Something is off, and my ‘Spidey Senses’ are tingling.
Not one thing. Not one policy. Not one government. Not one economic number. Not one housing cycle. Not one political party. Not one industry. Not one villain.
It is more like a set of signals that keep appearing in different places, all pointing in a similar direction.
Housing feels stretched. Productivity feels weak. Government spending feels high. Compliance feels heavier. Small businesses feel harder than they should have to. Innovation feels like something we talk about more than something we genuinely build.
Intellectual property and soft assets seem to be taken more seriously overseas than they are here. Artificial Intelligence is advancing faster than most organisations (and humans) can keep up with. Professional services are being challenged. Public systems feel increasingly difficult to explain. People are busy, but not always productive. We are building more, spending more, regulating more, managing more, reporting more, and somehow, many people still feel like we are going backwards.
It’s not only me, as I meet with people all over the world, but those signals are also there in their worlds too….. curious, hey?
I do not think that is a delusional feeling.
I also do not think it means everything is about to collapse.
That is not the point.
The point is that something deeper is happening, and I think we need to be honest enough to look at it.
The way I see it, Australia does not simply have a growth problem. The United Kingdom does not simply have a growth problem either. Many modern economies are facing something more difficult to name.
We have a complexity problem.
More precisely, we have a capability problem inside a complexity moment.
Modern society is now operating across several economies at once. We have the physical economy of houses, roads, mines, farms, factories, hospitals, energy, transport and construction. We have the financial economy of debt, credit, superannuation, shares, private equity, asset prices and capital flows. We have the government economy of spending, regulation, compliance, services, public programs and taxation. We have the professional services economy, comprising lawyers, accountants, consultants, advisors, managers, auditors, and administrators. We have the digital economy of platforms, software, cloud, data, automation and artificial intelligence. We have the soft asset economy of intellectual property, methods, brand, trust, audience, frameworks, relationships, reputation and human judgment.
All of these economies are operating at once.
They do not all move at the same speed. They do not all reward the same behaviours. They do not all create the same kind of value. They do not all follow the same rules.
That is part of the problem. (Psst, each has different playbooks and rules)
We are trying to run a modern digital and human economy using many assumptions that still belong to an older industrial world.
We still know how to value land. We know how to value houses. We know how to value buildings. We know how to value machinery. We know how to value minerals in the ground. We know how to value a factory, a farm, a road, a port, a truck, a warehouse or a piece of equipment.
We are far less mature when it comes to valuing the things that increasingly shape the future.
Ideas. Software. Systems. Data. Intellectual property. Trust. Leadership. Community. Creativity. Judgement. Art. Human interpretation. Digital leverage. Scalable methods. The ability to see what others have missed and turn that into something useful.
That matters because the future economy is increasingly being built on those things.
This is where I think Australia has a blind spot.
Australia has extraordinary assets. That part is not in question. We have minerals, food, land, energy potential, education, institutions, superannuation, skilled people, relative stability and a strong position in the Asia Pacific region. These are not small things. Many countries would love to have them.
But having assets is not the same thing as turning those assets into future capability.
Selling minerals is not the same as owning the full value chain. Digging something out of the ground is not the same as refining it, designing with it, manufacturing from it, building technology around it, owning the patents around it, owning the software around it, and building global companies from it. A data centre being built in Australia is not automatically the same as Australia owning the intelligence, the infrastructure stack, the platform, the software, the capital upside, or the intellectual property associated with it.
That is the difference between having resources and building capability.
It is also the difference between activity and productivity.
This is one of the biggest distinctions we need to recover.
- Activity is not productivity.
- Spending is not productivity.
- Compliance is not productivity.
- Busyness is not productivity.
- Government programs are not automatically productivity.
- Infrastructure is not automatically productivity.
- Population growth is not automatically productivity.
- Housing wealth is not automatically productivity.
A growing GDP number is not automatically proof that people are better off.
Some of those things can support productivity. Some are necessary. Some are useful. Some are unavoidable. But they are not the engine by themselves.
An economy becomes stronger when it can do more valuable things with the same or fewer resources. When people can create more value per hour. When businesses can build better systems. When technology reduces friction. When infrastructure creates leverage rather than merely catching up. When education produces capability. When regulation protects what matters without burying everyone in unnecessary process. When capital flows toward productive assets rather than just inflated assets. When ideas become products, businesses, exports, tools, services and ownership.
That is real growth.
Everything else needs to be tested carefully.
One of my concerns is that we have become too comfortable reinforcing the “props that hold up a house” as a strategy for future potential.
More debt. More government spending. More compliance. More reporting. More programs. More administration. More consultants. More outsourced complexity. More housing dependence. More infrastructure just to keep up with the pressure from previous growth.
Again, none of those things are automatically wrong.
But there is a point where a society’s energy starts being consumed by maintaining complexity rather than creating new capabilities.
That is the part that worries me.
The more I think about it, the more I wonder whether trust is one of the great hidden assets of a society.
We don’t tend to think about trust as an asset because you can’t put it on a balance sheet. You can’t mine it. You can’t build a road out of it. You can’t point to it on a GDP report. Yet it might be one of the most valuable things a society possesses.
High-trust societies move faster. They need fewer forms, fewer approvals, fewer layers of oversight and fewer checks and balances on every interaction. People can spend more time building and less time proving they should be allowed to build.
Low-trust societies compensate with process. More paperwork. More approvals. More reporting. More auditing. More compliance. More people checking other people who are checking other people.
The irony is that many of the systems we create to protect ourselves from bad behaviour often make it harder for good people to get things done. Most people are not trying to cheat the system. Most people are trying to build a business, raise a family, contribute to their community and do the right thing. Yet increasingly we seem to design systems around the assumption that nobody can be trusted. That has a cost. Not just financially, but culturally.
The challenge is that every layer of process consumes energy. Every additional layer creates complexity. Complexity itself isn’t bad, and if we’re not careful, we can end up dedicating more capability and energy to maintaining the system than improving it.
That makes trust one of the great hidden productivity multipliers. The more trust we have, the less energy we need to spend defending ourselves from one another. The less trust we have, the more complexity we create to compensate for its absence.
It reminds me of the lesson of Rome, though not in the simplistic “Rome collapsed and so will we” kind of way. That is not the argument. Rome was extraordinarily capable.
The Romans possessed remarkable engineering capability. They built roads, aqueducts, sanitation systems and technologies that would not be matched in many places for centuries. They even understood concepts such as the steam motor & the need to clean water. Yet knowing something is possible and transforming society with it are very different things. It would take many centuries before those ideas were translated into the capabilities that ultimately drove the Industrial Revolution when the English brought the steam engine to life.
The problem was not simply that Rome lacked ideas. The problem was that the complexity of maintaining the system eventually became enormous. To the point, they called it back to Italy.
At some point, every civilisation faces a very simple equation.
Can we generate capability faster than we generate complexity?
If the answer is yes, society can keep advancing.
If the answer is no, society begins to drift.
It isn’t always dramatic, sudden or catastrophic. Not always suddenly. Not always with a crash. Sometimes the drift is slow, polite, managed and explained away by clever people using clever language.
That may be the greater danger.
Because a crash gets attention.
Drift gets normalised, and we risk complacency.
This is why many people can feel something is wrong before they can explain it.
They can feel that wages do not stretch as far. They can feel that housing has become absurdly difficult. They can feel that small businesses are harder than they should be. They can feel that institutions are less responsive. They can feel that the official story does not always match lived reality. They can feel that everything requires more forms, more approvals, more rules, more advice, more insurance, more compliance, more explanation and more cost.
People are not stupid.
They may not have the economic language, but they know when life is becoming harder to navigate.
This is also where the K-shaped economy matters. For many people, the promised benefits of trickle-down economics never seemed to arrive. A K-shaped economy is not just about rich people getting richer and poor people getting poorer. That is too simplistic.
It is about the difference between people who own compounding assets and people who do not.
If you own property, shares, business equity, intellectual property, software, data, licensing, brand, audience, productive land, or scalable systems, you are playing one economic game.
If you sell time, pay rent, carry debt, follow rules made by others, and have no real ownership stake in productive assets, you are playing a very different game.
Those two groups can live in the same country and experience completely different economies. That is the K shape.
The upper leg owns assets that can compound. The lower leg pays for access to assets owned by others.
This is why middle out economics deserves more serious attention.
Not as a slogan. Not as class warfare. Not as a lazy argument for bigger government. Not as resentment toward wealth.
The useful version of middle-out economics asks us better questions.
- How do we strengthen the productive middle of society?
- How do more families build security?
- How do more small businesses become resilient?
- How do more people own productive assets?
- How do more citizens participate in the value being created by technology?
- How do we make it easier to start, build, employ, innovate, export and own?
- How do we stop forcing small businesses to carry compliance burdens designed for much larger organisations?
- How do we create a society where wealth is not only extracted through property and financial assets, but created through capability?
That is the conversation we now need.
Not trickle down.
Not top down.
Not endless redistribution without productivity.
Not “let the market figure it all out” while the market increasingly rewards those who already own the strongest assets.
Not “government can fix everything” while government itself can become one of the sources of complexity.
We need a more mature conversation than that and we need to ask what actually creates capability.
This is where Artificial Intelligence becomes so important. It’s also one of the signals I keep watching closely.
AI is not just another technology wave. It is a capability multiplier. It has the potential to reduce the cost of knowledge work, coding, administration, analysis, communication, design, research, coordination and decision support. Used well (by humans), it could help small teams do what once required large teams. It could help small businesses become more capable. It could help regional businesses access tools that were once only available to large organisations. It could help citizens understand complex systems. It could help founders build faster. It could help governments simplify services. It could help educators personalise learning. It could help people with different kinds of minds contribute in ways that were previously blocked by traditional systems.
But that is only one path.
The other path is that AI becomes another layer of complexity. Another subscription. Another compliance problem. Another procurement mess. Another way for large platforms to concentrate ownership. Another way for small businesses to become dependent on systems they do not own, do not understand and cannot influence.
The question is not whether AI is good or bad. Instead the question is who owns the capability it creates.
That is the question countries like Australia need to take far more seriously.
Because if we simply consume the future while other countries own it, we should not be surprised when the value flows elsewhere.
This is one of the reasons I pay attention to how my own work is received internationally. Why? Because I have noticed that my products, ideas, frameworks, and intellectual property are often taken more seriously in the United States than in Australia. That is not a complaint. It is a signal.
Some markets are more comfortable valuing soft assets. They understand that a framework can be an asset. A method can be an asset. A point of view can be an asset. A diagnostic can be an asset. A body of intellectual property can be an asset. A lowed audience can be an asset. A leadership system can be an asset.
Australia often still wants to know where the “real thing” is.
However in the modern economy, the real thing is increasingly invisible before it becomes powerful.
That should make us uncomfortable.
Not because physical assets no longer matter. They do. Deeply. Food, energy, minerals, housing, transport and infrastructure will always matter.
But the future belongs to those who combine physical assets with digital capability, intellectual property, human judgment, and ownership.
- Resources plus IP.
- Infrastructure plus intelligence.
- Technology plus trust.
- AI plus humanity.
That is where I think the next major economic era sits.
Some people refer to the fourth industrial revolution as a digital and technological revolution. Automation, computing, cloud, robotics, data and AI.
We are already seeing the next layer emerge.
The human layer will become increasingly important.
Because the more powerful technology becomes, the more important human judgment becomes. The more automated the world becomes, the more valuable trust becomes. The more information we have, the more valuable the interpretation becomes. The more tools we have, the more important leadership becomes. The more AI can produce, the more important discernment becomes.
This is not anti-technology.
It says that technology without humanity creates greater complexity. Technology with humanity can create capability.
That is the heart of the moment.
We are not just deciding what tools we will use.
We are deciding what kind of society we will become with those tools.
So, what are we going to do we do about it?
Honestly, the answer is far less exciting than most people want it to be.
There is no grand policy that fixes this. There is no political party that rides in on a white horse and saves us. I don’t think there is a billionaire, a government department, an AI system or a business leader that’s going to suddenly solve complexity for us.
The more I have thought about all of this, the more I keep coming back to people. Ordinary people. Curious people. People willing to ask questions. People willing to challenge assumptions. People willing to get involved in their communities, their businesses, their local chambers, their industries and even their local politics. Not because they think they have all the answers, but because they care enough to help find them. Every major shift in history seems to have started with people who refused to accept that the status quo was simply the way things had to be.
One of the things I think we have lost is our appetite to examine things for ourselves. We increasingly consume opinions rather than investigate them. We join tribes rather than seek truth. We outsource thinking to experts, governments, consultants, media organisations and algorithms, then wonder why things feel disconnected from our lived experience.
If there is one thing I would encourage people to do, it is to become relentlessly curious. Talk to business owners. Talk to engineers. Talk to teachers. Talk to public servants. Talk to founders. Talk to farmers. Talk to young people trying to buy their first home. Talk to retirees. Talk to people who disagree with you. The patterns become much easier to see when you stop looking at headlines and start listening to people on the ground.
Because ultimately, the future will not be determined by economics. Economics is just the scoreboard. The real question is whether we remain a society capable of turning ideas into action. Can we still build things? Can we still create capability faster than complexity? Can we still support local businesses, encourage innovation, reward people who take risks, and create pathways for more people to own productive assets? Can we still have honest conversations about what is and isn’t working without immediately retreating into politics and ideology?
That’s the challenge in front of us. Not survival. Not collapse. Not even prosperity. The challenge is whether we are prepared to participate in shaping the future rather than simply consuming whatever future gets handed to us.
One of the things this whole line of thinking keeps bringing me back to is the role of people who think differently.
I have spent most of my life around different-minded and divergent people. Entrepreneurs, engineers, technologists, creatives, founders, artists, musicians, people on the autism spectrum, people with ADHD, and plenty of people who simply never seemed to fit comfortably inside the box everyone else was trying to put them in.
One of the things I’ve noticed is that they are often the first people to become uncomfortable when something doesn’t add up. They may not always be able to explain it immediately. They may not have all the evidence. Sometimes they get it wrong.
More often than not, they are seeing patterns emerge before the pattern has a name. They are noticing contradictions. They are asking awkward questions. They are looking at something everybody else has accepted and wondering why nobody is talking about the obvious problem sitting in front of them.
I sometimes describe it as seeing through it all like seeing life as though through The Matrix. Not because they possess some special superpower, but because they have a habit of questioning assumptions that everybody else has stopped questioning.
In times of stability, that can be frustrating. In times of complexity, it becomes incredibly valuable. The more complex a system becomes, the more important it is to have people willing to challenge it, examine it, pull it apart and ask whether it still makes sense. History is full of examples where the warning signs were visible long before the consequences arrived. The challenge was not a lack of information. The challenge was that too many people had become comfortable with the status quo, and too few were willing to challenge it.
The mistake, however, is thinking that seeing the problem is enough. It isn’t. Ideas by themselves are cheap. Observations are cheap. Even being right is cheap.
What matters is what happens next.
Somebody still has to build the business. Somebody still has to start the movement. Somebody still has to have the conversation with the politician. Somebody still has to invest in the idea. Somebody still has to support the local business. Somebody still has to turn the insight into action.
If there is one thing I have learned over the years, it is that progress rarely comes from people who simply identify problems. It comes from people who are courageous enough to take responsibility for doing something about them.
Perhaps that is the real opportunity sitting in front of us. Not to conform. Not to rebel for the sake of rebelling. Not to blindly accept the way things are because that is how they have always been done.
Instead, stay curious.
To keep asking questions. To keep seeking the truth. To keep challenging assumptions.
To keep building & taking action.
Because every meaningful improvement in society, every major advance in technology, every breakthrough in business, and every positive shift in culture started with somebody who looked at the world as it was and decided it could be better.
The future has always belonged to people willing to turn ideas into action. That is even more true now than it has ever been.
