It’s time to start changing the world
Eight years ago I started my first company, The Big Art People. We existed to unlock the creativity of children all over the UK, battling against a stifling education system.
Now me and Jon Barnes have started a new company, flux. We exist to liberate people and organisations. Our vision is grand and our ambitions are huge. We want to make change at all levels of society, from individuals, to companies, to countries.
At 31, with a decade of experience under my belt, it’s time to start being explicit about changing the world.
Since 2008 I’ve done amazing things with some of the world’s smartest people. I’ve worked alongside them and learnt from their experience. It’s been the most awesome self-led apprenticeship in creative and strategic thinking and doing. Now I’m going to bring all that together, with my mate Jon and a suite of amazing partners, to make several dents in the universe.
The world is an amazing place. So let’s take the amazing things and make them even better, and make more of them.
The world is also a shit place. So let’s take the shit things and make them less shit, and turn them into amazing things.
In Sapiens, Yuval Harari goes deep into cultural evolutionary theory for 400 pages in a book that is as balanced as it is polemical, and as inspiring as it is disheartening. The thought that stuck with me is this:
“Very little exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.”
I want to start rewriting stories, and flux is the way I’m going to do that…
Our proposition
At flux we’re currently focusing on two areas: research and consultancy. The areas of work will evolve over time, but they will all always have the goal of liberating people and organisations.
An organisational redesign consultancy
Helping organisations, from startups to multi-national corporations, change and evolve towards new structures, processes, and ways of working.
With the Rinse Group as our founding client, and more in the pipeline, we’re going to have an immediate impact on one of the most corruptible organisational structures of the modern age, the corporation.
A researcher and publisher
Asking big questions and conducting deep research into global topics, then publishing that research in books and podcasts.
- Democracy Squared asks “what if the internet had been invented before democracy?”
- Education Squared (coming 2017) will ask “what if we redesigned the education system for the digital age?”
- flux podcast features a range of interviews and conversations about organisations, the future of work, democracy, and education
Public thanks to all of the people who inspired me and Jon to do this: Ellie Westbrook, Dream Valley Projects, Hyper Island, August, The Happy Startup School, and everyone else who I’ve worked with and learned from over the last decade.
