Why we want to be
The Fourth Way of Futurism.
We find people between worlds - and businesses struggling to make change last - because market concentration is at a 29-year high, despite 305 million new businesses launching worldwide each year. So we first asked ourselves, why is that?
Startups don’t stay up. Founders often too fixated on selling-up to realise the market's lasting value.
90% growth in acquisitions versus going public, eliminating competitors from a healthy marketplace. (Yale)
SMEs struggle with the investment in resources, vision and skills to make change last.
74% of SMEs lack a digital strategy and roadmap to navigate their future Go-To-Market path. (McKinsey)
Corporate change-makers aren’t set up to last, leaving organisations stuck with their legacy.
CMOs, CPOs & CHROs in charge of mastering change, innovation and user-centricity stay less time than the rest of C-suite. (Korn Ferry)
Buying the dream.
How the hype cycle mythos serves tech’s competitiveness more than its customers.
Normalising expectation, dissonance and disappointment in order to sell the next generation of tech.
Oedipus learned to his cost that if you know your future you will have no choice but to fulfil it. That is the hype cycle.
Businesses lost $104 million on average last year due to digital inefficiencies, such as underutilized technology and disjointed strategies. $2.3 trillion has been wasted globally in failed digital transformation programs.
Our reality is
Complexification
Let’s get existential for a minute.
What if we told you that complexity killed the dinosaurs?
You’d probably think we were nuts.
But the universe only moves in one direction: toward greater complexity. Without that long arc of complexification — stars, planets, ecosystems, orbital mechanics — there would be no asteroids, no impact events, no evolutionary resets.
Humanity follows the same pattern. We respond to complexity by creating more of it. Not as a choice, but as a compulsion.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called this the “law of complexity and consciousness.”
His work sparked a wide body of scientific inquiry — the kind we live inside every day.
Rapid technological acceleration. Global economic interdependence. Environmental systems under strain.
Sweeping changes that make the world less predictable, less familiar. Dysregulated.
You feel it, right?
Your feeling is right.
Complexity is accelerating 46× faster than the historical norm.
The Industrial Revolution had its revolution. The Networked era has none. The Fourth Way of Futurism is that revolution.
The “Complexity Profile” is a mathematical tool Yaneer Bar-Yam devised to visualise how the complexity of a system changes across different levels of scale.
Increasing social complexity from individuals to collective civilisations is a natural consequence of growing interdependence and the need to coordinate large-scale cooperation - expand below for more proof points.
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600-1,000 distinctive emerging technologies appeared in the main Gartner Hype Cycle since 1995.
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5-10x expansion of investment vehicles in global finance and >20x diversity of products and asset classes since 2005.
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A 200% growth in the number of specialist titles since 2005 and a 300% growth in the number of meetings since 2020.
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After steady decline in working hours for 150 years, the number of people working 55+ hours per week is increasing again globally.
Time to face facts
Handle with care
Complexification is at the heart of fragility.
In our systems, societies and governance.
And in ourselves; overwhelm that results in fatigue, denialism and avoidance.
Yet trying grasp the bigger picture is to be labelled a generalist - lacking focus, inexpert, common.
The industrial revolution has led to increasingly specialised specialists, who are less and less able to cope with the complexity around them.
To cope, we control, prizing familiarity and convenience - the status quo - instead of acting on consequences.
Short-term thinking is both rooted in our most primal instincts and enclosed by runaway technological development.
People are more fragile now, not less.
Choose
Enthusiasm
Creativity is responsive. Organic brains make connections that our machines will not.
Because complexity is rising that means rising reactivity too.
More reactivity means more binary thinking.
Binary thinking exaggerates positives and negatives. Left for long enough it results in apathy and nihilism.
So we hand over more and more of our agency.
The history of life on earth is a history of teamwork, of cooperation and resourcefulness.
Resourcefulness means creativity with consequence, activism and longevity.
The truth is that complexity will only increase. The biggest question is how we choose to respond.
Because the future is not something that happens to us, but something we shape through us.
This is how we surf complexity through the status quo.
Instead of hyped-up expectations, The Fourth Way of Futurism embodies Enthusiasm.
The Enthusiasm Wave™
For next generation leaders that are between worlds to surf complexity through the status quo.
Complexification informs our model - the Enthusiasm Wave - which embraces the progress of complexity, instead of denying it and continually betting on silver bullet solutions. Think of it as the path of right resistance.
Enthusiasm in clear scientific terms can be interpreted and codified. The catalyst is always “Openness to experience”.
| Way | Art Says | Science Says | Our Method | The Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Enthusiasm starts with openness to experience | ||||
| First Way | Mind | Clear Intent | Reveal | Realism |
| Second Way | Body | High Arousal | Release | Resilience |
| Third Way | Soul | Positive Feelings | Retrain | Divergence |
| Fourth Way | Life | Social Focus | Reinspire | Coherence |
| Reference: The internal structure of enthusiasm: a prototype analysis, Rijn Vogelaar, Eric van Dijk & Wilco W. van Dijk, 2025 | ||||
We can rise with openness, setup for the challenge with realism, then surf the wave through resilience, divergence and coherence - coming out ahead of where we started.
Because emotional maturity must catch up to runaway intelligence.
That’s exactly what our method was created to do…
What if we imagined tech’s role in a new consensus?
“Cross-functional collaboration yields worse revenue outcomes” (Gartner)
Systems:
Don’t just collaborate, systemise cooperation.
Don’t measure impact in isolation, recognize intangible and personal impacts through integrated accountability.
Don’t ignore, adopt proven systems for human-centred design and innovation making use of common languages.
“Brands need to move on from effectiveness and solve for influence” (McKinsey)
Don’t stifle difference, embrace independence.
Stories:
Don’t burden BAU processes, find inflection points to bring teams together and formulate outcomes-based models.
Don’t re-org, re-design to reflect a more nuanced view of contribution and set-out the right degrees of freedom.
A new tech consensus built on cultures of enthusiasm.
Systems
Don’t just collaborate, systemise cooperation.
Stories
Don’t stifle difference, embrace independence.
