A New Start
A new start for Coffee & Complexity, with a clear focus: exploring what today's technology means for the next two years – and the next 10 years.
Once, many years ago, I was sat in a budget hotel in Hamburg, thinking to myself “I don’t want to stop doing this”. It was the day after NEXT18, and my mind was buzzing with the ideas I’d been exposed to.
In particular, one of the closing talks by Indy Johar was stuck in my mind. It was one of those that I needed to continue exploring in my writing. He had given us the right questions, without any pretensions to delivering answers:
There are very few parts of the world that have the democratic infrastructure to have these conversations – but they are fundamental conversations. How we have them, and who we design for, will be profound. We are sitting at the precipice of war, famine, revolution, or another disaster. They change things. Can we avoid that?
I couldn’t imagine not being part of that conversation.
Planning for change
The conference had been a freelance client since 2012, and I knew that every conference, every piece I wrote for them could potentially be my last. But I know that if that day came, I’d want to carry on writing about those issues; to keep looking into the future and start conversations about what’s next.
That was the secret of the conference: unlike so many tech events, it was more interested in what today’s tech would do to society in 10 years, than about the latest app or startup. To take a day a week and look outside journalism, at how the world was changing, and what that means for all us, was a blessing I would rather not let go of.
So, I set up my fallback. A domain name that perfectly encapsulated the ideas I was thinking about. A Ghost install. And a steady flow of random pieces that didn’t really fit in with what I’m doing with One Man & His Blog, but which kept the domain (and its Google ranking) alive.
Change arrives. With coffee.
Today, I activate the plan. There’s been a strategic shift at Accenture, NEXT26 won’t be happening, and the site is, for now, on hiatus, while the lovely team decide what NEXT will be in the future.
And so, while that happens, I’m picking up where I left off. Drinking coffee. Exploring complexity. Charting a course to what’s next.
I didn’t want to stop doing this. It turns out I don’t have to.
But I really hope you’ll join me on the journey.
