Thank you for taking the time to read our plea for metasystems. We hope it infused you with the conviction that collaboration – and with that, trust – is central to the survival of businesses and to uphold our overall quality of life in the coming decade.
Without knowing it, your journey towards building a metasystem has already started. It took flight the moment you bought this book. You checked box number one of the metasystems to-do list: take time. Free your schedule, stop repeating the answers and actions you already know all too well. Because in a fast-changing world like ours, more of the same just won’t do the trick.
So, that was step one. What’s next, you ask? Get out of the building. Talk to people, pay attention and think out loud. That’s what we did. We are no prophets; everything we wrote down in this book is based on our own experience, talking to clients and colleagues and then challenging those insights with whatever we could learn from inspiring examples and people across the globe. We did not invent metasystems, we identified this phenomenon emerging all around as a resilient answer to the messy times we’re in. It gets lonely building a metasystem all on your own, though, so we wanted to convince as many people as possible of the potential they hold. And that goes for both metasystems and people.
While researching for this book we could almost feel our own human ideal shift, day by day, page per page, from hesitant to confident. We imagined what reality could look like if trust was the fabric people and businesses were made of. We experienced the immense opportunities this image of man opened up in thinking about global challenges, ways of working and possible future horizons. We believe that the metasystem mindset will eventually help us to be more resilient for the black swans ahead of us.
We wish for you to go through the same transformation. It’s liberating. And for the rest of the journey ahead, we hope you’ll join us. We can’t make a lot of promises, except for one: it will be exciting and enriching, sometimes scary, but most importantly, it will be human. With all its flaws and intricacies, with all its beauty and endless possibilities. Onwards and upwards!