Category: economics
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Laissez-faire Cognitive Debt
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I have been thinking a lot recently about Cognitive Debt from one particular perspective; often the need for ‘thinking’ is not being replaced, but instead just reshaped and pushed elsewhere in a system. Recap: I think of Cognitive Debt as ‘where we have the answers, but not the thinking that went into producing those answers”.…
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Organisational Surface Area
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Calling Arno Penzias I want to talk about Arnos Penzias and his idea about the Surface Area of an organisation. I’ve been an EE (“Everything Everywhere”) customer for years now. I was an Orange customer before that, so just drifted over in the rebrand. I probably stayed because of inertia, but an inertia rooted in…
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The Warp and the Weft
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I was at one of Dan Hon’s Hallway Tracks yesterday, featuring special guests Deb Chachra and Georgina Voss as they talked about their respective magnificent recent books, How Infrastructure Works and Systems Ultra. Held under Chatham House* rules, there were lots of brilliant questions and directions the ninety minutes took, both in conversation and in…
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WeWork… never worked
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This started as an aside on LinkedIn, but in the comments more stories started turning up, so capturing here for posterity. ——- WeWork has filed for bankrupt (FT). Quite some going for a company Ince valued at $47 billion. An unbelievable valuation. I have been grimly fascinated by the business for years, ever since I…
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Testing the Community Power Compass
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A year or so after first writing about the Community Power Compass, I was invited by Val Elefante to deliver a seminar on it for The Metagovernance Project this week. Metagov (for short) is an interdisciplinary research collective looking at standards and infrastructure for digital self governance. The video of the seminar will be up…
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Exploring Regenerative Triangulation
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I started articulating some thoughts in the last newsletter about a triad, in the fashion of fragile–robust–antifragile (from Taleb’s 2012 book) , which contained the states of unsustainable, sustainable and regenerative. The main thing bugging me was that making something sustainable, and moving towards a regenerative version of it, aren’t necessarily in the same direction.…
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Hanging with your prosthetic selves
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This week I read Zoe Scaman’s latest report on communities; there probably aren’t many (if any) people paying as much attention at the intersections behind brands, agencies and whatever community is in these conversations today. If that’s your bag, do check it out. It did spur one particular thought in my mind; are we still…
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How to use the Community Power Compass
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A practical walk through on how to use the Community Power Compass to evaluate and analyse communities in spaces like Web3.
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Introducing the Community Power Compass
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The background context for a beta version of a tool for investigating and evaluating different types of community, particularly those in the Web3 space.
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Quantum Markets
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A short, exploratory post, prompted by the serendipitous collision in my head this past week of this thread by Jerry Daykin on proven principles for building brands at scale, and this great post by Zoe Scaman on moving from static frameworks to dynamic flywheels. I’d like to caveat all of the below, too – the…
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Towards Leastmodernism; Mr Prosser’s Bulldozer
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I was at my second International Futures Form (IFF) breakfast this morning. On Zoom, naturally*. One of the conversation threads in our breakout group was about clutter. We’re spending much more time in our homes, and so undoubtedly eyes and activity will turn to the things we’ve accumulated over the months and years. What to…
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The Parasite As Host?
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I has a DM from Lee at the weekend, after we’d caught up last week for the first time in ages: “…loved your comment re Monzo as an incumbent – smart, in an ‘of course’ way. Might make a nice blog* post…”. So here it is. I’d mentioned the poster and campaign below, and the…