No Straight Lines: making sense of our non-linear world @alansmlxl

A long standing professional friend is Alan Moore and his new book is, like previous books, excellent.

....We have arrived at the edge of the adaptive range of our industrial world. At the edge, because that world, our world is being overwhelmed by a trilemma of social, organisational and economic complexity. We are in transit from a linear world to a non-linear one. Non-linear because it is for all of us socially, organisationally and economically ambiguous, confusing and worrying. Consequently we are faced with an increasingly pressing and urgent problem, WHAT COMES NEXT? And also we are therefore presented with a design challenge: HOW do we create better societies, more able organisations and, more vibrant and equitable economies relevant to the world we live in today? No Straight Lines presents a new logic and inspiring plea for a more human centric world that argues we now have the possibility to truly transform our world, to be more resilient, to be more relevant to us both personally and collectively, socially cohesive, sustainable, economically vibrant and humane, through the tools, capabilities, language and processes at our fingertips......

I can see we are slowly rejecting the wisdom of books as the method of learning and passing facts.  We are moving back to pre-printing press when non-linear existed and where our brains probably want to be again.  Non-linear is not a struggle unlike long form concentration and deep thinking.   With my true engineering hat on, linear and straight lines are only special cases so why did we focus on them?

If you want to buy his book.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/No-Straight-Lines-Making-Non-linear/dp/0956766242
http://www.amazon.com/No-Straight-Lines-Alan-Moore/dp/0956766242