MATTER Vol. 1: Beyond Horizontality

Volume 1

Horizontality

MATTER is a resource for those who seek to understand the forces shaping our industry and our society, those who strive to improve constantly, those filled with curiosity, and those who want to believe in something better.

Forget what's now. MATTER is what's next.

Matter: physical substance in general; that which occupies space; an affair or situation under consideration; a topic; be of importance; have significance

A Composition

As we pored over content for MATTER's debut issue, we spent a lot of time looking at trends for 2024. We looked at obvious ones (“more genAI!”), controversial ones (“the death of democracy!”), and those that were more mundane (“the merging of strategy and marketing!”). We worked with experts and pragmatic visionaries across the world to create experiential pieces that entice and engage, provoke as they educate, and embolden as they excite. Ultimately, we concluded that there was a common theme across every article— that of horizontality.

In a business context, horizontality can refer to a horizontal organization or to aspects of an organization that spread across the entirety of the company (think: IT and HR which tend to sit in striated layers above the organizational silos or verticals). Within MATTER, we have articles about the distribution of design philosophy, whether AI is coming for your job, and a perspective on the horizontal nature of Customer Journey Orchestration. Additionally, the contributors to this issue span the globe from the United States to New Zealand and Singapore.

We hope you enjoy the inaugural MATTER experience, and it causes you to look again at what you think you recognize and think that you know. You may not agree with everything here, but we would rather engage you than deliver nothing more than you expect. Instead, we want to change what you expect so that, together, we can create futures faster by design.

— The MATTER Editorial Board

Horizontality comes from the Ancient Greek word horízōn, meaning boundary. That's important to us because we are most interested in talking about what is coming, not what is here.

We think that's a problem with a lot of consultancies— too much what is and not enough what if. Here, in MATTER, we want to look beyond the horizon. So many dreams of the future failed to materialize (ahem, jetpacks) but we should never stop trying to build the future that we deserve.