“...in order to establish such complex organizations, it’s necessary to convince many strangers to cooperate with one another. And this will happen only if these strangers believe in some shared myths. It follows that in order to change an existing imagined order, we must first believe in an alternative imagined order. In order to dismantle Peugeot, for example, we need to imagine something more powerful, such as the French legal system. In oder to dismantle the French legal system we need to imagine something even more powerful, such as the French state. And if we would like to dismantle that too, we will have to imagine something yet more powerful. There is no way out of the imagined order. When we break down our prison walls and run towards freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison.”
“We were liars, cheats, she began—none of it was real. The trees had been made to move by a trick, it was only the branches. someone was filming from a helicopter, circling around. The poplars hadn’t moved at all, but the viewer would think they were leaping about dancing, that the whole forest was spinning round. The was sheer deception; it was disgusting.
I defended myself. ‘You’re quite wrong,’ I said. ‘The tree really was dancing because that is how the viewer will experience it. What matters was the effect we achieved, not whether the tree moved or if a technician created the idea of movement. Did you think the forest could walk around, when the trees are held by their roots? Don’t you think it’s a function of art to create the illusion of reality?’
’Art,’ she repeated bitterly. ‘If that’s what you were—artists—then everything would be real, even the dance, because you would know how to make the leaves move to your words, not to a wind machine or whatever it was. But you people can’t do anything like that—not you, or the others. You’re all clowns, and more contemptible than clowns. You’re worse than con men.’”
“The longer-term effect of the capital markets’ preference for remaining at the same knowledge stage is stagnation. At some point, exploitation activities will run out of steam, and the company will be outflanked by competitors taking more exploratory approaches. Earnings will stop growing or even decline, and the analysts will savage the company for its lack of innovation. As James March points out, “An organization that engages exclusively in exploitation will ordinarily suffer from obsolescence.”
“Her description was as vivid as if she actually lived that way. It’s important to achieve this degree of concreteness when visualizing your ideal lifestyle. If you find that hard, if you can’t picture the kind of life you would like to have, try looking in interior decorating magazines for photos that grab you.”
“The protagonist in our story is therefore a subject immersed in his everyday life, taking part in various conversations; a node in various networks and an actor in various social forms. From his point of observation and action, he designs and co-designs his action on the world operating as a bricoleur: he looks for usable materials around him (products and services, but also ideas and knowledge) and, adapting and reinterpreting them, he uses them to compose his life project.”
“Strategic design often involves doing what the physicist Fritz Zwicky started doing in 1934—looking for the “missing mass”, the material that must be inescapably there, that must be causing a particular outcome. This missing mass is the key to unlocking a better solution, a solution that sticks at the initial contact point, and then ripples out to produce systemic change.
The dark matter of strategic designers is the organizational culture, policy environments, market mechanisms, legislation, finance models and other incentive, governance structures, tradition and habits, local culture and national identity, the habitats, situations and events that decisions are produced within. This may well be the core mass of the architecture of society, and if we want to shift the way society functions, a facility with dark matter must be part of the strategic designer’s toolkit.”