(2023-10-12) Schroeder Book Review The Nexus

Karl Schroeder: Book Review: The Nexus. We’re still mired in bureaucracies designed in the 19th century, our managerial initiatives solve for problems that are not actually the problems that matter, and collectively we’re fighting the last war instead of the current one. We know we need to decarbonize completely within the next decade, for instance, yet CO2 emissions are going up, not down. How can you earn optimism in the face of an insanely complex polycrisis? The thesis of The Nexus, by Julio Mario Ottino, dean of the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University, and Bruce Mau, designer and artist, is that we are at a critical moment when imagination is absolutely critical for solving our biggest problems, and has simultaneously reached its nadir as a social practice.

First off, I’m going to say that I approached this book with a weary, “Oh, another of these,” attitude.

There are lots of books about changing the world by changing our organization, and they mostly appeal to design thinking in one form or another. They’re generally good, yet somehow unsatisfying. With The Nexus, I was expecting a typical structure

Somehow, though, Ottino and Mau accomplish, for me, what no other book on innovation has succeeded in doing: they make the solutions concrete.

Real creativity means taking the full complexity of the world head-on.

My long-time editor and friend, David G. Hartwell, edited some of the best authors of science fiction, and we worked together on nine of my novels

He was a different editor with every book; and when we talked about it one day, he confirmed my suspicion: “I reinvent the process with each manuscript.” David had no theory of editing. For him, each book was an entirely new subject of study. (One Methodology Per Project)

The Nexus admits that this is true of the most pressing problems we face today

it takes one step back from trying to find a ‘method’ for creativity; rather than trying to solve the problem of creativity itself, it describes the social circumstances that give rise to creative teams. As a result, it ends up being useful because it becomes highly prescriptive about how to bring people together, while not trying to dictate what they do. (scenius?)

meticulously and in incredible detail, they lay out examples of problem-solving groups, past and present. The basics are familiar: start by breaking down the walls between siloed professions, especially between the arts, the sciences, and engineering. Where this book excels is in its deep exploration of exactly how that’s been done in the past and is being done now.