Non-Linear Thinking: Why This Conversation Belongs in 2026

Nobody gets fired for following the process.

That’s the real reason it exists.

You’ve seen this before. An organisation needs something built. An app. A website. A platform. A campaign. Brief. RFP. Vendors. Proposals. Wireframe approval. Design approval. Revised design approval. Development approval. Testing. Launch. Three months later, everyone politely agrees it isn’t quite what they wanted. Nobody says that out loud though. Because the process was followed. Every box was ticked. Every signature collected. The result may be mediocre. But it was achieved safely.

This is how much of the corporate world operates. Not because it’s wrong. Because for a very long time, it worked.

The modern organisation was built around risk mitigation. Every approval layer, every committee, every sign-off exists for a reason. It creates consistency. It scales. It protects organisations from bad decisions.

The problem is that after enough years of building safety rails, people stop seeing the road beyond them.

The process becomes the objective. The method becomes more important than the outcome. And eventually, people become genuinely incapable of imagining a different route.

I started noticing this in my own thinking.

Recently, my team and I were frustrated with a piece of software. Not bad software. Probably one of the best-known products in its category. But it was built for everyone. And that’s precisely the problem.

When software serves millions of customers, every feature is a compromise. Every update must satisfy the largest possible audience. Every decision is balanced against existing users and existing workflows.

The result is something useful. But rarely something perfect.

For years, the assumption would have been simple: we need this software. The conversation would then focus on how to work around its limitations.

We asked a different question instead.

What if we didn’t need this software at all?

That single question changed everything. Within a few hours we weren’t discussing feature requests anymore. We were discussing whether we could simply build what we needed ourselves. Not a platform. Not a product. Just the exact tool required to solve our exact problem.

The moment we stopped assuming we needed the existing solution, we realised we didn’t need most of its features either. We only needed the parts that actually mattered to us.

Think about the difference between a hotel room and a home.

Hotel rooms are designed brilliantly. They have to be. They’re built to accommodate almost everyone. The business traveller. The tourist. The conference guest. The family on holiday. Every room contains things many guests will never touch. A desk. A reading lamp. A luggage stand. A dozen small compromises designed to satisfy millions of different needs.

Homes work differently. Even in the same neighbourhood. Even in identical houses. People make them their own. One family turns a spare room into a gym. Another into a studio. Someone knocks down a wall. Someone builds a library. The structure might be identical. The outcome is deeply personal.

For decades, we’ve been forced to live in hotel rooms. Standardised tools. Standardised processes. Standardised solutions designed for everyone, which means perfectly suited to no one.

That’s changing. And that’s the point.

Non-linear thinking isn’t about being reckless. It isn’t about ignoring process or abandoning expertise. It’s about refusing to assume the traditional path is the only path.

The corporate world approaches most challenges the same way. Step one. Step two. Step three. Only then do we arrive at the result.

Non-linear thinkers start with the result.

What would success actually look like? Can we create a version of it today? Can we test the idea before we build the entire process around it?

I caught myself recently failing this test.

An idea came up in conversation. A good one. And before I’d even finished hearing it out, my brain had already started running the checklist. Who would make it? How long would it take? What would the approval look like?

The idea hadn’t been evaluated on whether it was good. I had instantly filtered it through the existing process. The limitation wasn’t creative. It was procedural. And it was entirely in my own head.

This happens constantly inside organisations. We stop asking should we do this? and start asking can our existing structure do this? Over time, the structure becomes the boundary of imagination. We kill ideas before they have a chance to breathe. Not because they’re bad. But because we already know what the linear process will look like.

That’s not innovation. That’s self-censorship.

And it may be the most expensive problem facing large organisations today.

Because while they’re busy optimising the path, someone else is questioning whether the path is necessary at all. The greatest threat to a linear organisation isn’t another organisation that does the same thing faster. It’s an organisation that refuses to play the same game.

So why am I writing this now, and not five years ago?

Because five years ago, challenging the process was still mostly theoretical. You could question the path. But you still needed the budget, the team, the vendor, the timeline. The argument was inspiring. The alternative wasn’t always practical.

That’s what’s different today.

The barriers that made linear thinking necessary are collapsing. The things that once required six months and a committee can now be questioned, tested and sometimes solved before the approval meeting is even scheduled. The excuses that kept people inside the process are running out.

Which means the organisations still hiding behind them are running out of time.

Non-linear thinking was always the better approach. Now, for the first time, it’s also the more accessible one.

The only question left is who’s brave enough to use it.