The Next Big Thing

What's the next big thing?

Is it 3D printing, personal genomics, cleantech, hydrotech, self-driving cars, augmented reality, wearable computing, microcurrencies, big(ger) data, faster drones?

And now for something completely different.

What makes us human? In one word, preferably.

It's a question, that the other day, out of sheer orneriness, I decided to ask my Twitter followers. The most common answers were: empathy, consciousness, compassion, love.

So here's another question, given the results of my thoroughly unscientific anti-experiment. Will any of stuff in the first list necessarily, automatically bring about any more (or better) of the stuff in the second?

And yet few of us go the office, the classroom, the bank, or the clinic to expect, evoke, elicit, or enjoy anything resembling empathy, consciousness, compassion, love. I'd bet the farm, the house, and the Apple shares on the following proposition: Our institutions are failing not merely because they're bankrupting us financially, but because they're bankrupting us in human terms — that, having become something like Alcatrazes for the human soul, they fail to ignite within us the searing potential for the towering accomplishments necessary to answer today's titanic challenges.

Here's how an organization designed for empathy might work. I'd go one step past "Undercover Boss", and institute a new rule: Every year, anybody with the word "chief" or "senior" in their title spends two weeks at an orphanage for children affected by war crimes (without a retinue of liveried footmen and tuxedoed butlers). Here's how one designed for compassion might work. I'd go one step past philanthropy, and institute a new rule: that should a series of real-world social objectives fail to be met, bonuses are slashed by fifty percent, and reinvested in said social objectives (I know, so unfair). Here's how one designed for love might work. Don't like it? Don't do it? Not feeling it? Stop working on it. Love it? Pitch it, seed it, build it, live it. Sounds a little crazy, right? Not if you're Zappos or Netflix.

Now, you might — and probably do — object to some of my quasi-designs; and that's fair enough. They're just idle napkin scribbles I jotted down over a quick cappuccino. Here's the point.

In the journey of human progress, there are still undoubtedly whole new continents — perhaps literally galaxies — to explore. Yet, as we continue our voyage, it's all too easy to get caught up in the technology, the technique, the formula, the algorithm, the mechanics and the method, the how and the now, the excitement of the moment of discovery, the exhilaration of sighting terra incognita — and fail to peer not merely over the horizon, but inside our own horizons.

Perhaps we've gotten a little too seduced by the quest for the Next Big Thing. While it's certain there will be a (smallcaps) next big thing — 3D printing, personal genomics, etc, that will redraw the boundaries of productivity, efficiency, effectiveness — perhaps, the biggest thing we need to face next is us.

Not "us" in the vague, internetzy sense of "the collective." But "us" as in the even more imprecise, yet razor-sharp sense of what pulses through you and I when we feel most alive; what ripples gently through us, when we feel alone, hurt, small, afraid, taut with grief. The stuff that makes us us: not just well-behaved, obedient, productive atoms in the economic world, but feeling, thinking, doing, living beings in the human world.

If you want to reduce it to a caricature, then sum it up thus: "the next big thing is meaning; mattering; the art of human significance". But if you want to take a second to wrestle with the weft and weave of my message, then let me unpick the nuances thus.

There are existential questions searing every human life, burning billions of times through every second — and while five seconds of either reality TV or cable news might suggest they're trivial, disposable, or superfluous, they are what give us, in the brief moments we enjoy here, a sense of imperative.

I don't suggest our institutions be designed to give us neat, clean, sterile answers to them — that they offer us a kind of pre-packaged, by-the-dozen, commodity "happiness." But I do offer the heretical proposition that the highest purpose of human life isn't merely turning disposable diapers into designer diapers, but, fundamentally, to discover a sense of possibility, to expand the boundaries of human potential, to earn and offer one another that which means something. And in that case, the first great concern isn't how we organize — for surely there are infinite permutations to be explored — but why we're here: what, as a first approximation, elevates you and I in the human world. What makes us, in the dismal, clanking, haywire logic of the industrial age not merely productive, efficient, or effective — but searingly, painfully, achingly, enduringly, joyously human.

If there are routes to productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness, the heavens know we've found more — imagine a Neolithic hunter-gatherer walking from a Walmart to an Apple Store — than our forebears ever dreamt of. And here's the paradox: they're mightily solved problems — but pretty poor solutions to the questions that matter.

Hence here's a minor challenge. Unless you want to spend your valuable life painstakingly eking out barely better solutions to problems we've already solved which give us answers that fail to matter in the enduring terms of the questions which do, consider the following: If we're going to reboot our institutions, rethink our way of work, life, and play, then what are we going to redesign them for?

Or, more sharply: what makes us human? One word, preferably.