Where we are headed

On 30 June 1956, two aircraft left Los Angeles three minutes apart. Ninety minutes later they collided at 21,000 feet over the Grand Canyon. All 128 people on board were killed.

Neither crew broke a rule.

They were flying under a doctrine called “see and avoid.” Outside the airways, the whole job of not hitting anything fell to the pilots and their eyes. Nobody else was responsible for keeping them apart. This had always worked, because for as long as anyone could remember, the sky had been mostly empty.

It wasn’t empty anymore.

The obvious response would have been better pilots, more training or a rule telling everyone to look harder. Instead, they admitted the system was broken and the picture had grown too big for any one person to hold. By 1958 Congress had created the FAA and paid for a new layer over the whole country: radar and the controllers who watch it.

The smart part of that layer though is what it doesn’t do. A controller can see every aircraft, yet she only sends you nine words: traffic, two o’clock, three miles, climbing, report in sight. She tells you only what you need when you need it, in a precise shared language you can’t misunderstand.

Keeping it that simple is why the modern sky works. Reliability often requires legibility. It has become so ordinary that more than thirteen million people a day trust it without a second thought.

Nearly every organisation on the planet still runs on see and avoid. You post it in the channel and hope the right person happens to look up. That mostly worked while we moved at human speed and the sky was thin. Unfortunately agents are about to fill it.

At Concentric we’re building air-traffic control for your organisation. The first step is identifying who and what is in the sky. Step two is where they’re headed. Step three is understanding the landscape of your business.

Who is building this

Concentric is founded by Tim Davey.

He has helped scale several companies and every one of them has had this exact problem. It is said “Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics”. Building anything ambitious, be it at scale or speed, requires getting your teams to execute with speed and precision. The logistics of effective coordination is what makes or breaks a project. Every company on the planet is now having to move at speed, adapting first to AI, then climate and so on. The mission of Concentric is to enable companies to coordinate seamlessly, so they can adapt to the changes in front of them.

He helped build onefinestay, which turned thousands of private homes into one distributed hotel across five continents and was acquired by Accor in 2016. Coordination and logistics was everything. Then the London Interdisciplinary School, which is a university designed to get rid of disciplines and integrate teaching around problems. The Times called it “the most radical new university to open in decades”.