Thrivable

Focusing on what’s best for individuals does not result in better social outcomes, as history has shown. Focusing on what’s best for humanity, however, provides an opportunity to serve everyone equally, transcending cultural, organisational, and political boundaries.

It's time that we re-engineer our economic, social, and cultural systems for justice. Equitable systems rectify historic injustices, create opportunities for all, ensure that all value created is appropriately compensated, and provide stakeholders with participatory governance.

Commitments to "collaboration" aren't enough to solve our most immediate challenges. We need to go further, faster, together. Truly cooperative systems are designed for mutual benefit, and as such must permit us to work together outside of organisational and operational siloes.

Planet-sized problems are complex adaptive systems that will not be solved in a single iteration, or by “silver bullet” solutions. We must be willing and able to respond to environmental and market feedback, and rapidly adapt and adopt new information and approaches.

Distributing data means distributing power; breaking the stranglehold big tech and governments have over what is done with our information. Systems must acknowledge that equity cannot be achieved without ownership and control. Digital sovereignty is an inalienable right of all humans.

The greatest challenges of the 21st century cannot be solved by heropreneurs. Solutions must be modular, incorporating inputs and outputs from multiple sources and stakeholders, depending on context and availability, ensuring the reliability of the system as a whole.

Much ‘tech for good’ fails in environments that lack reliable access to power, telecommunications, and modern computing equipment. Robust systems must function regardless of these constraints, and be capable of withstanding enormous stress.

We currently value what we measure, rather than measure what we value. Systems must be designed to value outcomes over outputs, a well as all forms of value — particularly in areas lacking effective metrics — to support better sense-making, decision-making and capital flow.