Why we want to be the rehumanising platform for a healthier marketplace
Because market concentration is at a 29-year high, despite 305 million new businesses launching worldwide each year. Businesses are struggling to make change last. So we first asked ourselves, why is that?
Startups don’t stay-up, too often focused on selling-up to realise their lasting value.
90% growth in acquisitions versus going public, eliminating competitors from a healthy marketplace. (Yale)
SMEs struggle with 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 able to stay the course.
CMOs & CHROs in charge of mastering change and user-centricity stay less time than the rest of C-suite. (Korn Ferry)
“Buying the dream” often helps Tech’s competitiveness more than its customers.
The curse of the hype cycle
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. p
Our insight:
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 is always getting more complex, and without that process - no asteroids.
Humanity too is evolving, and humans respond to complexity by creating more complexity.
It’s not a choice, but a compulsion.
Rapid technological advancement, global economic interdependence and environmental systems.
Sweeping changes make our world less and less predictable - less familiar. Dysregulated.
You feel it right?
Time to face facts.
Complexification is at the heart of fragility in our systems, societies and governance.
Complexification is at the heart of fragility 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 encouraged by runaway technological development.
People are more fragile now, not less.
Accelerating complexity and specialisation.
The “Complexity Profile” was 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, illustrated by:
600-1,000 distinctive emerging technologies appeared in the main Gartner Hype Cycle since 1995.
A 200% growth in the number of specialist titles since 2005 and a 300% growth in the number of meetings since 2020.
Choose
Enthusiasm
Rising complexity means rising reactivity.
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.
Creativity is responsive. Organic brains make connections that our machines will not.
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.
Our model
Complexification leads us to 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 as the following:
1 Openness to experience
2 Goal conduciveness = Realism
3 Positive valence = Resilience
4 Elevated arousal = Divergence
5 Interpersonal orientation= Coherence.
Instead of hyped-up expectations, through enthusiasm we can instead 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.
*The internal structure of enthusiasm: a prototype analysis, Rijn Vogelaar, Eric van Dijk & Wilco W. van Dijk, 2025
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 consensus
A new tech consensus built on cultures of enthusiasm.
Systems
Don’t just collaborate, systemise cooperation.
Stories
Don’t stifle difference, embrace independence.
Pronounced HITME, a big part of our idea was inspired by the fitness and elite sports. We promise to meet you in the ‘hit me’ moment of truth. A shared readiness to take risks, invest energy, speak honestly and face consequences. We begin where it hurts, because the weakest link always breaks the chain.
That’s where real change happens.