The Fourth Way of Futurism.
The Fourth Way of Futurism begins with accelerating complexity, exposes fragility, and builds the everyday practices that make coherent, lasting change possible.
For people who want their agency, not someone else’s prophecy.
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If the Attention Economy is about distraction, then market concentration is the real motive. Market concentration is at a 29-year high. Equity market concentration has reached record highs and k-shaped economies are growing in number.
Despite 305 million new businesses launching worldwide each year, the gap with corporate leviathans and hyperscalers is growing. So we first challenged ourselves to know, why is this happening?
Because 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)
Because SMEs struggle with the investment in resources, vision and skills to make productive change last.
74% of SMEs lack a digital strategy and roadmap to navigate their future Go-To-Market path. (McKinsey)
Because Corporate change-makers aren’t set up to last, leaving organisations stuck with their legacy.
CMOs, CPOs & CHROs charged with mastering change stay less time than the rest of C-suite. (Korn Ferry)
Buying magic.
The hype cycle mythos serves tech’s competitiveness more than its customers.
Normalising expectation, dissonance and disappointment in order to sell the next revolution in technology. Each wave adds more complexity and conceals simplicity - just one look at any tech ecosystem map.
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Before the Fourth Way, futurism follows three broad paths — each powerful, but incomplete machine-led ideologies.
1. The Collective — Mind
The hive mind seeks unity through shared intelligence. It promises coherence but often dissolves individuality into consensus.
2. The Accelerated — Body
The augmented body pursues speed and optimisation. It builds capability but burns through resilience, mistaking motion for progress.
3. The Idealist — Soul
The utopian future imagines perfection. It inspires vision but escapes reality, trading practice for intellectual posture.
Choosing one over another means splitting us apart.
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The story of Oedipus is the quintessential Greek tragedy about a man who, in trying to run away from his fate, runs straight into it. Oedipus learned to his cost that if you know your future you will have no choice but to fulfil it. He was a prisoner to his future.
That is the hype cycle, except businesses are running toward their fate.
Businesses lost $104 million on average in 2024 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 more complex a system is, the more individuals matter.
The Industrial Revolution had its revolution. The Networked era has none. The Fourth Way of Futurism stands for that revolution.
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Complexification is a wide body of scientific inquiry aimed at understanding how simple components, agents, or rules interact to spontaneously produce intricate, high-level, and adaptive, collective behaviors, often referred to as emergent properties.
When it comes to people, 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.
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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.
The industrial revolution has led to increasingly specialised specialists, who are less and less able to cope with the complexity around them.
The more complex a system is, the more individuals matter.
Yet trying grasp the bigger picture is to be labelled a generalist - lacking focus, inexpert, common.
To cope, we control, prizing familiarity and convenience - our quick-fixation -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 and matter more 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 with courage.
Because the future is not something that happens to us, but something we shape through us.
After all, “You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.”
Agency is how we surf complexity through the status quo.
Instead of hyped-up expectations, The Fourth Way of Futurism embodies Enthusiasm.
The HITMˣE® Enthusiasm Wave™
For next generation leaders feeling between worlds to surf complexity through their status quo.
Complexification guides 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.
We all have the potential to rise with openness, setup for a challenge with realism, then surf the wave through resilience, divergence and coherence - coming out ahead of where we started.
Enthusiasm in clear scientific terms can be interpreted. We have codified this into every aspect of the HITMXE® model and method. The precondition is always “Openness to experience”.
| Way | Art Says | Science Says | Our Method | The Outcome |
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| Enthusiasm starts with openness to experience | ||||
| First Way | Mind | Clear Intent | Reveal | Realism |
| Second Way | Body | High Arousal | Release | Resilience |
| Third Way | Soul | Feeling Good | Retrain | Divergence |
| Fourth Way | Guile | Focus On Others | Reinspire | Coherence |
| Reference: The internal structure of enthusiasm: a prototype analysis, Rijn Vogelaar, Eric van Dijk & Wilco W. van Dijk, 2025 | ||||
Because emotional maturity must catch up to runaway intelligence.
That’s exactly what our method was created for…
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)
Stories:
Don’t stifle difference, embrace independence.
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.
