One Size Fits None

You know when something feels fundamentally wrong, but you don’t really know what to call it?

As fellow Tuckie Alejandro Crawford and I write in the introduction to our book: One Size Fits None: Time for an Entrepreneurial Revolution.

A relative of one of the authors recently tried to respond to check fraud and identity theft. He [spent] an entire week in the communications “doom loop” …. Finally, he went into his bank and explained the situation. The people at the bank tried to be helpful. They couldn’t make the system work either.

The two of us quickly realized that the experience of banging our heads against “unresponsive systems” was an experience everyone was having.

We started to ask whether systems were becoming unresponsive by design, and pushing more and more of us into what we call “life in cattle class.” Not only that: we began to explore whether, alongside our everyday crises, the big crises seeming to plague our economy, society, and natural world, were related to this unresponsiveness.

That led to interviews for what became our podcast. It was like peeling back the layers of an onion. We felt (only half-joking here) like detectives working a complicated case. Why did everything from the doctor’s office to the energy industry seem to be making it harder for customers or employees to get answers, help, or information?

We began to explore these questions together, sending each other links to research, mailing books to each other for background reading, trading ideas, and testing them with our own students. The process of collaborating on solving the mystery, connecting one clue to the next, has been exciting and rewarding. Our collaboration enabled us to take our ideas to places neither of us would have gone on our own.

In the process, we analyzed original research from programs my co-writer leads. What we found, to our surprise, was that even if you don’t identify yourself as the innovator who would change those systems, you aren’t just waiting for someone else to swoop in and save you, either. In fact, when given a structured opportunity to ask “What if Instead?”, most of us want to do that work.

Those ideas became a series of op-eds in Climate and Capital. By the time the second one came out, we had a dozen written. It quickly became clear that there was a bigger connected story, and a commissioning editor at Emerald Publishing approached us about a book.

We began our story about “life in cattle class,” and how we got to think unresponsive systems were normal. We also found ourselves writing an optimistic ending to a sometimes dark story, about what amazing things happen to people when they ask, “what if, instead?” and participate in an experiment to replace the way we do things today.

One Size Fits None is available on Amazon or at bookshop.org.