Field Notes

Traces from the frontier of thought

This is a notebook of insights, questions, and provocations captured along the journey.

Each entry is a field note from a moment of clarity, confusion, or conversation worth holding onto. The thinking here is evergreen—because the world is still becoming.

Wander, revisit, get lost. That’s what fieldwork is for.

History's Myths

The holidays (Christmas, Hanukkah, New Year…) offer an annual opportunity to reflect on the very biggest questions we can find. But first we need to find those questions. So much is changing so fast in our lives, at work and in our businesses, in our science and society. It’s a struggle to recognise the most valuable questions to ask of all these changes.

Explorers' Gym: A Simple Way to Have Deep Conversations

More important than the particular set of rules or behaviours you set for your conversations is to talk explicitly about what those rules should be.

No Time to Die?

We are very poor explorers of life’s greatest unknown.

How to Widen Your Reality Check

It’s time to recheck the relationship between our maps and our reality

Explorers' Gym: Reaching Out to Bring Together

Breaking the Binary on Climate Change & Techno-Optimism

Rather than pursue a bunch of different agendas to fight climate change, or hunger, or inequality, society’s whole focus should be on making a new Age happen.

Explorers' Gym: Blunt Stakeholder Mapping

New Geography of Work

COVID-19 made the old routine of "going to work" impossible, then passé.

Explorers' Gym: How to Host Virtual Campfires

A campfire has a few distinctive qualities. It helps to make these explicit for the people you convene.

Explorers' Gym: Dare to Define Diversity

Diversity is a big word. It's an emotionally and politically charged word. As a convenor of diverse perspectives, the key question to ask yourself is: Which diversity is relevant to my quest?

From Tunnel Vision to Lateral Vision

Let’s tour the filters that form and maintain the walls of our tunnel vision. Not so we fix them or knock them down, but so we can play with them more, climb over some of them, and begin to discover what our lateral vision might reveal.

Explorers' Gym: A Cure for 'Imposter Syndrome'

Explorers need allies. Is fear holding you back from inviting the right people on your expedition?