How Harari’s Nexus changed my thinking, and where it stops

Guest post by Alain Bejjani, see more about his new book  Next: Leading Through the New Realities

Yuval Noah Harari’s Nexus is the clearest account I have read of why our institutions are struggling. It is also the book that caught me out, which is the more interesting reason to write about it.

His argument is deceptively simple. Societies are held together less by force or economics than by information networks that let millions of strangers cooperate. Religion, law, money, bureaucracy, science and nationalism are all systems for organising, trusting and transmitting information, and all of them run on myth and partial truth as much as on fact. He turns that insight into a sweeping history.  The chapters on the printing press are the best in the book. The press did not only spread knowledge, it spread witch-hunting manuals and religious wars with equal efficiency;, because a network that is good at moving information is not automatically good at moving truth.

Nexus changed my thinking, and where it stops

That distinction is the spine of the book. It is also the sentence that made me put it down.

In the spring of 2020 I was closing shopping malls and cinemas across seventeen countries, with no manual, no guide book. My instinct was that we had an information problem, so we built the means and machinery to fix it: daily numbers out of every market, footfall, cash, health data, decrees that changed overnight. I was proud of it. It was fast and accurate, and it was, in a way I did not see at the time, part of the problem. The better the reporting became, the more the organisation deferred to it and the less anyone argued with what they were shown. A number that arrives on a screen at eight in the morning carries an authority that a doubting colleague  does not, and the doubting was usually the more valuable of the two.

What carried us through was not the reporting. It was a few people willing to say that the figure from their market did not match what they could see, and to say it early enough to matter. At the time I took that to be luck, or good hiring. Harari gave me a better framing for it. Networks do not survive on the volume of information they move. They survive on their capacity to correct themselves; and this is a slow, unpopular, human function that every efficient system quietly suffocates..

Self-correction runs on trust, which is where it gets awkward. Our people trusted each other, which is a different thing from trusting the system, and the two pull in opposite directions. Trust in the system is what makes an organisation work. Trust between people is what lets it be corrected. Most organisations fund the first and starve the second, then wonder why nobody spoke up.

Which brings me to what I have borrowed most from Harari’s thinking,, and most uneasily. Harari’s real case for self-correction is political. He sets distributed networks against centralised ones, democracy against totalitarianism, and shows how a system with no way of being told it is wrong ends up believing its own reporting. Read that in an office and it is hard to unsee. A company is not a democracy. It is a single hub with an official version of events and a cost attached to contradicting it. No opposition, no free press, no term limits. Every structural mechanism he relies on is missing.

And AI, by his account, makes centralisation cheaper. Not another medium but an active participant that generates information, interprets evidence and then decides. If self-correction was already the weakest part of the network, it is hard to think of anything likelier to finish it off than a system that is fluent, tireless and almost never visibly unsure.

That is where my own book, NEXT, begins. Organisations are colliding with four realities at once: constant change, new technology, a changed bargain with talent, and sustainability. None of these is solved by more information. There is plenty of data. What they demand is judgment under conditions that more information cannot settle, and they need an organisation built to protect that judgment rather than automate it away.

So read Nexus. It will change how you look at every institution you sit inside, including the one that pays you. Then ask the question Harari has not yet asked: In your own organisation, who is allowed to say the number is wrong, and what happens to them when they do? If you cannot answer that quickly, the technology is not your most urgent problem.

Alain Bejjani served as CEO of Majid Al Futtaim from 2015 to 2023, growing it into a $15 billion enterprise across 17 countries. He was named Gulf Business CEO of the Year in 2020 and ranked among Forbes Middle East’s Top 100 CEOs in 2022. His book, Next: Leading Through the New Realities, is out now.

See more breaking stories here.