines and centralize it. He envisioned a nationwide clearinghouse and an integrated system of cars, trucks, and planes. His system required sophisticated information technology (IT) to allow unprecedented precision and a new way of tracking items as they moved around the world. For the service to function as intended, the tracking system would need handheld computers and machine-readable, sequentially numbered bar codes. It required obtaining new radio frequencies and designing new equipment for trucks. Government deregulation of the airlines in 1978 was the final piece of the puzzle, clearing FedEx for takeoff. Smith, leading the innovation journey that put all of these parts together, thus created a whole new order of things.