We come from a long line of humans endeavoring to make sense of the world, to find and make meaning in creating safety, beauty, and community, and to create a better future for their families and for future generations.

Scientific, social, artistic, and technological creations and breakthroughs throughout history broke through contexts with more constraints and fewer resources than are available to anyone who has the privilege of sitting down to read or write a book in the twenty‐first century.

The future is not a trend that can be modeled or that we can or even need to predict. It takes bravery and vulnerability, but within thriving social systems, it is possible to envision and create a more human future.

But we cannot create a more human or better future within mechanistic organizations or by mechanistic methods. The time has come to break out of the local minutiae of the Industrial Revolution. It is time for a decisive, worldwide shift toward a new way of thinking, talking about, approaching, and managing organizations, initiatives, teams, and systems. And it absolutely will not happen organically.

My hope for the context, frameworks, methods, and strategies in this book is that they contribute to a worldwide swing out of the Industrial Revolution and into an era in which organizations and ecosystems become truly human‐centered social systems in name, theory, and practice, followed by a form of renaissance, in which the centuries of thought and research related to the social sciences are more fully integrated into all disciplines spanning organizations. The ineffectiveness of attempts to implement artificial intelligence and its adjacent technologies are symptoms of the deeper issue, the resolution of which will lead to harnessing unprecedented economic and social potential, changing the very nature of work for the better, and a brighter future for humanity.

As for me, the next phase of my journey will be focused on helping people and organizations to leverage the frameworks, methods, and strategies in this book for practical application within their organizations, industries, and markets, and partnering with academic and industry leaders to generate research, learnings, and frameworks to extend this body of work, insights, and knowledge.

As for you, regardless of the point at which you find yourself in your career, or with what level of purview and resources, you and your organization are a necessary part of this worldwide transformation. As we have learned in this book, changing the nature of or performance of a part of a system only matters if it influences the performance of the whole system. Together, we can change that system on behalf of future generations. With humility and conviction, and in the face of technological upheaval, we must endeavor to find and use every opportunity to create a more human future for future generations.