Here via a reader is a neat glimpse at how every ten years for a hundred years the world has changed in quite unexpected new directions. Have a look.

It brings out just how difficult it is to be ‘strategic’. The more so when there is a whirring positive feedback loop going on with Creativity – the cheaper the IT, the more people can do things, the more new processes get invented, the faster everything happens, the cheaper the IT gets … and so on.

This means that within almost a matter of a few hundred weeks, the planet has brought in to the global means of production of ideas anything up to a billion people.

The transformative implications of this, for better or worse, quite outstrip the capacity of governments to plan ahead, since planning per se requires a lot of things to be relatively static or at least developing in a steady way, not exponentially.

Which is the real reason why the sort of cumbersome, bossy government structures as evolved in Europe and the ‘West’ are creaking at the seams. The sheer complexity of the task they now face is overwhelming them. Though admittedly the Brown Labour government here in the UK looks to be in a class of its own for sheer dysfunctionality.

As described eloquently in the fine book Seeing Like a State, a great deal of government activity has been centred on measurement.

Why? Because without measurement things can not be put in the countless arbitrary categories governments need for their own purposes, above all tracking down people to get money from them.

And once governments have set up measurement and categories, they also have a requirement to dish out government processes ‘equally’. Hence ever-increasing standardisation eg of schools and so on – one-size-fits-all in the state sector, since anything else would be unfair.

Which sounds fine, but in fact is 100% incompatible with the innovation and creativity needed to cope with pell-mell Change.

So, in short, looking very far into the future is now next to impossible. But it is possible to identify policies and attitudes which look unwise, since instead of creating more flexibility they reduce it. 

Read this interesting Reason interview with John Mackey, who has built up a superb business through ‘conscious capitalism’ and who looks forward with optimism:

reason: How do you think the 21st century is going?

Mackey: Well, entrepreneurs tend to be very optimistic people, and I’m a very optimistic person. I never would have started a business if I wasn’t.

If you just watch the news at night or read reports on all the things that are going wrong, you can really become frightened with all the problems that are out there. I do think we have enormous challenges right now.

You’ve got to make a distinction between the short term and the long term, because I think things move in spirals, and if you look at a spiral, sometimes it loops back on itself. It’s kind of like it takes three steps forward and one step back. In some ways, I think we’re taking a step back right now, but I’ve got great hope that we’ll take three steps forward over the next several years.

… I like the quote by Michelangelo. He said, “Criticize through creating.” It’s easy to be a critic. It’s much harder to create something. I always want to encourage young people to take their passion for making the world a better place and channel it to help us create new solutions to our challenges.

I’ve devoted my life to trying to build a business that makes a difference in people’s lives and in the not-for-profit world, in ways that I think also serve our society and culture. So I’m optimistic, because I’ve seen how much progress we’ve made.

If we can just get people to become more conscious about what capitalism is, because I think capitalism is a tremendous force for positive change in the world, and take the collective human intelligence and creativity and begin to channel it in constructive ways, there’s really no limit to where humanity will be in the 21st century.

Spot on.