“We don’t know who discovered water but we know it wasn’t a fish. A pervasive environment, a pervasive medium is always beyond perception”

— Marshal McLuhan

If there is one rule of thumb for the last year, it has been to concentrate on what you can control. But what do we do when we don't know what to do? We distract ourselves. Anxiety urges us to do something. So we focus on what we can control. Like many, I spent most of the year perfecting our online practice. Something within my control. I've also spent the time fine-tuning the Blue Ocean Strategy to B2B process. Another project I have agency over. When the overwhelming feeling of uncertainty returns, the urge is there to gather information. And the internet is the perfect medium, yet it leads to hours of watching water skiing squirrels.

The fact is that the internet has been central to both the things we can control and the things that help distract us. The tools we make shape us more than we shape them. But something else was going on. We've been so focused on the role of technology during the pandemic we missed the fact for the first time in hundreds of years we have been stuck in one place. We could be on a zoom call with almost anyone in the world during the pandemic, but most of us couldn't move very far outside of our homes.(1)

Sometimes a fish doesn't know water until its been beached. What did our immobility do to our perspective and perception of the world? Consider the impact on business. Strategy has forever been oriented to geography. Look at the language we use, from defending our market position, strategy maps and charts, segmentation, exploring ill-defined territory, and capturing new market space. Everything is spatial. And in an instant last March, we lost the fundamental factor of space. The ability to see, smell, taste, hear and touch global markets was gone. In our work, as with many innovation/design firms, we demand executives to get out of the office and into their markets to explore the new, the exotic, and the distant for new innovative ideas. Now we ask them to do it through the pinhole bandwidth of the internet. Thank god for the internet, but it makes our formerly over regimented lives even more overly indexed and categorized. It is a fascinating time to be alive as we are witness to a growth spurt in the age-old evolution of how we interact with the world, but we need to learn from it and not repeat past mistakes.

You change the technology around the person, you change the person as scholars from Benjamin to McLuhan to Socrates have noted. How we mediate our relationship to reality, clearly changes how we see the world. “Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand,” Plato observed. In ancient times, stories were the medium of choice. And the collective process in which people told and received their stories, mirrored the collective reality these stories were based upon. In the 15th century with the rise of book publication we saw our stories change. In contrast to the oral tradition, reading a book is not a collective activity. Reading, much like contemplating a painting, is an individual process that requires concentration and deliberation. When moving pictures were introduced in the late 19th century we moved back to a collective activity as billions of people could watch the same story at the same time. Movies are a form of collective process, but unlike the original storytelling, there is no interactivity. Move to the late 20th century when the internet appeared, we were promised a technology that would combine the best of storytelling, with the reflective contemplation of books, and the collective communication of movies to create a global village. Instead we got the village idiot, facebook trolls, twitter flame wars and instagram influencers.

Everyday we make so many complicated, creative, incisive decisions at home, but in the office we shut these capabilities down. It's as Robert Frost said, "The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office." Now we've broken the wall between work and home and our perspective is closing even more than at our office desk. And post-pandemic, this is likely to not change. According to the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute, 45% of Americans are working from home in 2021.(2) Three quarters of us want to keep it this way, according to a Microsoft study.(3) There are obvious benefits to distance working, from eliminating the dreaded commute to lowering overhead and increasing productivity. This works for many jobs, but can you be creative at home, living in the over indexed and classified world of the internet?

I believe we can, if we learn from history. Solely observing the world from one's desk is a dangerous proposition. We're held hostage to an overly curated world based on what we click, like and subscribe. But can we flip the narrative to leverage technology to further randomize our worldview, to open the aperture of the universe at our fingertips to connect the dots across categories, which is the very root of the root of innovation? We have to rethink how we use distance and technology to look at our world that is close to us, while exploring other realities far away. The constant sensory bombardment and lack of stillness requires a different mode of thought to understand life. The world no longer absorbs us into it, we absorb the world into ourselves in a distracted mess. And this is a good thing.

How we are going to shape this new reality into new and better value propositions will be the theme of this year's series. The lack of movement has brought about a new way to utilize a new form of communication, interaction and discovery. We are more local and global at the same time and we need to harness these powers to create the next stage in human development.

During the pandemic, more and more of us discovered the benefits of a stroll through town. To be a flâneur/flâneuse became commonplace once again. Flâneur is a difficult to translate French word, kind of meaning to wander or better yet, to get lost on purpose. To flâneur is to soak in the common details we otherwise overlook. As Nassim Taleb writes, "A flâneur is someone who, unlike a tourist, makes a decision opportunistically at every step to revise his schedule (or his destination) so he can imbibe things based on new information obtained." In the early days of the internet there was a hope of cyberflâneurism, as reflected in the name of early web browsers (“Internet Explorer,” “Netscape Navigator”). “What the city and the street were to the Flâneur, the Internet has become to the Cyberflâneur,” crowed a 1998 article on the future of the internet. For a brief moment in the mid-1990s it seemed that this may be true.

Unfortunately we lost our way and the internet became just a place to confirm staid assumptions and get things done. But the pandemic has been a sea change to life online. Over the last year, we've found that our loss of geography has brought a correction to our relationship with the internet. The way we collaborate, learn, discover and create has changed, and as a result, we developed Corners, an approach and platform for online flâneurism. In this series I'll explore the notion of looking around your Corner - physically and digitally - to uncover strategic insights hidden in plain sight.

The internet could take our cubed faces to a zoom meeting anywhere in the world, and we rely on it more than every. Today, May 12th, in the last 24 hours there were 90 billion emails sent, 2,5m blog posts, 160m skype calls 3.3b gb of data traffic, and it goes on. Check out for some amazing statistics: https://www.internetlivestats.com/
Barrero, Jose Maria, Nicholas Bloom, and Steven J. Davis. 2020. “Why Working from Home Will Stick.” SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3741644
The New York Times. 2021. “How to Navigate the Postpandemic Office,” April 24, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/24/business/dealbook/hybrid-workplace-guide.html