Con Air, Space Entrepreneurs, and Provocative Questions for Better Partnership Design

I watched Con Air a long time ago. Whether it’s a terrible or great film depends on your tolerance for Nicolas Cage’s hair and John Malkovich’s exaggerated acting.

When they hijacked the plane in mid air, there is a moment where Cyrus “The Virus”, the villain, says “It’s not difficult to surmise Nathan’s feelings towards killing these guards; and my own proclivities are well-known and often-lamented facts of penal lore.”

That line is legendary and I think I just loved the wit. Cyrus is so enthusiastic about killing guards that it has become prison folklore. His proclivity for dismantling the people standing between him and freedom is not just known, it is celebrated in certain circles and lamented in others.

I always ask myself: Bami, what are the guards stopping partnership design working for you?

Not literal guards, obviously. But the structures, the inherited assumptions, the “this is how we have always done it” that stands between good partnership design and genuinely generative collaboration. The things everyone knows are there but nobody wants to name them because naming them feels dangerous.

Like Cyrus, I have my own well-known proclivities. I like to make systems and partnerships work for everyone. 

Then I read something that reframed the whole thing.

When Old Guards Think Galactically

Jeff Bezos, who is an old guard in certain respects, wrote something I read in the book Invent and Wander that has been rattling around my head for weeks.

He was talking about Blue Origin, his space company, and why he is obsessed with building infrastructure for space entrepreneurs. Not for himself. For people who do not exist yet. Here is what he said:

“We must have a future of dynamism for our grandchildren and their grandchildren. We cannot let them fall prey to stasis and rationing, and it’s this generation’s job to build that road to space so that the future generations can unleash their creativity. When that is possible, when the infrastructure is in place for future space entrepreneurs, just as it was for me in 1994 to start Amazon, you will see amazing things happen, and it will happen fast. I guarantee it. People are so creative once they’re unleashed. If this generation builds the road to space, builds that infrastructure, we will get to see thousands of future entrepreneurs building a real space industry, and I want to inspire them. This vision sounds very big, and it is. None of this is easy. All of it is hard, but I want to inspire you. So think about this: Big things start small.”

That is not global thinking. That is galactic!

And it made me wonder: what is the partnership equivalent of building roads to space?

The Partnership Infrastructure We Can Start to Build

I will speak more to cancer care as it’s my place of primary assignment these days, but the logic applies to several sectors.

National organisations in health care, take brilliant care in designing partnerships for right now. Governance structures that reflect current organisational charts. Evaluation frameworks that measure current outputs.

All useful. All necessary. 

What if the job of this generation of partnership designers is not only to optimise current collaborations but to build infrastructure that unleashes the next generation of system players? The niche organisations that will emerge when the conditions allow them to. The community-led models that cannot form because the infrastructure is not there yet.

This is not romantic, it’s practical. The question is: what infrastructure?

For example, I think that in Scotland, Wales and NI, if data infrastructure allows measurement of multimorbidity, deprivation, interlinking with ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender and the full catalogue of social determinants, we would surface patterns invisible to current systems. Those patterns would enable creation of niche organisations with ingenious thinking and localised solutions. A system of care that actually works for everyone could emerge, not because someone designed it top-down, but because the infrastructure made it possible for the right solutions to form where they are needed.  And I do not speak to data infra alone. This applies to evaluation infrastructure that measures system change, not just service outputs. Funding infrastructure, governance infrastructure, talent infrastructure, etc. 

Bezos is building roads to space because he knows that once the infrastructure exists, entrepreneurs will do things he cannot imagine. The same logic applies to partnership work. If we build the right infrastructure, collaborative models that will lead to system improvement will emerge. But only if we stop designing for ourselves and start designing for people who are not in the room yet.

The Creative Challenge (Or: Why Do We Even Do It This Way?)

In cancer care, I keep coming back to two questions:

Why do we look at the situation in this way?
Why are things done this way?

These are the creative challenges. They force you to introspect on the way we have framed the problem.

There is a tool for this called laddering, or the ladder of abstraction. It works like this: when you are given a problem, you assume you know what the right problem statement is. Laddering forces you to climb up and down that assumption, testing whether you are solving the right thing.

You ask:

• Why do we look at the problem in this way?
• Why are we doing things in a certain way?
• What assumptions are baked into the current design that we are treating as facts?

These questions lead to alternative problem statements that might be more appropriate. They also expose the guards. The inherited structures that are stopping better design.

Let me give you an example from cancer care partnerships.

Many organisations design partnerships around service delivery: who provides what to whom, where, and how we measure it. That is the framing. The problem statement is: how do we coordinate service delivery more effectively?

Laddering that question looks like this:

Why are we focused on coordinating service delivery?
Because services are fragmented and patients fall through gaps.

Why are services fragmented?
Because they were designed by different organisations at different times for different purposes.

Why were they designed that way?
Because funding streams are siloed, institutional mandates are narrow, and nobody had the authority to design across the whole system.

Why does nobody have that authority?
Because the system was not designed to be a system. It was designed to be a collection of independent actors working in proximity.

Suddenly the problem is not “how do we coordinate service delivery better?” The problem is “how do we design infrastructure that allows a real system to emerge, rather than pretending a collection of independent actors is a system?”

That is a different problem. It requires different partnerships. And it surfaces the guards: funding silos, narrow institutional mandates, absence of system-level design authority.

Dismantling Old guards/Designing for the Upcoming Generation

Bezos said: “People are so creative once they’re unleashed.” That is true in space. It is also true in cancer care. But you cannot unleash creativity without infrastructure.

What does a partnership that focuses on new infrastructural design look like?

Not another coordination framework. Infrastructure that allows new models to form without requiring permission from the current power holders. Infrastructure that redistributes decision-making power, not just service delivery responsibility. Infrastructure that funds experimentation at the edges, not just scale at the centre.

I am not writing solutions. I am writing my own proclivities to provoke your thinking.

The question I want you sitting with is this: are you designing partnerships that optimise the current configuration, or are you building roads that the upcoming generation of system players can travel on?