Introducing: My Contrarians

Sensible folks who have defied conventional wisdom.

We do live in interesting times. The curse is complete.

These times also seem dangerous, head-spinning, disorienting, distressing, and, every now and then, promising. How we respond matters a great deal.

My preferred mode of response — alas, not always the one that comes out my mouth or fingertips — is to describe positive futures and work toward making them real. The positive futures I imagine involve major redesigns of the systems, institutions and norms we often take for granted today.

I was on this quest before the 2016 US election, as you'll see from the stories I tell in this series. The chain of events since 2016 seems to have softened up our old institutions (perhaps an understatement), while hardening up the humans and creating a huge amount of uncertainty.

Still, uncertainty and change spell opportunity. The confluence of Generative AI, geopolitical flux, harsher climate events and whatever your other favorite ingredient of the polycrisis is has created a moment for reinvention.

My best ideas about reinvention were sparked by a series of sages I discovered, each of whom was offering a sensible critique of their field, from education to urban design and creating abundance. I took to calling them my Contrarians.

About those Contrarians

In 2022, I had the pleasure of giving a unique keynote in Bucharest as part of Unfinished 2022. You can watch the whole talk here, but I've realized that the ideas it contains deserve individual presentation, so I'm posting this short series examining them in turn.

The theme of my U22 keynote was explaining the thinking behind my Unfinished keynote two years prior, which I titled Trust Is the (Only) Way Forward. How did I decide that trust is the way forward, even in our low-trust times?

A big chunk of that thesis came from my slow discovery over time of a series of Contrarians, an eclectic collection of relative unknowns (as you'll see in subsequent clips) who transformed their sectors by defying conventional wisdom.

It took me some time to get there, but gradually I realized their critiques had a huge theme in common. The paragraph none of them uttered that I know of, but which I'm pretty sure they all would have agreed with is:

In my field, years ago, we lost faith in humans and redesigned our systems and institutions on a basis of mistrust of the average person. That has left us with congenitally flawed institutions that often do a lot of damage. It turns out that if you flip that assumption and start with a belief that most (though not all) people are trustworthy, you get much better results — and very different solutions.

In this short section of the U22 talk, I frame the notion of Contrarians:

To pick up the story, please head to my description of the Contrarian named Harrison Owen, the first of five whose stories and heresies I tell in this series.

As you'll see in this short series, Contrarians are masters of rethinking constraints. They are also the foundations of Design from Trust. More on those topics later.

A confession or warning: only one of the five Contrarians I profiled in this talk is a woman; the rest are oldish white men. In part this is because I chose the stories I knew best from among my larger collection of Contrarians, and also was biased toward the few that I've met in person.

If you read this far, a treat: In my online Brain, you'll find all my Contrarians here, where you can see them in their greater context.

The Ur version of this article lives here. It's also here in my Brain.