One day, quite early, there appeared a small bird on a wire, its feathers ruffled by the cool morning breeze. “I wonder what I am doing here?” the bird thought. As it pondered, a sudden gust of wind swept it off the wire and into the sky. “and how is…

What if we took the world and all that’s in it, and risked it on one game of pitch and toss? and lost.

The Paradox of Evolution & Homeostasis — “In trying to climb out of the pits we’ve dug ourselves, the pit becomes resilient. In trying to escape the prison, the prison gains its form.” — Bayo Akomolafe Imagine a forest, a complex web of organic life, where every tree, bush, and critter has a unique role to play…

In 1836 a 17 yo boy left Scotland bound for Hobart, Van Diemen’s Land… “Fired by his pioneer spirit” and tales of opportunity, he traveled north to explore the Port Phillip district. Two years later, he set out with a group of others — and many sheep — to search…

Play a game with me for a moment. Think about a person. They might be anyone. Even you. For the purposes of this game, let’s picture this person as an individual, existing on a uniform plane in otherwise empty space. (Imagine they don’t need a breathable atmosphere in this game) …

Think about a stone you pick up from the bank of a fast flowing river. Perhaps granite. Tumbled matte by the forces of water and other things it repeatedly rubs up against. If we hit this stone with a hammer and it fractures along some internal fault line, is it…

Adventures into the practical abyss, and back again. — Ten years ago I started two big projects. This is the story of one of them, my PhD. I wrote this for anyone contemplating something similar. “In the varied topography of professional practice, there is a high ground overlooking a swamp…” — Donald Schön Let me tell you a story the tale of how I grokked my PhD. Grok is coined as an untranslatable…

When we start a project with someone, we make a promise to them that we will go from A to B… and, when we get to B we’ll have something to show for it. — We can talk all we like about the middle bit – that meandering path that leads through ambiguity, to some new sense of understanding – but it’s not until they’ve experienced it that a client or stakeholder will understand what you meant when you said:

There’s a moment when things get a little strained. Adrenaline wakes the fluttering bugs down below, eye contact becomes difficult, words fail someone and the pause … extends. Time to pack up and go home, there’s nothing here for you. That moment is the when the door reveals itself. Like dreaming that extra room in your childhood home, a door appears in what, moments before, was a solid wall. Like some piece of science fiction filming trickery, there’s now a threshold to knowing in your view.