A wall is a vastly underestimated device. It has scale. It can be viewed from many angles. It is impressive. We tend to walk blindly past them. Not me. I love them. I use them in my work. I get to notice a great wall. Even when I am not in China.  In my opinion the wall is a 21st Century tool.  A massive canvas for the integration and interrogation of thought. A place to paint wisdom and knowledge. A tapestry. It’s time to rethink the wall. If the wall were taken less literally it could have a thousand metaphors/symbols for the 21st Century.

The power to display the strength of humanity in the face of increasing threat. This is what the great walls always represented. Why do we forget as a species?

Think of them as massive statements – billboards for quality expression. The unity of mankind could use the wall to turn back its mistakes.  Walls could become a symbol of hope in the midst of turmoil, standing firm against the swirling elements. A manifesto of optimism, telling the story of change for the future. The proud balustrades of a new pioneering peoples against the inequities of our past. The structure of change and creativity. The reflection of all thought. The mechanism for capture and synthesis that enables scale, context and perspective.

If you’ve ever seen a Son Et Lumiere in France (This one was at Le Mans) you will understand. You will get what I am saying about scale, storytelling and the power of the array on the walls.  At 50 -100 feet the impact is uplifting. Looking at the sheer magnitude of the whole thing is breathtaking for humans. This says to us that we should change scale more often and see what we can see in a bigger context. A feast for more of our senses – at more meaningful size and juxtaposition.

Technology will soon enable whole walls, vast spaces to be covered in High Definition display. The Advertising world has long used these tricks to amaze and capture attention and imagination. Soon all of us will have the power to command attention. What would we say?

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Walls are just stuck there. Immobile, one dimensional, passive.

Rubbish.

They are alive and all around us. They are outside and inside.
They form the inside – they define the outside.
 They can be at once forbidding and tantalising. They hold secrets.
They invite and engage enemies and allies alike.
They defend – they beckon.
They are my canvas.

Walls are athletes. They are agile and dynamic.

We often don’t think about them like that because we don’t often think about them like that.
Performing vital tasks – buildings to live and work in – demarcating land.
Secure and partitioned spaces. A major part of our lives. We make them.

They’re a lot more present than we may think.

They exist in software, technology, engineering and every known physics and science.
In biology they are capiliaries – the ducts that enable life itself.
They point out the foundations of every structure known to man.
They are the canvas of our human endeavour.

They represent the assets of establishment and success. They are our castles.
The laminin to all our efforts. They defines the shapes and sizes of our imaginations.
The wall has exceptional characteristics. It’s written and crafted on. It is canvas for unlimited creativity.

A wall is never a barrier but always a summons to creativity.

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Ray Kurzweil famously stated in his law of accelerating returns in The Singularity Is Near –

“In the next 100 years, and at the current rate, we will witness 20,000 years of progress. Or about one thousand times greater than that of the 20th Century.”

The 21st Century is driving a truck through every business plan and every government policy. There’s a tidal wave of change drowning the traditional business and operating models – that’s true of every category and each sector.  While change has always been with us, the exponential rate at which it is now gathering pace is having increasingly massive impact. The killer questions of How? Where? and What? can we do about it are preoccupying senior leaders and their executives like never before.

Can you feel the urgency? No?

I can’t think of a single recent case where the unknown’s of developing a strategy have not far exceeded the known’s. There is no certainty in all this. The terrain is far more treacherous – more fatal to the unwary than ever before. The fascinating bit of all this is that there has never been more opportunity either.

Think about it.

As any market reaches maturity and fashion becomes tired and ordinary the new and the extraordinary is in immediate demand. The innovators can win, the entrepreneurs can sense the moment, the dreamers can achieve their dreams. In the blink of an eye a new product or service can catch fire. Sparked by the death of an old solution the new one is immediately king of the hill.

Time is compressed, distribution is almost a given – it’s a commodity – if its good it’s out there. The world is available to the brightest of ideas and the only game in town is capability and imagination. Creativity.

So how much of this do we not get? None right? So how much of this do we see people thinking differently about? Not many right?

The Killer Questions

To survive, Businesses and Governments do not need more of the same thinking about change, strategy or transformation. They do not want or have time for yet another boring consultant with this or that methodology. It just won’t work. It ain’t gonna cut it. They need different thinking. That seems so obvious a statement and yet we witness every day how stuck or caught in the headlamps of the truck they are. New ways of tackling this tornado, this tsunami and this careering inevitability are required.

How can we act differently? So what must we do differently? Now what will be different? Why is this the right kind of difference?  Then they are on into When? Where? Who? Business wants to have answers to these big questions. The right answers if at all possible. Providing the right answers though is now as much an art as it is a science. It’s subtle and therefore deceptively simple. Why are these questions so hard for so many to get their heads around?

The Killer Application

Well we could be a lot better at doing the basics. We have found that the simple ways to solve complex issues can appear very hard to grasp and actually not that simple. This is a paradox around which we have to get to survive the 21st Century. Try these – Dialog amongst teams, visualization and telling an actual story that interests people. Make reasoned arguments and share meaning within a logical framework that everyone can see and engage in. This involves talking, listening, being creative and actually putting the outcomes into practice. Doesn’t this sound like common sense?

It is. Where did it go?

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