This arrived in my inbox after I wrote this post reflecting on home ownership.

“Our journey as human beings is not about following a pre-ordained path. Life doesn’t make any more sense when things are done ‘in order’… it’s way more exciting to know that you are creating your world, not replicating it.” – the-brand-guy.com

In this current climate of constant and chaotic change, mass “common sense wisdom” increasingly looks like the blind leading the blind.

Take the financial market as an example: it is traditionally seen as conservative, stable, and enduring; with banks and other institutions that are so big they will last forever. But fail they did.

Entire nations (like Iceland) failed. Take the rapidly-changing climate as another example – for the first time since weather forecasting began, our expectations are increasingly falling short of the actuality.

And yet amidst all this change it is still very tempting to bury our heads in the sand, to stick to what had worked in the past as if it will continue to work forever. There are still many who simply refuse to “believe” in climate change. The financial markets seem to have more or less scraped back to what things were before, using the exact same core systems, practices and attitudes that arguable contributed to the crash to begin with. Is this blind replication simply a form of mass insanity?

Is creating something new just too hard? Is it too comfortable to be with the devil we know rather than imagine a world without one?

Sometimes it seems to be that the more opportunities and tools we have in this world for individual expression, for customising our lives/lifestyles, out relationships, our social systems, for envisioning brave new futures; the more we want to stick to the perceived comforts of the past and the known.

It seems like the brighter the future, the greater the potential, the more advanced our knowledge and technology; the more we seek to scamper blindly back to the good-old Dark Ages. Indeed this seems to be exactly what fundamentalist religions are out to do.

In the practice of business, we definitely see more replication than creation. New breakthrough business concepts are few and far in between. The media celebrates the same-old same-old: more in, less out, and do everything faster. Business schools churn out graduates armed with the same strategic spreadsheets, the same bottom line measures, the same marketing strategies. Little wonder given replication is much easier to grade, measure and benchmark against same-same others.

Replication is boring; and with each iteration, life is rendered less meaningful…