1. Cultivate Patience
Create waiting spaces. Do not rush to eliminate what may look like imperfectly shaped ideas. Resist the temptation to filter early. Give ideas the time they need—it may take years. Creative work requires the confidence to allow things to emerge and evolve. Patience is essential to letting ideas that have not fully formed remain in play and be part of possible pathways. Choosing a development pathway too early eliminates all other potential paths, which might cause you to miss the best idea.
2. Tolerate Tension
Tension is healthy. Embrace the beauty and excitement of opposing ideas. Do not take sides. The measure of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold opposing ideas simultaneously. In The Nexus, these ideas may come from different domains, with varying metrics, historical references, and criteria for success. The key to Nexus success is to welcome and embrace the conflict. By holding the tension, we create a space for collaboration, learning, and real innovation, leading to something that has never been seen or done before.
3. Accept Imperfection
An imperfectly shaped idea, when tested and evolved through work, may go further than a clear, simple one. The pressure to make decisions, meet deadlines, and maintain budgets often works against this critical Nexus lesson. There is an aesthetic to ideas, and it is tempting, under pressure, to discard the ugly ones. Sometimes the best ideas need time to mature and reveal their hidden brilliance. Nexus supports an agnostic aesthetic of ideas, without judgment, allowing the process to determine what will ultimately solve the problem.
4. Contemplate Holistically
Aim to be global and plural rather than linear and sequential. Find pleasure in contemplating an array of ideas and possibilities rather than discarding them sequentially. The Nexus is a holistic space of complexity, emergence, ecologies, and interconnection. It calls for an augmented way of thinking that begins holistically. In Nexus thinking, we start with the ecology—the complex web of life and culture at the intersection of art, technology, and science. Train yourself to think plural and parallel, rather than singular and sequential. Imagine the system, not just the object, and explore scenarios and their implications to design the best possible outcomes.
5. Begin Now
Magical moments of epiphany rarely exist. The idea that completes a puzzle is just a final piece, no more special than the other essential pieces that came earlier in the process. Value the frequent, incremental insights. Do not wait for inspiration, perfect conditions, all the money, or the ideal people. Get started immediately and work systematically. When Chuck Close said, “Inspiration is for amateurs, the rest of us just show up and get to work,” he meant that creative work is hard work. By focusing on the work consistently, the conditions, money, people, and sometimes even the inspiration will suddenly align. So do not wait. Begin now.
6. Design Nexus Teams
Combine specialists with key Nexus connectors and examine problems through the lens of multiple disciplines. The bodies of knowledge and expertise in art, technology, and science are now so vast and deep that mastering more than one seems almost impossible. The great challenges we face do not sit neatly within specific disciplines or domains. For example, climate change is not merely a technology problem. This is where the Nexus team plays a crucial role. Balance specialists and generalists, newcomers and veterans, with key Nexus connectors—people with expertise in the overlaps between disciplines.
7. Embrace Fog
It is important in guiding teams. Do not seek instant clarity by matching questions with specific answers. In military strategy, “the fog of war” describes the challenge of making critical decisions with partial information from the battlefield. Great leaders somehow know what is happening, perfectly defining the Nexus practice. It is rare to have everything we need: perfect information and a clear definition. Instead, a Nexus leader embraces the creative potential of fog—interpolating, extrapolating, speculating, and even guessing what might work to solve the challenge at hand. Fog may be a competitive advantage.
8. Operate with Broadness
Not everyone on the team must be broad-minded, but the team as a whole needs to be. Define the problem as an ecosystem, not an object. Nexus is a collective mindset that can be developed both individually and collectively. Some people are naturally Nexus thinkers—connecting across disciplines and boundaries, thinking ecologically, and seeing possibilities where others see only constraints. Most people need to practice, studying systems thinking and gaining mastery of The Nexus. By defining the problem as an ecosystem rather than an object, we set the stage for the broad-minded approach that The Nexus is designed to support.
9. Break Assumptions
Truly new ideas break assumptions. Breakthroughs expand domains, while “breakwiths” create entirely new ones. The pandemic showed us that everything can change; things we thought were permanent suddenly stopped. The Nexus helps us think about possibilities without the catalyst of a pandemic, augmenting our thinking space to imagine new potential where art, technology, and science converge. Assumptions hold the world in place, but breakwiths liberate our Nexus minds to imagine entirely new creative possibilities for reinventing the world.
10. Educate!
Be relentless. Make it a priority for yourself, your team, and others. Foster a culture of emergence. Be open and courageous in exploring the foundations of art, technology, and science. Teach the basics of beauty and complexity, and focus on what is becoming possible. In the coming years, we will change practically everything: how we live, eat, grow, learn, move, and connect. Those who master the Nexus and the culture that emerges where art, technology, and science overlap will lead that change.
Expanding on Emergence
Emergence runs counter to almost everything we know and teach about leadership, business, and design. Our business culture insists that we are in control, that power ladders up, and that we know everything that is happening. Emergence is out of control; we design the conditions for it to happen. With emergence, power is pushed down into the system, and we cannot know exactly what will happen.
Most of us like to feel in control. We want to design every outcome. But when we embrace emergence, we elevate design to a higher order of complexity. We have a chance for our designs to behave like life. We design the rules of the game, as well as the inputs and outputs, and then we allow the beauty of emergence. This is the only hope we have of getting to a plausible future at the scale needed to confront the challenges we now face.