The future isn't a place. It's a set of tools. For three hundred years we've lived with Isaac Newton's tools, designed for a clockwork universe where the rules are simple, knowable, and apply the same way everywhere. The future was a set of possibilities that narrowed as they approached, so our most basic strategy was to anticipate what happens and to work the clockwork's levers to eliminate all of the possibilities except for the one we wanted.
But now the clockwork is coming apart as we get used to the truth that everything affects everything else, all at once, forever. In this new future, our best strategy often requires holding back from anticipating and instead creating as many possibilities as we can. The book's imperative for business and beyond is simple: Make. More. Future.
In Everyday Chaos, we'll look at how we've been busily, silently overturning our most basic ideas about change. We'll see how that's already affecting how we plan, measure success, make predictions, model and explain our world, and design strategies--and ultimately how we think the future emerges from the present. By acknowledging the complexity and intricacy all around us, we're learning that we succeed by making the future even less predictable, employing new tools for new success in a new type of future.