Seamless. Sorman-Nilsson Anders

ruined the ending for you. However, even if you now know the structure behind this epic, and feel like you have just seen the process behind the magician JRR Tolkien's tricks, these tricks are hardly his alone. This type of mythical structure is deeply embedded and in rapport with our subconscious souls, and has always been part and parcel of that most fundamental of human skills – the art of storytelling. Indeed, throughout this book, I use the hero's journey contained within another epic – Star Wars IV: A New Hope — to more fully illustrate this type of narrative arc, and the similarities contained within the story arc of my own, closer to home, hero. Through this journey, you will learn how to design and guide your partners, clients and collaborators in quests that lead to true adaptation and transformation.

      For as long as stories have been told, the most engaging and connected of human stories are those of transformation, change and adaptation – which is perhaps why I, as a futurist and science fiction geek, was so strongly drawn to support my hero on their transformational journey, so that they could one day return home with the elixir to their business problems. (And good story also holds something back. We'll get to this hero in chapter 1.)

      The narrative arc that I have just described stands in stark contrast to the idea of seamlessness. If you think of Frodo's journey, for example, nothing about it was seamless. Rather, the whole experience was filled with seams, friction, obstacles and paradigm shifts. Moving from one stage to another was neither easy nor without interruptions or problems, and Frodo and his fellowship didn't perform perfectly and certainly not without any flaws or errors. Few of us do. However a dream, a destination, a vision, a strategy was always part of these epic journeys. And, at the end, there was a sense of relief, of calm, of a beautiful life, of peace, of perfection.

      So I want to uphold ‘seamless' as a kind of ‘end of the rainbow' state – a utopia, Holy Grail, and paradisiacal, mythical place. It is a special world that we can all imagine. Because it is brands, leaders and organisations that are able to design journeys – customer journeys, talent quests, change projects and transformational odysseys – empathetically and in such a way as to guide their stakeholders from a status quo of living an ordinary, boring life in the Shire, through a special world of dragons, demons and disruptions, to return fully transformed, that will excel in our near-horizon future.

The hero's journey is one of both inner and outer transformation, and of movement between ordinary worlds and special worlds. And again, the transitions between inner and outer transformation, and between different worlds, can be either frictive or seamless (see figure I.2).

Figure I.2 : the journey between what is (the status quo) and what could be

      And this moves us to the second of Arthur C Clarke's laws – that ‘The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible'. This book is designed to take you into the magical world that is the future – of current im-possibilities. Please let me co-design an extraordinary one with you. And as I say to my clients and friends, you better start preparing for the future today, because it is where you will spend the rest of your life.

      With this in mind, fellow futurephile hero, join me on a space odyssey, sign-posted by the following twelve steps, equally the chapters in this book:

      1. Ordinary world/status quo

      2. Call to adventure

      3. Refusal of the call

      4. Meeting with the mentor

      5. Crossing the threshold

      6. Tests, allies and enemies

      7. Approaching the inmost cave

      8. Ordeal

      9. Reward (seizing the sword)

      10. Road back

      11. Resurrection

      12. Return with the elixir

      Butterflies, bow ties and infinity

      One more point before we get started: you may recognise in the cover of the book both the ancient symbol of infinity and the horizontal ‘8'. This symbolises that the hero's journey is, of course, a constant multi-cyclical one. You take this journey with any challenge you meet in business or in your personal life, complete it (hopefully), or get up and dust yourself off and go again. You'll also recognise this iconography of the horizontal 8 (infinity sign) hidden in the bow tie. The word for ‘bow tie' in French is papillon, which is the same as the French word for ‘butterfly' (and in fashionable Italy, farfalla has the same double meaning). In other words, ‘butterfly' – the symbol of metamorphosis and transformation – transfers similar attributes to its distant shape-sharing wearable cousin the bow tie. Shape, models and iconography are central to this book and, as we all know from the great brands of the world, analogues, allegory and hidden meanings are all around us, playing with our subconscious minds.

The horizontal 8 symbol of infinity, in turn, comes from the mathematical infinity symbol (sometimes called the ‘lemniscate') which is credited to John Wallis, who in turn was inspired by a variant of the Roman numeral for 1000 (originally

). In modern mysticism the infinity symbol has become fused with the variation of the ‘ouroboros', an ancient image of a snake eating its own tail, representing life reborn. The infinity symbol can be drawn in one continuous movement, with the loops potentially signifying the balance of opposites – male and female, day and night, dark and light, and who knows? Maybe analogue and digital (see figure I.3). The convergent point may symbolise union and two things becoming one. With all these layers of meaning, the symbol stands for wholeness, integration and completion.

Figure I.3 : the infinite movement between the ordinary, analogue, world and the extraordinary, digital, world

      But we can draw out the connections between these symbols even further. The term ‘lemniscate', used in algebraic geometry, comes from the Latin lēmniscātus, which means ‘decorated with ribbons', which in turn may have originated on the ancient Greek island of Lemnos, where ribbons were worn as decorations, much as sartorial men (and, of course, some women) wear bow ties, another form of ribbons.

      You see, even the etymological heritage of the infinity symbol and the meanings attached to butterflies and bow ties are mythically intertwined, seamlessly and infinitely. Who knows? Maybe there is only one story, a monomyth behind this. And the seamless symbol of the hero's journey is aptly the infinity sign, endless, enduring and transformative as it, as well as the butterfly and the bow tie. And within this, the convergent point – the point where the infinity symbol crosses itself, where the ‘wings' of the butterfly and the bow tie come together (see figure I.4, overleaf) – becomes the seamless interplay between ordinary and extraordinary worlds, and in our case the dynamics between the analogue and the digital in the context of digital adaptation and human transformation.