Systems thinker Brandon Barnett says we don’t have a good intuition for instability. We don’t quite know what to do with it.
Barnett, director of corporate strategy at Intel Corporation, builds analytic tools to help businesses anticipate how a host of futures might emerge in the movable, unstable space where market opportunities emerge, morph, and fall away, often more quickly than companies like Intel can take advantage of them. The problem, he says, is when we assume that stability is the norm in any realm — biological, economic, digital or otherwise — we limit our thinking and make it harder to move along with the landscape under our feet.