I’m excited to build upon my last essay and introduce the full Liminal Stewardship Framework below. In deciding to publish this (or even write it in the first place) I have not really been sure what I hoped would happen as a result. Is it novel? Is it accurate?Is it even useful? I wasn’t sure that naming a thing that I was sensing would have much more impact than bringing clarity, and creating a roadmap for my own work.

Since I shared the first Liminal Stewardship article, I’ve had so much positive feedback from people in my wider community who self-identified with the capacities I mentioned, or feel they are doing parts of this work, yet had been struggling to communicate their approach or sense-make their own theory of change. I even had someone add the framing to his LinkedIn bio, and explore adding it to the skills database of his multi-national public institution. This to me was the greatest impact I could imagine having. I hope that extending the framework to a dynamic practice and process to be followed or explored adds even more value.

Introducing the Liminal Stewardship Framework

The following framework offers a possible practice for navigating periods of systemic transition. While I’ve presented it sequentially for clarity, Liminal Stewardship is not a linear methodology. It unfolds as a continuing spiral, with multiple iterations occurring simultaneously across the different scales of a system. As mentioned in my previous essay, the role of the steward is not to move a system mechanically from one stage to the next, but to accompany people and communities through transition - continually orienting, making meaning, cultivating possibility, supporting experimentation and integrating new learning as the future gradually emerges.

Orientation:

You can’t figure out where you’re going if you don’t acknowledge the present reality; light and shade, warts and all.

The steward first helps a community orient to the current system. This begins by making visible the assumptions, narratives and patterns that underpin the existing Horizon One reality. What are the power dynamics? What actions do the incentives currently direct? Whose worldviews dominate and why?

What is named becomes visible, allowing participants to better understand both the strengths and limitations of the current paradigm.

Without rushing to solutions, at this moment the steward helps create alignment around an initial orientation toward a preferred Horizon Three future - not as a fixed destination, but as a shared compass point. What is it that, regardless of worldviews and beliefs, we can all agree upon enough to set the compass toward?

This creates enough collective direction for people to begin navigating uncertainty together while remaining open to emergence and adaptation.

Worldbuilding:

Having established a shared orientation, the steward’s next responsibility is to help cultivate collective imagination.

Narrative is not simply a way of describing the world; it is one of the primary mechanisms through which societies construct reality, organise meaning and establish legitimacy. Stories shape identity, values, participation, imagination and ultimately the paradigms through which systems operate. Within Liminal Stewardship, narrative therefore becomes a necessary scaffold for systems change.

The central question shifts from What is? to What could become possible? Through documentary, long-form writing, media, speculative futures and other narrative forms, the steward helps articulate preferred futures. Rob Hopkins’ latest book How to Fall in Love With the Future is full of beautiful examples of the power of these exercises.

It is also through this worldbuilding phase that existing frontier experiments are connected and spotlit, pioneers are given visibility and emerging practices begin to form a coherent field rather than isolated examples.

Through this process, the steward cultivates the legitimacy required for an emerging paradigm to become collectively imaginable.

The Liminal Transition:

Once a shared narrative begins to take shape, the steward shifts from imagination toward coordination.

Communities assemble around the emerging possibility, bringing together citizens, practitioners, policymakers, industry and other stakeholders to explore the barriers preventing the preferred future from taking hold. Rather than directing change, the steward creates the conditions for collaboration, helping diverse actors remain aligned around a shared purpose while recognising that different parts of the system will move at different speeds.

If I’m honest, this is the phase we are supremely challenged by. Yet this is the kind of collective, hopeful action we will need to become fluent in to create the future we desire.

In this stage, safe-to-fail experiments become the primary mechanism for learning (again, a process often reserved only for high-innovation environments and communities like startup ecosystems. We need to learn to fail better outside this context).

Throughout this phase, narrative continues to play an essential role - not only by maintaining orientation toward the emerging future, but by capturing learning, legitimising successful experiments and continually rewriting the collective story as the system evolves. In this way, narrative and experimentation become mutually reinforcing, allowing the emerging paradigm to gain both practical evidence and cultural legitimacy.

Self & System:

As the transition deepens, the steward champions the notion that systems do not change independently of the people who inhabit them. The work therefore turns inward as well as outward. If I said we were less skilled at the previous stage, it’s in this phase that the whole model for change is made or broken.

Systems reinforce beliefs, and beliefs shape and create a system’s intractable nature.

When individuals within the system begin reflecting on the beliefs, assumptions and identities that both sustain and constrain the existing paradigm, change is inevitable. In parallel, they begin experimenting with new ways of thinking, relating and participating that better reflect the emerging future. It’s deep work, and it’s necessary at all levels.

The steward supports this ongoing dialogue between self and system, recognising that paradigm change is not only institutional but deeply personal. At this stage, narrative again becomes central - as both collective stories, and the personal stories individuals tell about who they are, what is possible and the role they play in shaping the future.

Rewriting the Future:

Through repeated cycles of orientation, worldbuilding, experimentation and reflection, the emerging future gradually becomes a more coherent Horizon Two reality. While rarely perfect, it represents a meaningful course correction capable of shifting both the system and the paradigm over time.

The steward’s role in this phase is to help integrate learning, strengthen reinforcing feedback loops and consolidate successful practices into new cultural norms. As new ways of working become more widely adopted, the narrative evolves alongside them. What once appeared radical begins to feel normal; what was once imagined gradually becomes lived reality.

Yet the work of stewardship is never complete. Each new stability eventually becomes another Horizon One, inviting the steward to begin the process again - helping communities continually reorient, reimagine and navigate the next threshold.

Said another way, we will never reach a perfect future, but we can be a learning and evolving system constantly striving for a more just and regenerative way to live that fully honours our ‘more-than-human’ world.

Where to next…

For me, this Liminal Stewardship Framework represents a working hypothesis I am testing in my own work across a number of areas right now - from a 1:1 coaching container for high-performing individuals going through a period of transition, to a global documentary feature in pre-production that applies the framework to imagine and convene around the future of education in a time of metacrisis. I’ll expand on these experiments in a future essay.

Alongside this, I am exploring the capabilities and skills required at each stage of the framework and plan to build a map of where the work and frameworks of other theorists might be impactful. For example, Otto Scharmer’s Theory U work is hugely influential in the sensing and presencing work required, and Dick Schwartz’ Internal Family Systems methodology feels critical to support work at the Self and System Stage. I welcome more references and ideas of practices and frameworks that might fit within this map, and other adjacencies that might be helpful to support Liminal Stewards in self-identifying, capacity building and connecting in their work moving forward.

As always, please share what resonates with you, and forward to those in your network that might identify themselves somewhere in this framework.

Before I begin, I need to make a confession. The more time we spent immersed in systems change theory, the less equipped I felt to change a specific system through a pre-determined intervention. Instead, my mind kept returning to a kind of meta-inquiry: who do we need to be when we show up to change systems? What are the broad set of conditions and practices required to cultivate meaningful transition? What is the leverage point to end all leverage points; the one that works regardless of the system, regardless of the altitude, regardless of the stakeholders or incentives?

While these are of course almost unanswerable questions, they felt closer to my terrain of exploration - taking a horizontal look at systems change theory as opposed to a vertical deep dive. So while later parts of this strategy will offer a worked example of systems change at a very high level, what it does better is codify the particular posture that systems change asks us to adopt, and the process of change it asks us to spiral through, again and again, in pursuit of, in the words of Charles Eisenstein, ‘the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible’.

As such, this document represents both a sequential line of inquiry and the current edge of my thinking after a year within the Mastery of Systems Leadership. It is less an attempt to present a finished methodology than to capture an emerging synthesis of insights. Moving forward, I see it both as insights to be tested, a posture to be further inhabited and a methodology to be refined through practice, in community.

Insight 1 - We live in Liminal Times

For years now, we have found ourselves living in a period of prolonged societal liminality. Typically used to describe a precise threshold moment, or rite of passage between one chapter and the next, instead our sense of the liminal feels almost terminal. We are caught betwixt and between the world we have known, and the one that wants to emerge. Yet, neither serves us as a grounding force to anchor to. Instead, liminality is the condition of our times.

What has preoccupied me, however, throughout the past nine months immersed in systems change theory and practice is not how we get out of this liminal threshold toward something new. Instead, I have become focused on how we inhabit, and leverage, these transitional times, in order to better shape and envision the place that might emerge on the other side.

Insight 2 - Liminal times require new paradigms

In Thinking in Systems: A Primer, Donella Meadows articulates a series of leverage points along a scale from lowest to highest. While we can play with intervention points lower down the scale (and at some point all of them become necessary or play their part), in the case of liminal times, we require nothing short of a new paradigm to anchor to. Ultimately, these moments call for a reshaping of what societies view as normal, possible and valuable. These implicit models are the most potent way to bring about true transformative change.

This transformation is then supported by more of the relational aspects of the system, rethinking the goals, rules and information flows of the system. Then can we determine the more structural interventions that make sense to govern the system - the policies, incentives and other infrastructure. However, without the paradigm shift, changes at these other levels can appear fragmented, disconnected and potentially even pointing in the wrong direction.

Changing the paradigm means creating a new shared narrative of what is possible, and aligning behind a vision for how to get there.

Insight 3 - Liminal times call for liminal interventions

During periods of transition, the stories that once helped us make sense of the world begin to lose their explanatory power. At the same time, emerging possibilities struggle to find language, legitimacy and direction before they are fully formed. We find ourselves suspended between worlds: no longer able to rely on inherited maps, yet unable to clearly describe the territory ahead.

Rather than needing better plans, we may need different roles. We need people who are capable of stewarding transition itself - individuals who are not charged with designing the future, but with cultivating the conditions from which healthier futures can emerge. I call this role ‘Liminal Stewardship’, and those who inhabit this role, Liminal Stewards.

Insight 4 - Stewardship, not Strategy, as a Posture for Systems Change

If Liminal Stewardship is the posture required for periods of transition, then what distinguishes a Liminal Steward from other forms of leadership? Strategy traditionally assumes a relatively knowable destination and seeks to optimise the allocation of resources toward it. Liminal periods offer no such certainty. The destination itself is still emerging. The role of the Liminal Steward is therefore not to determine the future, but to cultivate the conditions from which healthier futures can emerge.

The Liminal Steward is less a strategist, than a cultivator of emergence. Their work is to scaffold, sense-make and shepherd new futures into being. Instead of setting direction, galvanising the troops and driving action, Liminal Stewards:

• Orient communities to the current system and the possibility of another

• Hold the tension between the world that is and the one that is emerging

• Bridge between paradigms, sectors and perspectives

• Convene unlikely collaborators around a shared future

• Translate across horizons, disciplines and worldviews

• Create conditions for imagination and collective visioning

• Legitimise emerging stories, experiments and pioneers

• Integrate learning back into the evolving paradigm

The distinguishing characteristic of the Liminal Steward is not their ability to predict the future, but their capacity to remain present to emergence, in the spirit of Otto Scharmer’s Theory U. Before crafting strategy or executing plans, they cultivate a posture required to accompany people, organisations and systems through uncertainty. Only from this place can strategy become responsive to what is unfolding, rather than rigidly attached to what was imagined at the outset. Stewardship is therefore not an alternative to strategy. It is the practice that makes strategy adaptive within conditions of permanent transition.

Part 2 of this series will introduce the Liminal Stewardship Methodology for systems change, and Part 3 will illustrate an example in progress within the education system.

There is a particular kind of burnout that comes from the chasm between what you believe and how you spend your days.

This time last year, the incongruence between who I was, what gave me meaning, and the reality of how I actually showed up in the world had grown too difficult to bear. The singularity I was chasing was just me with myself - both internally and externally, felt and expressed. When I showed up in London for the first Mastery of Systems Leadership retreat, I thought it was to immerse myself in the theory of systems thinking. It would not take too long before I was reckoning with my own incoherence.

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The Gods We Serve

It’s possible that a lot of incoherence shows up innocently enough at first, like a little static on the line. Mine stemmed from following a career path I thought held transformative power to shape our world for the better - startups, technology and venture capital. The further I travelled along that road, however, I found these pathways paved with compromise on the way to progress. Despite my previously-limited systems literacy, I could see incentives hard-coded into the industry that could never optimise for the outcomes I thought should be prioritised. No matter how well-intentioned a founder or investor, they still answered to the god of financial returns and asymmetric upside. This Faustian bargain was somewhat unavoidable, and the nature of the beast.

It became apparent that changing this from the ‘inside’ would be an almost impossible task. I became more aware of the deeper assumptions sitting under the operating system of this industry, ones that had created an inescapable ‘top quartile’ reinforcing loop. This awareness has helped me to understand that while the values of people in the system are important, it’s more instructive to determine what the system rewards.

We shape our systems according to what we worship. In time, those systems teach us what to worship in return.

Your Horizon or Mine?

In my panic to restore coherence, I began to diagnose the issue as a vision problem. I came to believe that we lacked a uniting philosophy for our times - one that could offer a view of a more beautiful future, and help create the scaffolding required to get there. It was as though we had lost touch with the powers of the imaginal to conjure up the future we want.

As we progressed through our sessions together, and through conversations with my fellow Wayfinders, I gained some nuance in my thinking. The challenge wasn’t simply cultivating the capacity to see a compelling Horizon Three. It was developing the agility to move between horizons; to hold multiple futures in mind while remaining deeply attentive to the present conditions required to make any of them possible.

Amusingly, the program experience that most embodied this lesson for me occurred during our second retreat, where I had to guide my blindfolded teammates to prepare ingredients and make a cake together. As the visionkeeper, I could see the end product we were working towards, but I also had full visibility of all the pieces on the board in the present moment - the ingredients, the utensils, the players, the recipe - that my teammates only had limited information about. My role wasn’t simply to tell people what to do. It was to continually translate between the long-term vision and the immediate next step, ensuring neither became disconnected from the other. This will stay with me as a whimsical way of experiencing the need to toggle between altitudes to ‘right-size’ our strategy in any given moment.

Leadership isn’t choosing the right horizon. It’s knowing how - and when - to change altitude.

When Urgency Stops Working

I remember voraciously inhaling all the content, readings and conversations that occurred in the early months of the program, as if ingesting and metabolising the lessons faster would help me take action and make an impact sooner. Somewhere in the middle of the program I recalibrated - but not entirely by choice.

My experience of the MSL is inextricably intertwined with the pregnancy and birth of my third baby - a bonus cohort member who joined us halfway through. As the weeks sped toward her due date, so too did my urgency to understand, synthesise and make sense of all that we were learning.

In the final week before she was born, I let go. To be honest, I felt lost - like I was going to miss the ‘big point’ landing, like I had lost the thread of my learning curve. All I had capacity to do was notice.

While it wasn’t immediately apparent, the pause I took here did slow me down enough to cultivate a new capacity - that of discernment. I had to filter out the things that held lower value, and attune myself to the spaces and places where I was needed, and where I could create a step-change by offering my presence. It was a process of realising that urgency narrows attention, but narrow attention can create the sense that everything feels urgent. While there is work to do to make this sustainable, I am now less oriented toward accelerating change, and more focused on creating conditions for wisdom to emerge.

Sometimes we don’t need action; we need awareness.

Meditations on Place

A theme I didn’t expect to be as profound was the importance of place in systems change. The irony is that place is what I have been seeking for so long. A sense that I am in like-minded company, that my way of showing up has a place, that the place nourishes me to meet my potential.

In these themes, I found a kind of allergy to forming the roots that might make this possible, and recognised the way I so often overlook the ‘place I am’ for the place I think I should be. While this is very much physical in its expression, I found the metaphor extending to other ‘locations’ like time, accomplishment, spiritual actualisation and of course a more boundaryless sense of community. In my seeking, I had dismissed what I had. In creating a specific idea of what ‘place’ should look like, I wasn’t appreciating its more ephemeral forms. What I found is that between the grounding of roots, and the freedom of other possibilities is the potential to create a more living, and potentially lasting, form of change.

We act in order to belong. Belonging changes the way we act.

Oblique Strategies

As a naturally creatively dominant thinker, I have perversely spent a lot of my life censoring my ideas and instincts, wanting to apply a ‘layer of rigour’ over the top that I thought was missing. I was seeking frameworks, worn pathways I could walk my ideas across, and new languages I could translate to others. The MSL program provided these in spades. But on the toolkit came a series of warnings: ‘The map is not the territory’. ‘All models are wrong. Some are useful.’

Instead of now relying on the thought frameworks of others to convey my own thinking, I have been given a set of strategies to remix, invert, subvert and build from. A recognition that as soon as something becomes a framework, it almost stops living and what we need most now are alive, responsive and dynamic approaches to the change we seek. In the tussle between ‘documentable’ progress and a more ephemeral emergence, I am leaning into the sparks, the cross-pollinations and the subtle forces at play. Most of all, this has become about trust over control. Creating a fertile environment and allowing what comes next.

We create the conditions for emergence. Emergence creates conditions we could never intentionally design.

In Search of Romance

I’ve touched a few times on what I was looking for through this experience - frameworks, belonging, an orientation, patience…

Taking a look in the rear-view mirror at this point, I believe what I was really looking for was to fall in love again. To become besotted with the poetry of our experience, enamoured with my own potential and capability, humbled and inspired by my fellow human beings, and in awe of the wondrous world we live in.

In the process of this great re-enchantment, I feel like I’ve shifted my lens so many times on what we need right now. We often speak of ‘war-time’ and ‘peace-time’ leadership, but none of those frames really seems to speak of the in-between we find ourselves in, and the capabilities we require of our leaders.

If I had to create a list, I would put at the top the notion of imagination as a serious leadership discipline. A capability to absorb the intense complexity of the transition, and to fall head-over-heels with the beauty of the experience of being alive and in service of the world right now.

Wonder invites attention - attention reveals things worthy of wonder.

Epilogue…

Like all thresholds, we are crossing through to the other side as we complete the Mastery of Systems Leadership. But like the times we live in, I suspect we will remain in this ‘becoming’ place for a little while longer. Not out of stuckness, but out of an intentional desire to take on the role of steward of the transition. To inhabit it fully, so as to be fully metabolised when at last it is time to close the door.

Anthropologist Vincent Turner introduced to studies of liminality the concept of ‘communitas’ - the ‘spontaneous, egalitarian, and intensely human bond that emerges among those who share a liminal experience’, which creates its transformative power. I will forever be grateful to the Wayfinders, my fellow MSL cohort members, who shared this communitas with me.

At this point, I want to acknowledge a persistent blindspot of mine that treats learning as an individual journey. The reality is that my most profound shifts throughout this program did not come from the content consumed. They were a result of the conversations, the reflections and the wisdom shared amongst my peers on the journey. Even more sacred are those moments where a few close connections could see something in me that I hadn’t yet embodied, and where they were willing to lend their courage and belief until I could.

The singularity I came looking for was never something I could find alone. It emerged through the practice of paying attention - first to others, then to myself, and ultimately to the living systems that connect us.

The clarity of my expression on these pages is not because of the certainty of my position. It comes from having developed enough agency to express a thought half-formed, in the hope of connection with other half- or more completely formed thoughts to create new collective insight. To me, this has been the real gift of this year, and one I commit to expanding and sharing with others as we navigate the liminal together and create a more beautiful vision for our shared future.

I was recently asked to reflect on and share my thoughts about the tension of progress versus emergence for our Systems Leadership cohort.

Initially it sent me into a philosophical spiral: progress feels troubling, progressive is energising, emergence is delicate, unpredictable… I thought about times in my life and career where I’ve leaned into each of these concepts, and where that has left me. I thought about my journey as a result of emergence in a world that has measured it in terms of progress. I wondered how I could possibly convey the multitude of my feelings within a 5 minute timeslot.

The next morning, as I nursed my baby to her nap, the words flowed through my head. Better yet, they emerged. So the below is the result of this little download and the 15 minutes I took over breakfast to capture what was coming through, while my husband watched confused as I scribbled like a madwoman.

In this spirit of emergence, a little spontaneous poetry for your Friday. Yes, I picked a side. No, it’s not that simple. But it was a provocation I thought worth sharing, and would love to hear how it lands for you.

And because this is a little different, I thought I’d add below an audio note of me reading the poem - because sometimes things are better heard and felt, than read.

Every day, there rages
A quiet war between emergence and progress
Like two ends of a scale that will never be reconciled.
For centuries now, progress has led the way;
Its sure foot marching across history,
Trampling the whispers of emergence in the mud underneath.
We’ve indexed on its beat, measured ourselves against its value and found ourselves wanting,
Time and again.
No matter how many mountains we climb, lands we claim or planets we collect as trophies.
Progress is a hard task master and we will never be enough.

It is strange that in this march toward accomplishment,
We’ve forgotten the glimmers that created us;
The emergence that unfolded and continues to unfold
Around us all day, everyday.
Without being instructed. Without being forced. Without seeking compensation.

A soft hand, an invisible touch.
A million tiny sparks conspiring to bring something forth,
Effortlessly, as if by magic, so that it
Can play its role in the world.

For magic is how I see emergence.
Once revered, now unspoken, all but invalidated in the name of science when its forces become too strong.
That which can not be explained can not be believed.

And still, the leaves unfurl…

They don’t ask for validation.
They simply invite you to witness,
to listen, to take part
in your soul’s own emergence.

I am sure if asked, progress and emergence
Wouldn’t have put themselves on opposite sides of the battlefield.
Progress with its heavy hand, emergence with a mother’s gentle touch.
Even they would see it as an unfair fight,
And one they had no interest in seeing the outcome of.

But the world became so noisy, as if to drown out emergence anyway.
Progress had no choice but to set the metrics,
Without a friend to usher in the allowing, the noticing.

I’m not sure why I so viscerally lay judgments of value
At the feet of these two labels.
Mere concepts whose only power is in those who wield or welcome them.

Perhaps it’s because for too long I’ve felt an alien
In the world of progress.
Felt the hostility of its march, as quiet voices, instincts
And insights were told they had no place
Unless progress’s friend data could prove it so.

Because feeling and knowing and creating through
On the breath of an impulse from somewhere else
Was not validated, trusted, given the oxygen
it needed to thrive.

But now I can see that thrive it did.
Because emergence can not be snuffed out.
It is the natural way of things.
And when we’re all tired and burnt out and lonely and in despair of all the progress
In the lives we have created,
Emergence will continue as a heartbeat underneath it all.
Calling us to listen, to observe, to act on the impulse
We feel in our gut, we feel in our bones.

So maybe if enough of us listen to
Our own soul’s emergence,
We will unfurl out of these bodies of progress together.

Trusting not what the world wants to create,
But what needs to be created through our world.

Perhaps then progress will have some kind words
Of advice for its dear friend emergence,
Who has waited in the wings for its moment to step forward.

‘Celebrate your wins,’ progress will say.
‘Always strive for more.’
‘Things will be better if you just push harder.’

But emergence will wink sagely,
Leading from behind as it is more comfortable to.
For she knows her very presence is a celebration of life and all that is.
That there is no more to strive for if you trust in the flow of the universe.
That we are enough as we are and these are the best of times
When we live them in harmony.

Progress is a measure of how things are.

Emergence is the magic of what’s unfolding, and what’s still to come.

I know what I believe in.

For fun, me reading aloud:

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In all my enthusiasm and determination for system change, there is one factor that creates friction toward my own action. It’s that meaningful change usually occurs first at the local level. That the revolution will be shaped just as much by citizens, as by policy or strategy. That the best chance we have of shaping the future is to shape that of the communities we inhabit.

It wasn’t until we dove into the theory of place-based change-making in the MSL program in January that I realised this resistance was almost a full-blown aversion. Granted, I was days away from giving birth to Daisy, but my recalcitrance seemed deeper than that. In the months that have followed, I’ve come to see that the medicine in this understanding of place is exactly what I needed.

For me, place-based interventions carry a weight I have tried to avoid. They are slow, they are complex, they require ‘real’ resources (not just the externalities embedded in connecting and creating online). The change they bring about, however meaningful to those in the community, can appear to be just a drop in the ocean. Most of all, they require that you show up, in all your messiness, to roll up your sleeves, and work for change no matter how futile things may seem.

It turns out this insight may govern a lot more of my behaviour than I realise.

I’ve started to wonder whether framing myself as a ‘third-horizon’ thinker has partly been a way of avoiding the complexity of the horizon we actually inhabit on a daily basis. This orientation to ‘elsewhere’ is both empowering and avoidant. It allows a lot of blame-shifting, and I started to notice where my language moved toward, ‘If only they would…’, ‘Things would be better if…’ - while distancing myself from the fact that I was not contributing anything better than the status quo if I could only complain about it.

A few things contribute to this worldview of mine. One is an inherent restlessness to be always moving forward, elsewhere, away - just moving. Perhaps a product of frequent house moves as a child, resulting in a lack of nostalgia for ‘home’, or just the notion that everything good happens elsewhere - especially somewhere that is not regional (or even metropolitan) Australia.

The other part is almost the shadow of that same lens - if I had anything valuable to offer, and if I was going to create impact, then I would be able to escape the boundaries of my own country and engage on a different, more ‘intellectual’, more ‘profound’ playing field. A belief that in staying connected to physical place, I automatically shrink my limits, and my potential.

I had come to believe that anchoring to ‘place’ represents friction, limitation and obligation. In contrast, a non-geographic, or global, lens enables movement and freedom, and represents opportunity and transformation.

But perhaps that belief also allows us to avoid commitment. To others, yes, but also to self.

Over the last few decades, we have increasingly come to associate mobility with aspiration. The ability to move freely for work, opportunity or reinvention carries a kind of modern prestige; proof of ambition, adaptability and possibility. To be globally connected, geographically untethered and endlessly in motion is often framed as a marker of success.

Of course, movement can genuinely expand us. People do build meaningful lives far from where they began. But I started to notice how easy it is to exist in a kind of suspended layer above the physical environment; connected everywhere, yet only lightly embedded anywhere. When movement becomes identity, rootedness can begin to feel like limitation rather than participation.

What I slowly realised about my constant orientation toward elsewhere - my romanticising of movement, possibility and distance - was that this mindset can subtly erode our sense of responsibility to the locations we inhabit and come from. By constantly projecting forward to a time and destination where I might ‘belong’, I have avoided belonging where I am. Worse still, this form of avoidance wasn’t just passive disengagement - it was a complete retreat from the possibility of deeper connection.

I was sitting with this notion recently, while lamenting some shortcomings about our current hometown in relation to what it offers and how it supports our children and young people. In particular, I sensed a huge gap when it comes to holiday activities and programs (which is ironic since for many capital city dwellers, it is literally a holiday destination). I decided to compile a database of all the available activities as a form of audit, and to publish the list via a newsletter for parents of the area. An offering, if you will.

Two things surprised me.

One - that there was actually an abundance of activities on offer, many run by independent organisers who were just looking for their audience. In reality, it was a distribution problem, not a quantity issue.

Two - that suddenly in this act, I created a link with hundreds of parents who were all wondering the same thing. I made myself visible in ecosystem. I helped, and in return it was appreciated.

What began as a simple attempt to solve a practical problem slowly changed the way I saw the world around me. By centring young people, highlighting the individuals creating opportunities for them, and noticing the gaps where more support was needed, I started to perceive my neighbourhood less as a static backdrop and more as a living web of relationships. What I had initially interpreted as lack was, in many ways, a problem of visibility and civic infrastructure. Beneath the surface already existed an ecosystem of parents, educators, organisers, artists, coaches, spaces and interests - people attempting, in their own fragmented ways, to create something meaningful for the next generation.

The newsletter itself is still relatively one-directional; information sent outward to those looking for it. But underneath it sits something more relational: a growing awareness of one another. The same names recurring. The same needs surfacing each month. The same questions surfacing within hundreds of families.

Did this shift the needle enough for me to put my restlessness to bed and deepen my roots for good? Not necessarily. But it pointed out the critical role I play either way.

In fact, what really struck me most was not the scale of the intervention, but the pattern underneath it. The simple act of paying attention, and contributing something useful had fundamentally altered my identity to place.

Perhaps this pattern extends far beyond hometowns and local newsletters. Perhaps meaningful change begins this way: not with abstract identification of problems from a distance, but through participation, contribution and the willingness to become accountable to something beyond ourselves.

The other thing about belonging is that it compounds. A single contribution may create the first threads of connection, but the process of showing up again and again is what strengthens the bonds, and builds resilience. Perhaps ‘place’ means a lot less without ‘time’.

With both of these elements in mind, belonging is not passively found, but created through sustained acts of participation, contribution and care.

We are living in a time where many of the systems that shaped our lives - and our sense of success - no longer fully hold.

Careers, leadership, institutions, identity.

They haven’t completely broken.
But they don’t quite fit either.

Most of us feel this before we can explain it.

A kind of tension between what worked… and what’s beginning to emerge.

This is what I call the liminal space.

Not confusion.
Not failure.

But a period of reorientation - where the old rules still apply, but no longer make sense.

The Liminal Space is where I write from inside that tension.

Exploring:

• leadership in transition

• systems that are quietly shifting beneath us

• the difference between optimisation and meaning

• and what becomes possible when we stop forcing clarity too early

If you’ve found your way here, there’s a good chance you’re already navigating something like this.

You might feel:

• successful, but misaligned

• capable, but questioning the game

• drawn to something you can’t yet fully articulate

If that’s the case — you’re in the right place.

Start with these

Here are a few pieces that best introduce the work:

A final note

This isn’t a space for quick answers.

It’s a space for better questions.
For pattern recognition.
For making sense of what you’re already sensing.

I celebrated my birthday last week. Having a birthday in close proximity to the new year (Gregorian, Lunar, Astrological… take your pick) always feels like a bonus opportunity for reflection. Like walking through a portal between what’s been, and what’s to come. This year, I found it harder to get visibility on what’s up ahead. The sense of predictability that might help put plans in motion feels more fragile every day.

Additionally, this wasn’t the only threshold I’ve crossed recently, with the quite-literal birth day of my second daughter, and third baby, Daisy, just over five weeks ago. Pregnancy and postpartum is a special kind of fog, though fogs generally lift. I’m not sure this one will.

See, postpartum fog has its own reason for being. Trusting and surrendering to it is part of the innate wisdom of the body. What concerns me more is that my interior state feels alarmingly reflected throughout our exterior world. It’s harder than ever to watch news cycles play out day after day - whether centred on climate change, war or gross abuses of power at the highest and most insidious levels - and not want to burn it all to the ground. Yet somehow, we stay locked in the Molochian machinery of the status quo, no matter how much we declare opposition to these ideals. Systems persist, incentives hold, power protects itself. Collectively, we find ourselves lacking the instinctive wisdom necessary to metabolise these events effectively. I think now, more than ever, we are in need of more unconventional tools to do so. Perhaps this is why my husband’s birthday gift felt especially appropriate.

Alongside the typical treasures and hand-drawn cards from my children, I unwrapped a little black box titled ‘Oblique Strategies’. Inside: 100 cryptic prompts created by musician Brian Eno and artist Peter Schmidt for the purpose of unblocking creativity and encouraging lateral thinking. The first card I pulled offered the below:

Destroy:

• nothing

• the most important thing

If ever there was a card for our times, it is this one.

Reflecting on this provocation, it seems to ask whether we should protect the structure at all costs, or tear it down entirely. Destroying ‘nothing’ suggests we allow certain reprehensible behaviours to continue, without perpetrators experiencing consequences - perhaps relinquishing our agency to shape the course of the future. In contrast, destroying the ‘most important thing’ would mean taking everything assumed to be true and integral to our way of life, and wiping the slate clean regardless of the impact. This binary option assumes clarity and stability await on the other side of a ‘right’ decision. But what if clarity is not coming?

Perhaps the problem is not choosing the wrong option. Perhaps the issue is we are trying to make decisions from a worldview that no longer adequately represents the landscape we inhabit.

I feel like I’ve written from this place before. It’s not lost on me that I started this Substack in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, where the liminal experience of global lockdowns had me grasping for clarity on what the future would hold. (Nor is it lost on me that I was also in post-partum liminality in that same year, after my second child was born six weeks before the pandemic was declared). As the world shut down, we clung to the hope that we were passing through a temporary rupture. Lockdowns would end. The portal would close behind us. A new normal would form on the other side.

Six years, and countless economic, geopolitical, climate, violent conflict, humanitarian and social crises later, I am less sure there is an ‘other side’. Despite the system shock that COVID presented, we may have prematurely closed the portal without developing a more appropriate frame of reference for the times we are living in. Now, we find the fog has not lifted. Instead, the threshold has widened.

We have become somewhat acclimatised to instability, but we sit in discomfort, our nervous systems holding together by a thread, waiting for ‘it’ to end. The reality is we may have to learn to live without waiting for the certainty of an outcome.

So if we are inside a period of prolonged collective liminality, what frameworks might help us make this period fruitful, rather than defeating? I recently came across a piece of work by The Good Shift that puts language around the various worldviews we bring to processes of change. While each articulated worldview has both benefits and blindspots, it had me wondering which is most applicable to the times we find ourselves in (and whether we might need to develop an entirely new one.)

For example, in moments of great upheaval, it’s easy to spot the majority aligning to a Maintenance worldview, clinging to the existing world order in an attempt to ‘destroy nothing’. Likewise, those who have something to gain from radical change become advocates for a Progress-minded approach, pushing ahead at all costs and creating blind spots around what gets lost in transition. The nostalgic chorus of Restoration-minded thinkers opine for better days long lost to periods of history, destroying nothing but mourning what’s gone. And those who have both a foot in past wisdom, and extend their stride to the potentiality of the future bring a Regenerative narrative of social order - composting the old to make way for the new. All these positions have their merit, but each of them dances with liminality differently. Liminality creates tension, it brings opportunity, it frustrates the living hell out of you. But it can’t be rushed.

I’ve sat with these tensions, opportunities and frustrations over the past year. As someone who often agitates for change to manifest, I’ve landed on a realisation that brings me some peace. We are not living at the interchange between two stable eras - an old one that needs to die, and a new one that needs to be forced into being. We are learning to operate in a prolonged period of suspension. We are building liminality as a muscle - or a frame of reference - and embracing it as the civic condition of our times.

In the Liminal Era, we are adaptive, connected, relational and contextual. We move from fixing to sensing. We steward in the new era, rather than coercing it into being with blunt force and unchecked power.

To return to our Oblique Strategies binary: rather than one or the other, I think we should choose both. We should do nothing in the sense that observing, sense-making and allowing are metaskills required for an adaptive future. Sometimes a pause is more useful than action. In the same breath, we should destroy the most important thing, which would bring us to a collective reckoning on where we have placed value and importance in the first place. Perhaps the world we have constructed to prioritise wealth, power, ownership and growth at all costs is worth destroying. Perhaps in doing so, we create space to reveal something even more important, something that was there all along.

For me personally, I’m focused on the experience of remaining in the threshold, without rushing to name what’s next.

Like so many, I began 2025 with an unrelenting sense that we are on the precipice of a necessary shake-up. The narratives and structures we have relied on for decades no longer seem to hold, and yet there is little shared clarity about what might replace them.

I entered the year with a determination to change, without knowing how or toward what. As we move into 2026, in no small part thanks to my experience so far with the Small Giants Mastery of Systems Leadership (MSL), I feel more equipped - not because I have answers, but because I have developed a deeper patience for what is unfolding.

For most of my life, I have identified myself as a ‘fixer’ - someone who can sense the problem from multiple perspectives, and who is motivated to optimise or improve wherever possible. Creating positive change excites me, and yet this response has sometimes been met with frustration by those who I’m trying to help. Over time, I began to see how this fixer orientation, however well-intentioned, had trained me to remain in a state of urgency, both in how I related to others’ problems and how I approached my own. Experiencing the turbulence of 2025 with this kind of approach was burning me out physically and emotionally, and I felt deeply dissatisfied with the tools available to create meaningful change in the face of so many challenges.

While I have been circling around the discipline of systems thinking for a few years now, in trying to overcome my difficulty in grappling with the state of 2025, I decided I was lacking the necessary frameworks and language to even make sense of what was going on around me, in order to determine a path forward. When Small Giants announced its newest Mastery program would specifically delve into the art and science of systems leadership, it felt like a divine intervention into the year that would fundamentally change its course. What I didn’t appreciate fully at the time was that the real work of systems leadership is a deep-dive into self. As we pass the half-way mark of the program, I find myself contemplating the reality that how we show up in systems shapes what becomes possible within them.

From fixing to sensing

The MSL program commenced in London, bringing together 40 global cohort members over 5 days to connect, lay groundwork and establish some common language for our 10-month journey together into the belly of systems thinking and complexity. This ‘island of coherence’ has become a touchstone and sounding board over the past few months as we have been exposed to thought leadership around the metacrisis and complex systems change. It has been confronting, energising and strangely calming in equal parts. I have become an active student in growing my complexity tolerance, grappling with the magnitude and dimensions of the challenges before us, and perhaps most critically, developing a patience for allowing patterns to emerge, without the immediate pressure to translate them into action.

This shift from fixer-orientation to sense-making has been the most profound one for me so far, and something that feels like the most resilient building block of my journey with systems leadership. If I reflect back just six months ago, I remember days where I was so emotionally overcome by the scope of the global tragedies and atrocities we are living through, that I broke down through sheer overwhelm and the stark awareness that there was nothing I could do to change any of it. I found myself without a map, without agency and without a clear next step I could take to change any of it.

Today, what has changed is not the situation itself, but my capacity to locate myself within it - to enquire, to map, and to recognise that different vantage points generate different truths. The multiplicity of paths forward, rather than a single ‘right’ next step, and the fact that these systems are living and evolving and changing organically alongside our efforts to steer them, has become a comfort as opposed to a threat that is out of my control.

Doubt as a superpower in the age of complexity

The idea of uncertainty is an uncomfortable one, and has certainly been seen as the antithesis of strong leadership in our modern era. Reflecting on the perspectives of one of our guest speakers, Indy Johar, has caused me to reckon with this notion in a different way. He argues that in these times we really have to become comfortable with the ‘partiality of knowing’ as opposed to relying on the illusion of certainty. The ability to hold ideas in paradox, or operate from the basis of partial knowing, may well become the leadership superpowers required to steward in the kind of adaptive and evolving systems change required today. Instead of certainty and data, we will be required to bring ‘tenderness, tentativeness and care’ to the decision-making process. In this framing, leadership is not about eliminating doubt, but about creating conditions where doubt can be held collectively without paralysis.

‍From ‘power over’ to ‘power with’

Reflecting on this shift from fixing to sensing has also fundamentally reshaped how I think about power. For most of my life, the notion of power has been largely conflated with competence. Those perceived to hold power are those who can see the whole picture, anticipate the risks, tolerate complexity and carry the responsibility where others can not. In positive expressions of power and leadership this is welcomed and celebrated, however on reflection it still centralises agency, even when exercised with care. As we were introduced to the work of Riane Eisler, it became clear that a paradigm of systems leadership requires a shift away from consolidated ‘power over’ dynamics toward a more collaborative process of ‘power with’. In this process, we start to move away from the fragility of centralised power structures, to ones that steward the conditions for agency to be distributed more widely, and for trust to strengthen the bonds in between.

This kind of power is slower, more intentional and requires presence and patience as new conditions emerge. It’s not about directing and controlling outcomes, but being an agent of change as the collective path unfolds. Similarly, a collaborative approach to ‘power with’ becomes an expression of doubt and uncertainty being held and metabolised by the group, as opposed to being the shadow of a singular leadership figure. Learning to observe and practice this kind of power has altered how I relate to uncertainty - not as a problem to be solved or a gap to be closed, but as the liminal space where collective intelligence can emerge.

Changing the system begins with self

As 2026 ramps up its intensity even faster than the years before it, I am so grateful to find myself within the container of the Mastery of Systems Leadership, alongside my incredible cohort. While the frameworks and tools are useful, we have been reminded often that the ‘map is not the territory’. Reflecting on my experience so far, it has been more useful to locate myself on the map of systems change and understand the strengths, worldviews, biases and blindspots I bring to the puzzle, and start from there. I am confident that building capability for holding uncertainty and doubt, and orienting toward more collaborative and distributed models of power and agency, will be the foundation stones of a new generation of leadership in these complex times. And that sometimes the most responsible action is to pause.

Applications for the Mastery of Systems Leadership open early February. Learn more here.

Throughout my career, I’ve been instinctively drawn to the edge of what’s possible. From the rise of social innovation in Australia, to the sharing economy as it crystallised globally, to fintech and VC as they took shape locally, and now the rapid evolution of generative AI. Each era felt distinct at the time, but viewed together they reveal a clear pattern: I gravitate toward movements and technologies in their formative stages, and I tend to play the role of connecting what’s emerging with what already exists.

Naming the Horizons

In the context of my current learning about systems thinking through the Small Giants Mastery of Systems Leadership (MSL), I have been able to apply another lens to my career as we build out our systems toolkit - that of the Three Horizons. This framework has helped me understand I naturally gravitate toward Horizon 3 thinking, but also that most of my career has been more embedded in Horizon 2 activity, and in some cases even in Horizon 1 environments. This realisation has shown not that any particular horizon is wrong, but how tension emerges through bringing the wrong lens to a particular horizon.

As a brief summary of the framework:

Horizon 1 represents the dominant systems, assumptions and institutions of today, focused on maintaining a status quo.

Horizon 2 heralds the disruptive forces that bring change - this could be in the form of new technology or social innovations for implementation now or in the near future to alter the course of H1. Most of what we see in the startup ecosystem could be placed here.

Horizon 3 is a long-range vision of a way of being that would ultimately replace the status quo. It’s a view of possible futures we would like to see play out, creating a compass point to guide the power of H2 innovation in a net positive direction and giving H1 institutions a hopeful path forward for transition.

As I reflected on the role and characteristics of each vantage point, I could see where these interactions have played out in my career. In the example of my work in the fintech ecosystem, fintech VC fund Reinventure’s investing mandate focused on the future of finance, built on ideas such as the democratisation of access to financial products through technology, and the decentralization of money through cryptocurrency - largely Horizon 3 ideas. The fund’s investments were being made on behalf of Westpac Bank, its sole limited partner and H1 financial institution, to create options for this potential future. The investments themselves occupied a space somewhere between H2 and H3, creating both immediate disruption to the financial services status quo, as well as laying future groundwork for further disruption to come on a longer term time horizon (we have not yet seen the cryptocurrency/decentralised finance space have its full impact).

It reflects the way I most naturally orient toward more holistic visions of what’s possible, and why I feel most energised at this frontier. Yet in my career, I have spent a lot more time building bridges and creating connective tissue back to the present state.

Defining the role I am drawn to play

In using the 3 Horizons framework to contemplate the different chapters of my career to date, I started to make sense of some of the phases of enquiry I’ve gone through before each pivot or new chapter. Sometimes these have been conscious exercises in mapping the space and identifying new opportunities, and in other cases, they have emerged internally as a sense of where to go next, but each time these three elements seem to be at play.

1. What wants to emerge?

2. What needs to change for this to take root?

3. What is it about the current system is inhibiting this transformation, and what could be leveraged to facilitate the shift?

While I believe over time my strength has been at step 1, bringing more intentionality has helped me to see where the gaps exist at steps 1 and 2, where I have the necessary skills to lean in, and what other strengths, skillsets and stakeholders I need around the table.

Together, these three elements create the conditions for a fourth, and possibly more important question, to emerge.

4. What is the paradigm that needs stewarding for the above to succeed?

Writing the future

When I consider the current state of the world, and the pervasive meta-crisis I have addressed here before, I am convinced we need a compelling and holistic Horizon 3 narrative we can anchor to. In so many ways, we have all the ingredients and technology needed to effectively make the changes required, but we have not been able to tell the story in a way that unites players at each vantage point, and somewhat collapse the horizons into a meaningful and clear path forward.

Instead, we have passionate H3 thinkers who either burn themselves out calling for change without the scaffolding to bring others along for the journey, or who alienate themselves by calling for the existing systems to be burned down without any optimism for transition pathways between the now and the next. We have H2 innovators and disruptors unanchored from any cohesive and regenerative picture of the future we want to create, all innovating in their own directions in a way that is more often net negative for the world, despite their best intentions. And we have those who occupy the first horizon on a daily basis (which is most of us on some level) who generally like things the way that they are, and have a much clearer perspective on the present than anything around the corner.

But knowledge is power, and I believe naming these perspectives, and knowing which one you dominantly operate from is half the battle. From here, we need people who are ‘multi-horizontal’ and can speak the language of those either side, to better facilitate movement in the right direction. This feels like a missing ingredient in the recipe for a better future. We can’t create it all at once, but we can cycle through stages that help keep us on track and moving in the right direction.

These cycles sit within a long lineage of systems and futures thinking, but they represent the specific pattern I’ve seen in my own career - the practical choreography required for a paradigm to shift from possibility to actualisation. Here is my developing mental model for the work that’s required to effectively bring a new paradigm to bear.

Cycle 1 - Spot the patterns and name what is emerging
Seeing before others see

Cycle 2 - Write the story of this emergence and build the narrative
Giving language to the invisible

Cycle 3 - Attract the field, build the community of practice
Gathering the early believers/actors

Cycle 4 - Articulate and build bridges between what exists and what should be
Creating pathways of transition

Cycle 5 - Reorient power in support of a new paradigm, and structure incentives to match
Shifting incentives, not just ideas

We can already see these cycles unfolding across many domains as we stand on the precipice of a sixth cycle: the emergence of a new paradigm. We desperately need better storytelling to build stronger foundations at Cycle 2. Then the leap from Cycle 3 to 4 and 5 needs all the focus and attention and resources we can muster. If we can get this right, the work of stewarding the next paradigm becomes not just imaginable, but actionable.

The term Romantic had metamorphosed through several stages since the mid-Seventeenth Century. There is the original meaning of ‘like a novel’, and our modern understanding associated with the word love or romance, but for the friends in Jena, it was something much more ambitious. They wanted to romanticise the entire world, and this meant perceiving it as an interconnected whole.

Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of Self - by Andrea Wulf

Two centuries ago, in a small German town called Jena, a circle of poets and philosophers gathered to explore what it truly means to be human. In a rare twist of fate (and as a potent example of ‘scenius’, which I have explored before), some of the most generative thinkers of the time happened to converge around this town at the turn of the 19th century. Remarkably, the benefit of this temporary intellectual collision has informed so much of the way we still understand the world, for better or worse.

Over the course of a decade, characters such as Goethe, Schelling, the Schlegels and Novalis convened in candlelit salons to engage in conversation that blurred the lines between art and science, reason and spiritual reverence. In strong reaction to the overly rational and logical sensibility of the era, out of their dialogues arose the Romantic movement: a revolt against the Enlightenment’s “Age of Reason,” and a reclamation of the ‘inner world’ as a source of truth. And while catalytic and transformative in so many ways, the Romantic Project remains incomplete even today, and potentially more under threat than ever.

Until recently, my understanding of this 18th century philosophical rebellion had been pretty cursory, shaped more by the Romantic poets who followed than by the thinkers who forged the movement itself. I certainly didn’t expect their efforts to feel contemporary or personally relevant, until I picked up Andrea Wulf’s Magnificent Rebels earlier this year. What began as preparation for a panel around the topic of ‘Digital Romanticism in the Age of AI’ became something else entirely: an encounter with a lineage of ideas that now shapes how I see the world and my role in it.

Wulf writes, ‘We live in a world where we tiptoe along a thin line between free will and selfishness, between self-determination and narcissism, between empathy and righteousness. Underpinning everything are two crucial questions: Who am I as an individual? And who am I as a member of a group or society?’ These were the very questions animating the thinkers of Jena, as they pushed against the constraints of Enlightenment reason. They remain our questions too - unresolved, made more acute by modern pressures, and more precarious than ever.

The Enlightenment... had stripped all feeling and spirituality not only from knowledge but also from life itself. Measurements, scientific data, experiments and classification couldn’t provide the answers for everything... Poetic thinking, [Novalis] explained, reached places where philosophy and science couldn’t follow.

Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of Self - by Andrea Wulf

Where the Enlightenment prized logic, science, and rationality - in no small part a reaction to centuries of religious dogma - the Romantics turned toward something more internal, more mysterious. They championed emotion over reason, nature over mechanism, and imagination over logic. They believed that the world was not merely to be explained, but felt. That the self (or the ‘Ich’) was not simply a mind to be trained, but a consciousness to be known. In this, I find a haunting parallel to our modern predicament. Two centuries later, the pendulum has swung again.

In our own new Age of Reason - one defined by algorithms, models, and machine intelligence - we are again questioning what it means to be human. Our systems, whether economic, technological or political, have been decoupled from meaning. We now live in the context of a polycrisis: a convergence of ecological, technological and societal fractures that expose the limits of our current worldview. But beneath these more visible crises lies something deeper and more elusive: a metacrisis of meaning. We find ourselves disconnected, both individually and societally, from very fundamental human questions technology can not answer for us.

This metacrisis is not only structural, but philosophical. It represents a chronic failure of imagination and integration. The question is not whether technology can understand us, but whether we can understand ourselves. It is here that I see the greatest opportunity to invoke the thinkers of the 1790’s and bring their insight into our modern day context. Can we bring a Romantic spirit to our digital world? Can we design systems that don’t just know about us — but help us know ourselves? Because if we can not understand ourselves, we can not truly understand - or responsibly redesign - the systems we build.

This piece is a very initial exploration into what I think the Romantic period has to offer those of us dancing at the edge of systems change in our fragile and complex modern era. I plan to follow this thread in future articles to delve deeper into the richness that period of history has to offer, as well as examining where its impact fell short, and what we might learn in order to gain more from the philosophy this time around.

Either way, what feels true is that one of the greatest leverage points we have at our disposal right now is one of deeper understanding of ourselves as humans, and our connection to the natural (and ‘un-natural’) world around us. This time around, with unprecedented global connectivity within our grasp, we may be able to shift the awareness of the ‘I’ to the greater context of the collective ‘We’.

In our dominant global paradigm today, we’ve somewhat mastered reason, but have alienated meaning, and all but left feeling at the door. We don’t need new information, or even new technology, so much as a different way of seeing. A new guiding philosophy for our times that again reunites imagination and intellect, system and self, beauty and truth.

A new Romantic spirit to help us once again see the extraordinary in the ordinary.

In the polytheistic worlds of ancient Greece and Rome, a host of gods and goddesses claimed dominion over every facet of existence: from celestial objects to earthly seasons, from birth to death. Our relationship to belief may be more fractured than ever, but our devotion to deity worship has not disappeared. If anything, it has intensified, while adopting a secular form.

A glance at our market-oriented economies reveals altars everywhere. Odes to Efficiency echo as daily psalms and mantras. Shrines to Innovation and temples of Progress become our regular congregation places, eking out little space for the goddesses of nature who now shrink themselves to the city’s edges. And perhaps the omnipotent God of Growth receives our most bountiful offerings, even as we realise that keeping this god alive may be the death of us all.

Once, these gods assumed a rightful place in the pantheon of deities upon which we have built our ‘house of modernity’. But over time, we stopped checking on their utility, or worse, lost the means to keep their power in check. Now their sole purpose is the maintenance of their own existence, and in our struggle against them, they grow stronger still.

This reflection has been on my mind over the past few months as I have immersed myself in the Mastery of Systems Leadership (MSL) program - a learning journey designed by the wonderful Small Giants Academy as both response and call to action for our times. Over recent weeks, forty passionate and talented systems thinkers from around the world have been wrestling with the potency and potential of systems thinking in an epoch in need of radical redesign. It has been uncomfortable work, but the kind that demands we sit with the discomfort long enough to see new pathways through.

One source of discomfort came in the form of a story: Ursula K. Le Guin’s, ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas’.

In Le Guin’s story, we encounter a somewhat idyllic, futuristic city where happiness reigns supreme. Built on a foundation of fulfilment, egalitarianism, creativity and joy, Omelas seems faultless - except for the town’s one secret. Their perfect way of life depends wholly on the misery of one single person: a child in the basement. From the age of eight, every citizen learns of, and agrees to, the bargain that keeps the child imprisoned, suffering.

It’s easy to contain this story as a work of fiction, but the more unpleasant truth is that we all live in Omelas. Our comfort and progress are made possible because somewhere, something is sacrificed on our behalf. The gods of Omelas are satisfied, so long as the child remains below. The question for us is the same: which gods have we chosen to serve, and what sacrifices keep their altars burning?

When systems thinkers talk about ‘coordination failure’, they are referring to the same counter-intuitive impulse ancient societies may have referred to as a demonic force at play. Referencing beat poet Allen Ginsburg’s well-known poem, psychiatrist and author Scott Alexander calls it Moloch, the emergent god of misaligned incentives.

Moloch…always and everywhere offers the same deal: throw what you love most into the flames, and I can grant you power.

Scott Alexander, Meditations on Moloch

Moloch thrives wherever individuals must compete inside structures that punish restraint. Every time we optimise for personal gain over shared good, we feed him. We in turn optimise for survival, not wisdom. Moloch wins not because he is powerful, but because we keep playing his game. In game theory terms, he is the precise logic behind the ‘race to the bottom’ - a trap which paints cooperation as the irrational choice, unless absolutely everyone else chooses it too.

I first heard of Moloch last year through Liv Boeree, the former world-poker champion turned game theorist, whose conversation with Sarah Wilson introduced Alexander’s essay. When the same reading - and Liv herself as guest speaker- resurfaced in the MSL program, I absorbed its message in an even more visceral way. I could finally see how these multipolar traps operate not as abstractions but as daily realities in markets, media, and governance. Everyone is incentivised to make their deal with the devil, because refusing to puts them on a path to irrelevance, or worse, terminality.

Liv aptly summed up the current state of the world as a ‘combination of hijacked dopamine circuits and the tyranny of metrics’ - an example of Moloch’s handiwork, and what Daniel Schmachtenberger calls the ‘generator functions’ of our metacrisis. This framing sums up the illness of our time perfectly: a civilisation reduced to optimising for attention and numbers, not aliveness. Our institutions, like gods, imagine themselves as immortal, and we play their games as though we will live forever. Perhaps that is the deeper tragedy from where our problems spring - our modern industrial culture has mastered the art of denying its own death.

Yet in this realisation lies a seed of potential. Once we confront our mortality, we regain the power to imagine the future through a different, more collective lens.

In his session with our cohort, architect and systems thinker Indy Johar (who I deeply admire and have written about before) named this shift the ‘partiality of knowing’. We live in a world under a delusion of separation - confusing individuation for freedom - when in reality we are collectively entangled at a planetary scale. To navigate this complexity, Johar suggests leveraging a ‘stack of doubt’ that allows us to operate in and deal with complexity differently: with an ethic of tenderness, tentativeness and care. These qualities, more maternally-coded and undervalued in Moloch’s world, may well be core skills required to move beyond our illusions of certainty. Acting from doubt moves from a weakness to a strength, in an effort to redesign and regenerate our world.

As one of our guest speakers expressed, much of what we hold onto doesn’t exist anymore. Our systems cling to a decaying mirage, instead of moving through the grief of death and evolution. On this, Vanessa Andreotti (author of Hospicing Modernity) offers a useful perspective: we must not violently reject or discard the past, but instead ‘metabolise’ or ‘compost’ it, so it becomes fertile soil for renewal. The task at hand, whether at an individual or societal level, is the same - to build things capable of dying gracefully so that life may continue.

At the end of his essay, Scott Alexander concludes that ‘only another god can kill Moloch’. His answer is Elua - ‘the god of flowers and free love, of art and science and all soft fragile things. Of niceness, community, and civilization.’

In Elua, we find an antidote to the competitive, extractive, fear-based rule of Moloch; a force grounded in cooperation, nourishment and beauty. A deity capable of embracing Johar’s ‘stack of doubt’ with ease, redesign systems in humility rather than hubris.

And still, I am troubled by the idea of projecting the idea of salvation onto a ‘new god’ however benevolent (as we all know, power corrupts). What feels more resonant is a devotion to what Elua represents - ideals of love, relationality and a reverence for life itself. If anything, we are all Elua - we have simply been out of touch with our true nature in the face of Moloch’s projections. This is about a re-enchantment - a New Romantic era to combat the cynicism of our age, and restore a sense of collective wisdom and wonder in the world we inhabit.

It feels like no small coincidence that I encountered Nikita Gill’s poetic retelling of the story of Hekate during this season of inquiry. This goddess of the crossroads - goddess of liminality, perhaps - reckoning with her own search for purpose, her growing power and the question of which gods to serve, mirrors the threshold so many of us now face.

We may not have her immortality, but we can borrow her wisdom. Hekate’s discernment helped her know which gods to answer to, what bargains to accept and on what terms. Perhaps she can guide us at our own crossroads as we navigate this - for ourselves and for each other.

Maybe the work now is not to overthrow the gods of this age, but to redesign the systems that keep them fed.

Field Notes

• Take some time to notice a system you are a part of - whether a workplace, an industry or the economy at large.

  • Which gods does it serve? How might you experiment with redesigning the rules of the game?

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Freedom is a spell word. - Indy Johar

In recent months, I’ve felt the weight of a world suspended. However you choose to name it—climate, conflict, capitalism, consciousness—we’re all feeling the ground shift beneath us and the liminal space between the known and unknown has become infused in almost every facet of our lives. It’s in that spirit that I found myself pulled full circle to once-familiar places, spaces and people - with the knowledge that both they and I have changed and evolved so much over the last decade or so. This is how I found myself at this week’s Wisdom & Action Forum, hosted by the incredible Small Giants team (who I happened to reference in my very first Liminal Space article almost five years ago). With the overarching theme of ‘We Are Nature’, the event brought together some of the most incredible thinkers and practitioners not just across Australia, but from around the world, all focused on solutions and pathways through the ecological crisis we are in. It’s going to take me days, if not weeks, to process and unpack all the learning and connection that occurred. And with a year between posts here, I’ve found the inspiration and urge to write, to integrate, and to share the magic that unfurled.

It would be impossible to recount and accurately capture the whole event, and yet the last session, A Sacred Vision for Nature seemed to bring it all home. The cast of characters included incredible systems innovator Indy Johar of Dark Matter Labs, the divine wisdom (and musical talent) of Wellbeing Economics expert and Bhutan Gross National Happiness Global Facilitator Julia Kim, alongside author and Rebel Wisdom founder Alexander Beiner and Small Giants co-founder Berry Liberman. The group danced with the need to hold the complexity, pain and fear of ecological collapse with the requirement of radical hope and ‘reentangling’ ourselves with the natural world.

Having listened to Indy’s confronting yet empowering podcast with Sarah Wilson earlier this year, it was his particular framing that I was most eager to hear, and it did not disappoint. At the start of the panel, he conjured the imagination of the audience through his framing of freedom as a ‘spell word’, and the fact that at the heart of what is needed to change the course of our ecological future is a new theory of what freedom is. A theory that takes us from our current ‘shallow, industrial’ paradigm, which only considers the (hierarchically distributed) freedom of humans, as opposed to the notion that all living things should be free. I find it no coincidence that I have been deeply contemplating what freedom means to me of late, and I found Indy’s call to ‘lose the illusion of dominance, and embrace the unknown’ to be deeply resonant. Because our systems—economic, ecological, and technological—are still built on a brittle definition of freedom: autonomy at the expense of interdependence. That paradigm has run its course.

It was a theme that recurred throughout the two days: the incredible Nora Bateson spoke to the need for us to begin a process of ‘unlearning’, multiple speakers called for the ‘embodiment of wisdom’ (both human and environmental), for a shift from an individuated understanding of ourselves and our role on the planet to a collective one, for a need to lean into liminality (yes, the title of this very blog was serendipitously mentioned many times), and to embrace the sacredness of this entire human<>nature experience. And Indy spoke to the ‘transformation required to usher us into a new way of being that enables all living things to collectively be more free.’

But how? And how quickly?

This conversation wasn’t necessarily about answers, but what came up for me was a reminder that despite the incredibly complex, intractable, systemic, global etc etc changes we face, we don’t have a chance if we can’t look inward and start the work there. And from that place, through connection with each other and operating from our best collectively-minded selves, we might be able to shift the dial. (I don’t know if it’s just that we’ve approached the five-year anniversary, but I’ve been spending a lot of time reflecting on the way we came together as a community in the early days of the pandemic - as well as what has ultimately snapped back or reverted to pre-pandemic times.) As was impressed on us this week, the work we do here may not mean that we will benefit from seeing the impact in our lifetime, but that shouldn’t stop us. We’re here to build cathedrals to the future, not be comfortable.

It’s here that I’m confronted by the reality of working in the startup, tech and venture capital sector for the last ten years. At the forum, impact film-maker Damon Gameau jested (in seriousness) that we are in a situation where ‘wounded man-children have the power of god-like technology in their hands’. As I wrote in Investing in People, ‘perhaps the fact that we are staring down the barrel of some of the most intractable problems our species will face is the catalyst we need as we stop and consider what’s really important, and how we optimize for a sense of innate purpose, over profit.’ Five years on from writing those words, a lot has certainly changed for the better, but we’ve also seen some disastrous setbacks in looking at the so-called ‘role models’ of the sector and global leadership generally.

So what do we do in this situation? Julia Kim’s reframing of ‘wisdom & action’ as ‘wisdom and skilful means’ stays with me. My observation of reconnecting with the impact sector this week is that many years have been spent now cultivating the wisdom and developing the skilful means required to combat the headwinds we face. Through a continued and deepening cultivation of self-awareness, empathy, collaboration and the importance of the collective, we are more powerful together than alone.

This inward and outward reflection brought me unexpectedly to the Romantics—thinkers who, like today’s ecological futurists, believed in integration over isolation. I have spent the last few weeks immersed in the excellent book by Andrea Wulf, 'Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of Self’. More on this in a future article, but today the words of Romantic writer and philosopher Novalis feel as pertinent as ever.

So this is me, closing loops and connecting dots between work started, ideas shared and people connected with over the last decade-plus, in order to stitch together a new foundation to build from for what is coming. Lately, I’ve been contemplating the magnitude of technological advancement like AI, and what role this might have in actually supporting us to be more uniquely human, as opposed to less. The tension undoubtedly exists, but there is a glimmer of the emergent opportunities this creates. AI technologies place us—rapidly and relentlessly—at the precipice of the next major evolution, and it does create exactly the opportunity Indy Johar references to redefine a new theory of freedom more appropriate for the coming era. Could these technologies actually support us to understand ourselves better for the benefit of the individual and the collective? As Julia Kim so beautifully said at the end of the final panel at Wisdom & Action, ‘perhaps instead of a closing, we have created an opening’. We are each the stewards of a spell—freedom not as escape, but as return. May we use it to build not just what is possible, but what is necessary.

Some questions to consider:

What does freedom mean to you now? Has that changed over time?

What wisdom have you cultivated that now seeks new, skilful means of expression?

How are you re-entangling yourself with the living world around you?

I'd love to hear what emerges for you—whether it's a word, a memory, or an idea you’re ready to carry forward.

But somewhere along the way, we can lose touch with the bits of ourselves that are ‘unapologetically us’. Maybe we’ve spent a lifetime leaning away from these parts, in case they were deemed to be unacceptable by the collective. Maybe we couldn’t see them connecting to the more material goals we aspire to, so we’ve taken to wearing a mask instead to keep us on the right path. It’s at this point that our ecosystem, and honestly society at large, misses out.

The reality is the startup ecosystem has largely perpetuated this problem by creating a culture of standardised advice, programmatic instruction on how to ‘optimise yourself’ and generally reinforcing the idea that there is a ‘singular’ way to do things to be successful. We have pattern-matched what worked in the first iterations of technology and venture capital, and created a norm for people to fit. In doing so, we ultimately missing the point that it was people’s uniqueness that established those norms in the first place, and that we should have been optimising for difference instead of homogeneity.

Essentially we have distilled down what it means to be a 'high performer’ into a caricatured persona -  one that is on turbo thanks to LinkedIn thinkfluencers - that we tend to subconsciously measure ourselves against. 

You know the one:

• Highly productive, output-oriented at all times

• ‘data-driven’ decision maker (no room for intuition or instinct unless it can be forced through a numeric justification process)

• always optimised for external metrics/reach/impact

• always on/consistently shipping rain, hail or shine

• If you didn’t post about it, did it even happen?

If you are not doing the above and more, you are not valued as a ‘weapon’, a superpower contributor, an amazing operator etc. You know the tropes.

To be clear, the above capabilities are admirable. For some people. And we could all benefit from leveraging them. Some of the time.

But if you’ve ever sat back and wondered why you don’t seem to fit the mould, why you could never live your life like that, or why it feels like your inherent value goes unnoticed - it’s probably because that advice is not good for you. And because the system we exist within has struggled to recognise more complex or subtle value-drivers, purely because they are harder to quantify.

I want to pause here to appreciate the incredible growth of our ecosystem over the last 5+ years largely due to the above qualities being front-and-centre. This is not a post against those qualities and ideals, it is a recognition that for a minority they will not be an aligned way to live. It’s also an awareness of the constraints of our continuing ‘industrial complex’ approach to work life, even at the bleeding edge of startups. And a hope that our ecosystem will benefit all the more when we recognise, appreciate and celebrate other ways of being, doing and working to create even more outsized impact.

• What if your value is to incubate, join dots and initiate the next big idea, but you get penalised because you can’t drive a project all the way to its natural conclusion or implementation? Or you can’t take the downtime you need to create something new because if you’re not doing 15 hour days, are you even working?

• What if you are great at implementing something the first few times, but aren’t the right person to establish the systems and processes that would keep it moving, growing, evolving?

• What if your superpower is being able to absorb the energy of the collective (team, company, community), tap into its needs and evolve its direction without seeming to lift a finger? Would people back-channel about how you never seem to ‘do’ anything, and yet, they know they’re better off with you around?

• What if you were simply a mirror to hold something up against, without which we continue to move forward unchecked, full of hubris and without any conscious reflection around the direction we are going?

Ultimately, it’s my view that the world of startups has become more prone to rewarding one way of working to the exclusion of all others. At the very least, my broader question is whether we are setting up all kinds of people to be successful in this industry? Or are we optimising for only one kind of contributor, and therefore missing out on so much more value, richness of experience and quite simply individual strengths and skills that are often overlooked.

For me personally, I’ve spent almost two decades learning where I can and do fit the mould (and for how long I can exist in these states), while also recognising where doing so absolutely depletes me, and leaves a whole lot of my value on the table, unseen and under-leveraged. Luckily, I am at the age and stage where resolving this feels within my control. But over the course of my career, I have borne witness to many others being disregarded for their true gifts, or being forced to supplement them with activity that probably felt plain unnatural to them. At best, they felt disgruntled or disengaged. At worst, they burnt out completely.

What feels more dangerous is that we’ve reached a point of idolisation of this one way of being, a ‘guruisation’ of its proponents and their way of thinking and acting, and the ‘processification’ of even the most human and intangible acts - like building meaningful relationships. Are we thinking and reflecting, or just acting and executing?

At a micro level, it can just be plain annoying to see this mindset being reinforced ad nauseum, adopted without question, and how few people spend the time to explore their own unique ways of working. At a macro level, I worry we continue to make the startup ecosystem inhospitable for people who think and act differently, whose value is harder to quantify. And that has dire consequences indeed.

So what? Well for me, I have begun 2024 with a renewed and even more insatiable appetite to understand myself better than ever. My motto has always been ‘perpetual self-betterment’, but not the ‘productive’ kind. (In fact, the less productive I am, the more aligned to and aware of my true value I become.) I value my intuition, my emotional knowing, my capability to see ahead and pull pieces of the puzzle together to make it real. This is where I’ll be spending time optimising myself this year.

But more to the point, I want to encourage and support others to spend time deeply enquiring about their own unique value - not the one our industry or society has said is worthy, but the one that, when unembodied, leaves you feeling sad or detached. If the prescriptive advice of the masses doesn’t seem to fit, I invite you to create your own playbook and lean into the things that light you up, the superpowers you know to be real even if you can’t put a KPI against them. We need your courage and your individuality to shape the world for the better.

If this resonates with you, either because you’re building a team and want to do the above better for your people, or you are an individual on a journey to better inhabiting your full potential - I’d love to hear from you.

TECH

• In reference to the above, I want to shout out someone who is absolutely leaning into their superpower. Annie Liao, founder of Build Club, is leveraging community to support the new generation of tech builders specialising in Generative AI. It’s a joy to watch her at work.

ECONOMY

• My journey into startups and tech was via the pathway of social entrepreneurship and social innovation. Deep down, I have always struggled with the ‘growth at all costs’ orientation the industry has. I’m loving the content of the ‘Post Growth Entrepreneurship’ course at the University of Amsterdam, as a way to consider alternate pathways.

HUMAN CONDITION

• There is no better way to commence your journey of greater personal understanding than to deep-dive into your values. One of my favourite new startups is leveraging AI to support this process. Check out thecompass.ai to kick off your own process of discovery, with their special early-bird subscriber rate.

I’ve always been fascinated by the way the breadcrumbs of our life experiences can end up manifesting into something tangible, almost inevitable, and yet no amount of intentional action could have determined the outcome. It is almost as if it’s fated, and yet at the same time, you have to be listening to what the threads of your interests and actions are telling you.

Lately, I’ve been mulling over a few specific breadcrumbs as I have watched them collide in the most delicious, yet unexpected, way in the present moment as the promise of web3 unfurls around us. In isolation, these crumbs are a lot less interesting, banal even, and yet together they have become markers that reinforce how magical and serendipitous life really is.

“For anyone with a computer, modem and so-called browser software, the place to be in 1995 is the World Wide Web, a section of the Internet overflowing with sights and sounds.”

Site-Seeing on the World Wide Web, The New York Times, January 1995

• I was 11 years old in 1995, the year the internet as we know it really came alive to the public. This was a time when the total number of websites was around 23,500. My use of the world wide web in these early years was focused around exactly three things: ICQ, doing quizzes on a ‘play-to-earn’ type trivia site called Riddler.com (anyone who knows me in person will understand this is very on-brand), and scrolling Netscape Navigator for sites about witchcraft, the occult and general mystical themes. While my tween self is dying at this admission, I’m a Piscean child of the 90’s - maybe I was born with it, maybe Sabrina, Buffy and The Craft were to blame.

• Fast-forward to 2002 and my first year at university, where I’d chosen journalism as a sub-minor. I couldn’t shake the feeling that aspiring to the traditional media and journalism pathways just wasn’t going to cut it in the life-time of my career, and a syllabus that didn’t include blogging, new media and the early signs of the social web just wasn’t it. I doubled down on my creative writing classes instead.

• It’s a chilly November night in New York City in 2011, and I’m in an office just down the street from Eataly for a sharing economy startup’s community event. Here I meet a young David Spinks, one of Zaarly’s first community managers, when community mainly meant throwing a good party. At the time, I was building a community of passionate sharing economy advocates around the world (which also largely meant events and meetups), but getting to know David would become a pivotal moment in how I understood both my tradeable skills, my career direction and the impending zeitgeist of ‘community’ as a business and strategic superpower. But neither of us knew that yet.

• In February 2014, I flew into San Francisco to speak on the line-up of the very first CMX Summit, David’s labour of love which, along with CMX the organisation, would become a real turning point in how ‘community’ was perceived as a discipline, and a secret weapon of the most successful organisations around the world.

• The city: Berlin. The date: October 2015. The scene: an edgy unconference called GETD - all focused on the emerging ‘decentralized web’ - hosted at an equally edgy coworking house in Neukölln called the Agora Collective. One of the most memorable presentations that weekend was by Bruce Pon from Ascribe - a project ‘proposing' a solution for artists to control intellectual property by constituting a new “ownership layer“ to the existing structure of the internet’. Cool idea, I thought. But how could that ever penetrate far enough to get mass adoption..?

  

• The hot, wet NFT Summer (or Winter, depending on your hemisphere) of 2021 - all of a sudden, things were taking off and I watched from the sidelines trying to figure out how to dip my toe into what was more akin to surging rapids than gentle river. Which collections were legitimate, how to place value on what mostly felt like various cartoon animals with weird motifs adorning their faces and bodies, how do I even get my Ethereum where it needs to be to transact… the overwhelm was real. With things moving so fast, I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to make sense of it. After crushing on World of Women (obvs), buying a Crypto Chick (good decision) and a Krazy Koala (It’s for my kids…), I came across Dame’s tweet:

NFTs, community, the season of the witch. Dots were connected, a spell was cast, and I haven’t turned back.

And now for the actual reason for this article…

Over the last few months, Crypto Coven has become one of the most fascinating, meaningful and literally magical collections - of all time, IMHO. But to call it just an NFT collection is to sell it short, as the magic is really in the community that has evolved around it. In a time where collections are built on hype (that in nine out of ten cases will not be able to sustain), sacrificed in a pump-and-dump, or simply run out of steam through an ill-thought-out or unoriginal ‘roadmap’ for how the project will retain or build value in the long-term - Crypto Coven’s path has been truly unique.

As a proud early community member (a First Witch, as the lore goes), I have been asked many times what was the catalyst for Crypto Coven’s ascent, and have observed astonishment when I explain the genuine nature of the organic community growth. I have been so spoiled by this early experience with Crypto Coven that I am often shocked at how many collections and communities try to launch and grow using the same stale PR101 tactics and strategies. I knew it was the right project for me to get involved in from the get-go (see: 1990’s web search history) , but I want to explore the absolute masterclass in community-building that has been so critical to its success. And to do that I’m going to bring back my friend David Spinks.

Since launching CMX Hub in 2014, David has spent the last eight years educating and convening community strategists all around the world - equipping them with the tools and frameworks that enable them to be successful in building highly engaged communities. What began as a month-long ‘community MBA’ eventually evolved into his first book, Business of Belonging, which he published last year. In the book, Spinks outlines a social psychology theory known as the ‘sense of community theory’, which explains a sense of community as ‘a feeling that members have of belonging, a feeling that members matter to one another and to the group, and a shared faith that members’ needs will be met through their commitment to be together.’ The theory outlines four key pillars that are foundational to building a strong community, and the lessons for all modern community builders (read: web3) are rich in every layer. Crypto Coven intuitively touches them all.

‘Membership’ as a feeling of belonging

The first pillar, Membership, defines how someone knows that they’re in - or, in fact, out - of a community. For most NFT projects, this has directly translated to ownership of the asset itself, or some form of token that pays your way into the community. The problem here is that the bar is immediately high, and requires a whole bunch of other conditions to be true to enable it (enough disposable income to buy your way in, networks and connection that enable privileged or early access, literacy in web3 transactions and tools etc etc).

For Crypto Coven, the intention was clear from the beginning - this community was open and accessible for anyone who shared their values (more on that later), and who appreciated the art and the lore. Even more intentionally, the community was framed to be welcoming to total novices in the NFT space - people who as yet had no Ethereum, who didn’t know their wallets from their smart contracts from their gas prices. As it was said early on by one of the High Witches (the name bestowed upon the project’s creatrixes), ‘We’re doing this for the first time too.’

So many little decisions went into establishing this message from the get-go - from the gifting of witches to first-time NFT buyers (preferencing those from under-represented backgrounds) to the optimisation of the smart contract to keep the 'minting’ as affordable and financially accessible as possible for those dipping their toe in for the first time. The perceived lack of boundaries to joining the Coven, along with the genuine sense of emotional safety fostered from the beginning has stayed as strong now that the community has grown into the thousands.

For me, however, the sense of belonging was fostered through the invitation extended by the High Witches in the early days of the project to actually be involved in the creation of the visual and written aesthetic of the collection.

This invitation had a two-fold benefit. 1 - the project could be guided toward the imagery and styles that resonated most with their early community and set the tone for what’s to come, and 2 - the project’s creators could use the opportunity to reinforce what elements of the mood board contributions aligned with the visions they themselves had for the project.

Let it be known - I am not a Pinner. The challenge to create a mood board was about the most daunting thing you could request of me, yet I found myself googling phrases, searching for a particular visual aesthetic on Pinterest that represented my view of witch lore and (nerve-wrackingly) made a contribution. It paid off.

There it is - hard-coded into the DNA of the project, and one of many community contributions that shaped what people now see as the Crypto Coven. My biggest disappointment to date is that I don’t have a witch with this headpiece in my collection! (I’m patient - you don’t hunt for witches, the witches find you.) With these opportunities to make a personal investment into the creation of the project, and enabling people to truly identify with what they see in the collection has built a culture of membership that is almost fanatical (except that is definitely not our vibe). While only a small group of people actively contributed to that early stage of the project, the culture of shared ownership has blossomed with every new Coven member welcomed, and Twitter has been over-run with witches as people display their symbols of involvement proudly. (See the recent ‘web2 v web3’ meme, which was kicked off by a fellow Coven member and featured witches heavily).

Influence is a two-way street

In many ways, with the idea of a Coven being central to the project, people haven’t so much ‘bought into’ but rather actively created what it is today. The influence the community has over its members (which is core to the second pillar of community theory) is no more evident than in one of the cardinal rules of the Discord server - ‘Lore, not floor’. A critical part of anyone’s onboarding journey is to understand that the witches of the Coven aren’t there to hype up and profit from the project - they are there to actively contribute to the value it holds and creates. You will find any mention of the price of the NFTs gently but clearly hushed by moderators and general community members alike.

This ethos of patience, authenticity and sustained interest in the project was built in from as early as the pre-launch community mint, which rationed the number of witches able to be minted by any one wallet to three, and any influencer marketing focused on bringing in new people to web3 through thoughtful giveaways. Rather than employ tactics that would mean the collection sold out in minutes, the High Witches chose to do the opposite, resulting in the collection being held by a large number of people who were genuinely there to HODL, not flip.

To me, this also speaks to another core aspect of a strong community, and a principle that is embedded within the idea of influence - trust. This trust is both in the creators of the project and the intention with which they set about creating it, and in the wider community who act as guardians for the values and ethos of the project. In earlier versions of the CMX community strategy theory developed by David and this team, the Community Engagement Cycle was the bridge between identification and participation, and there are many examples of how pivotal this has been in the evolving lore of Crypto Coven. (It’s been superseded by the ‘Social Identity Cycle’ but I still think acknowledging the specific role of trust is key.)

The most definitive example of this trust-building occurred in the first days of the community mint, where there was an error in the contract that resulted in it needing to be voided and redeployed. Around 130 First Witches had already minted by then (myself included), only to be told that their witches would be erased, and another version would repopulate in its place. Generally, this would be the stuff of nightmares in new NFT projects, as people wait for the rug to be pulled, and for FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) to take over. Instead, the High Witches turned it into a magical experience for their earliest adopters, and created a chapter of the Crypto Coven lore they could have never anticipated. Enter The Curse of the Void Witch. For these early adopters and supporters of the Coven, their void witch was replaced with a vessel containing their crystalised souls… (honestly, the wordsmithery on this project is a 10/10 thanks to High Witch Keridwen’s mastery). A disaster turned into a defining moment for the community, and a cementing of the trust between the project architects and their true fans.

There are countless other examples of this two-way dynamic of trust and influence every day in the discord, from the way both designated Mods and community members alike set the tone for engagement and conversation, to the energy in the barter-a-witch channel where people ignore conventions of ‘rarity’ to swap witch-for-witch based on what truly resonates, not the value a market would dictate. It’s also clear in the delightful spin-off projects that have emerged within the community to extend the Crypto Coven into the most unusual places - from the Library of Coven and Web3 resources that every witch needs, to the Weird Wilds Detective Agency which hunts for lost witches, to community-wide masterclasses on wallet and crypto security, to discussions of the best night cream in the Enchantress channel on the Discord. These initiatives drive the participation of community at large, as people see themselves reflected in the space, whatever that self chooses to be. It’s one of the hardest things to generate in community, but the Coven generates it in spades.

The Fulfillment of Needs

Let’s be honest. It’s why we’re all here. Every day we wake up we are searching for belonging and connection, and the weird wilds of web3 have given us more power to define what that is than ever before. It’s about self-expression, self-determination and being rewarded in-kind for what you contribute and create. The third pillar of the sense of community theory - integration and the fulfillment of needs - is the fuel that keeps the flywheel spinning - that when we join a community, it’s all we expect and more.

In the world of web3, many projects view the token or the NFT as the reward or the ‘fulfillment’, which is why so many feel like hollow derivatives of what has come before. Instead, Crypto Coven was an invitation to tap into your inner witch archetype and be rewarded for bringing your whole weird self to the community. People are included, encouraged and supported in a way that makes the most beautiful things happen. Fan fiction, custom art, random gifting of witches from community members to those who have been priced out and even operatic soundbaths on a Friday evening - all gifts offered up by the community to fulfil their need for creative expression, and in turn reward the community for their support - no NFT needed. While the witches are there badges of self-expression to those who feel so inclined, the true community ethos is that witches can not be owned, but are there to be appreciated by all.

The Emotional Connection of a Coven

The final pillar of the sense of community theory speaks to a shared emotional connection amongst its members. Of course, this shared connection is layered in every previous pillar, but I want to talk about the concept of witches themselves as the connective tissue of this project.

In an earlier interview about Crypto Coven (which is absolutely worth a read), the High Witches were asked the why behind their choice of avatar. Designing a collection of witches was highly intentional as they aimed to create a sub-culture and safe space in web3 for people who were attracted by what was, at the time, a *completely* different aesthetic to the normal PFP projects.

“As avatars, witches have agency, power. They shape the world as they move through it, are mysterious and strange. They defy traditional expectations. A witch is not defined by their relationship to, or appeal for, anyone else. They are individuals with influence over any narrative they touch, not objects to be observed and sold. Witches create. They perform magic. A coven of witches implies a bond—a group working together with more power than an individual.”

High Witch Nyx interviewed on Dirt Substack

Back to my earlier point, this project is about identifying with an inner witch archetype that, in and of itself, has agency and power. One thing the High Witches did to facilitate this was to create a Divination based on Buzzfeed quizzes of yesteryear, so community members could explore the archetypes and see which ones resonated most. Through this, smaller sub-communities emerged based around shared interests and passions, and new projects were spawned.

At a micro level, the bonds are strong; at a macro level this becomes a community for life. Nowhere is this more evident than on Opensea, where of the 9,800 witches currently in existence, only 990 are actively on the market (and some for prices that are more ironic than through an actual desire to sell. See: 24 witches at 666ETH or more…) And those 130 vessels containing void witch souls? You’d be lucky to get one of the 15 available.

This shared emotional connection is most important to attain, and most impossible to manufacture. Following Crypto Coven’s community building playbook will at least have you on the right path.

But wait, there’s more…

The hardest thing about writing this post was containing it to the few examples I’ve shared about why this is a project in a class of its own, that will be hard to match for years to come. Even more phenomenally, there is so much more to come and to be created in the Weird Wilds of the High Witches’ imaginations, and of the dreams of those Coven members who will play a key role.

I could have talked about the way the High Witches optimised the smart contract to minimise gas prices in a way that had never really been done before. The way they took inspiration from Fenty Beauty in planning their colour palettes, body and facial features for the project so that a wider and more diverse range of community members could find their way to the Coven. The masterful wordsmithery behind the project and the way they combined it with an AI generator to create powerful, unique and often hilarious names and articulations for each and every witch. The unique star sign combinations that give each witch further depth and personality. The collaborative art and design process between the High Witches to merge different styles into the singular aesthetic for the project. There is so much to explore and so much to appreciate depending on your interests, but the above is my offering of admiration and gratitude to a truly community-centric, creatively inspiring and genuinely exciting project that will shape the Weird Wilds of Web3 in both powerful and subtle ways.

Because that is the Way of the Witch.

PS. If, like me, you can’t get enough of the Coven, I highly recommend checking out this podcast episode conversation with the High Witches. It’s an absolute joy.

Also, check out the art on the beautiful Crypto Coven website or Opensea, follow the High Witches @Xuannu, @Alethia, @Aradia, @Keridwen and @Nyx on Twitter for more incredible threads on their process of developing the project, and join the Crypto Coven Discord to see what all the fuss is about.

With the intensity of the last week (combined with the fact that I was also reviewing 100+ applications for roles with Startmate in tandem), I spent a lot of time thinking about what I personally look for, or perhaps over-index on in my decision-making process. There were a handful of pitches where I felt an instant connection and excitement for the founder and the opportunity, and others where I could feel my enthusiasm flatline because of a few fatal flaws in the pitch. But these fatal flaws are a lot harder to codify than a market or model problem, or even a skill gap. They have to do with the connection between reality and ultimate possibility, and the clarity a founder exhibits to mapping a path between the two. I wanted to frame up five traps I heard founders falling into, and some of the ways in which the best founders I’ve met have navigated the path.

1. Say what you mean, and understand what you say

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

— George Orwell

Perhaps the greatest asset a founder can have is clarity: clarity of vision, clarity of thought, clarity of strategy. But in the earliest days, this level of clarity can be the most elusive thing of all as even the next step feels opaque and unclear. I think the best founders own this lack of clarity, in some cases even leaning into it to drive their curiosity and frame up their learning experiments. It’s so understandable to want to run in the other direction, and instead try to convey complete confidence in what you are doing, where you are heading, and the impact you hope to make. But on the other side of the table, this plays out as hand-wavy generalisations, grandiose statements like ‘saving the planet’ and other general over-compensations which pull a founder further away from the actual thing they know well and are deeply passionate about. This isn’t necessarily about being articulate, charismatic or being a good storyteller - I have found specificity and clarity shines through even in the absence of those things. Be honest with yourself about where you are, what you know and what you don’t, and clarity will be so much easier to grasp.

2. Over-simplifying a critical piece of the puzzle

If any of you have played Cards Against Humanity, this example might resonate. My favourite card in the deck is the three steps to profit. The reality is that so many startup pitches play out like this: ‘Step1: build magical product, Step 2: magically place in the hands of customers (target market being everyone of a certain age in a certain country), Step 3: profit.’

Never gonna happen.

Lean startup thinking has penetrated far enough into the mainstream consciousness by now that everyone is well aware of the level of customer discovery that needs to be undertaken to properly establish product-market fit (and yet it’s still the number one message we reinforce through the Accelerator program). Founders who get this right bring so much colour and depth to these first two steps, and an awareness that they will be going back and forth between them for a long time before Step 3 is even a consideration.

But product-market fit still relies on a solid distribution strategy to ultimately make that leap. Founders who can bring a unique insight around the problem they’re trying to solve, plus a level of focus around their initial target market will be able to divine more interesting pathways to reach them and expand over time. While it’s helpful to be able to see how this is already playing out through initial traction, it can still be true of a pre-MVP idea-stage start-up if the founder has spent enough time validating the problem being solved.

Let’s be honest, Step 3 is still miles away so you may as well be enjoy the learning and iterating in Steps 1 & 2.

3. Dismissing competition

We try not to over-index on evaluating the competition, as there is always an incumbent waiting to be disrupted by the right emerging player. We just have to be able to believe it’s going to be you.

When founders pitch a business in what is known to be a very crowded, or strongly dominated industry vertical, it’s worth spending some time clearly articulating just where that competitive advantage will come from (spoiler: UX is rarely enough on its own), and how there is a pathway to growth that doesn’t rely solely on SEO and online ads.

This shouldn’t look like a strategically structured 2x2, or a feature matrix that selectively shows your product as the most comprehensive. It should highlight the group of customers that are not being served by the existing players, why they are calling for your solution, and how you can move up the value chain over time (or why this becomes a new category in its own right). At the very least, just avoid overstating the reasons why your team is better, or dismissing the competition out of hand.

4. What you are now < what you could be

Part of the job of the investor to identify talent and potential, and provide support to the founding team to help them reach it. But it’s important that the founders themselves see that same potential and are ready to chase after it. This week, I spoke to many talented and passionate people about what they’re building. What set some of them apart was a recognition and awareness that what they are working on now is not the ultimate opportunity worth chasing, but instead more of a step on the path towards it. For others, the current state was simultaneously the optimal end-state (or at least the current state but at scale), and that changes the conversation.

While Startmate has a proven record at unleashing the ambition of the founders that come through the program, there still has to be an innate sense in the founder of a future possibility worth chasing after, and a compounding benefit to doing so. We love to know what you’ve achieved or learned to date, but we also want to be inspired and excited by the uncapped potential of what might happen if you pour fuel on the fire. Show us the pathway between the two and you’re already a step ahead. We’ll bring the fuel.

5. The ‘silver bullet’ solution

In some ways the reverse of the above problem, we have so many highly intelligent and capable founders that come to us having mapped out ‘a better way’ - to completely flip an industry on its head, to build the new operating system for a generation, to fix systemic inequality. These proposals are always incredibly well-thought out, exhibiting a depth of knowledge that has our best mentors in awe. We want the unreasonable people who are armed to exploit a glitch in the matrix. But it’s only the rare few that are equipped to take this silver bullet solution and take a first step to making it a reality.

These rare founders can hold incredible complexity and ambiguity in their mind, and distill it into practical, tangible next steps. They can comprehend volume and scale with a level of comfortability that would make others sweat. They can see the future, but they demonstrate an ability to execute in the present. And perhaps most importantly, they understand that it will be thousands of tiny shots that accumulate to become the big eventual shift they are working toward, not any one single bolt of lightning.

Because plans are nothing, execution is everything.

This is in no way a comprehensive outline of how we evaluate the startups that should continue to the shortlisting phase of the Accelerator program. There is no perfect formula and we will still miss tens of founders and companies every cohort who will go on to create incredibly successful businesses. Rather, it’s a list of personal observations I had over the course of my 50 interviews, and the hundreds more founder calls I’ve done over the past six months in preparation for Summer22 as I learn to be a better investor.

I love meeting a founder that successfully navigates these patterns, and have been so lucky to have many of them as part of the past few cohorts. But what I love even more is seeing the progress between one program cycle and the next, where a founder reapplies six months down the line and absolutely knocks it out of the park. None of these problems is terminal, all it takes is self-awareness and determination to bring yourself up the curve. And we’re all learning alongside you.

As a journalism and creative writing major who has effectively written myself into the venture and tech industry in Australia, I am extremely bullish on the future of creators driving investment decisions. I love the work of the people mentioned - Packy McCormack and Turner Novak in particular. The topic of this thread, and the ensuing blog post it linked to excites me greatly. That we can still, in 2021, compile these lists without including a single woman or person of colour does not.

I was going to let it slide and enjoy my weekend (I am only three days in to a 10-day solo parenting stint after all). But example after incredible example of people driving this exact trend who also happen to not be white males kept coming to mind. So here I present to you the extended list of media-first investors, some with more direct pathways from one to the other, some who started their career in the media and creative industries before making a huge leap.

Thanks to Frederik Gieschen for the initial inspiration to write this article and for rightly pointing out that the pathway into venture is opening up for people with creative and story-telling skills. But I don’t think that matters unless the face of venture capital changes accordingly too.

• Paige Finn Doherty is barely out of university but has already built an incredible reputation for her invaluable content focused on enabling emerging angels or managers to get started with investing or raising a fund. Her crowdfunded illustrated book Seed to Harvest: A Simple Explanation of Venture Capital was the ultimate catalyst for her to raise her first fund with Beyond Genius Ventures.

• With extensive experience as an operator focused on go-to-market strategy for companies like Zendesk and Expedia, Brianne Kimmel went on to launch invite only mentorship program SaaS School, and kicked off her WFH Substack last year. Of the back of this and her ongoing angel investing activity, she raised her Worklife Ventures Fund 1, backed by incredible industry heavyweights.

• Femstreet is arguably one of the most important newsletters focused on women in tech and investing who are shaping the future, with 15k subscribers globally. It was founded in 2017 by Sarah Nöckel, who has gone on to invest with Dawn Capital and now Northzone, where she is Vice President.

• Anyone who spent time on Clubhouse earlier this year (are we still doing that?) would have probably tuned into The Good Time Show. Sriram Krishnan, a tech industry veteran and cohost of the show was made a General Partner at A16Z in January, while his wife and cohost Aarti Ramamurthy is now Head of International at the platform they grew their own profile on.

• I knew this list should include Arlan Hamilton, but it took a bit more research to understand that the first chapter of her career was as the publisher of indie music magazine Interlude. While this may not have directly led to what has become an incredible legacy for improving diversity in venture investing through Backstage Capital, her roots as a creator were what she built her investing career success on.

• Prior Backstage Capital colleague and investor Lolita Taub spent almost a decade in ‘corporate tech’ for IBM and Cisco before she was driven to create The F Show - 100 video interviews profiling incredible women in tech and entrepreneurship around the world. Launched in 2015, I reckon it was pretty ahead of its time, and Lolita has spent the time since investing through Backstage, NextGen Ventures, Operator and her own initiative The Community Fund, which focuses on community-led business. She also dedicates time to building out resources and tools to help underrepresented founders access the support and capital they need.

• Joan Westenberg has had along career in the Australian startup ecosystem, both on the operator side in Communications and Marketing for some of the country’s most prominent startup businesses, but also as a journalist, writer and commentator with work published in Wired, The AFR, Junkee, Crikey and more. She runs Studio Self, a web3 brand creative and content agency, writes prolifically on similar topics at PizzaParty, and drops NFTs even more prolifically through her CryptoDunks project, to name but one. This is a story very much in the making, but as a leading thinker and creator in the web3 space, and one of the only transgender women angel investors in the world, I’m so excited to see how Joan’s investing career evolves.

I know there are more! I would love to hear about whose creative work you love and where people are using these skills and strengths to parlay into a career in investing. Drop a comment below.

TECH, THE ECONOMY & THE HUMAN CONDITION

This issue there is no difference.

• “Because of the competitive stakes, investors are “ascribing higher valuations to things where they can move quickly,” which means relying on “hero archetypes,” like established entrepreneurs and management teams that have experience together.” The Great Competition to Give Away Money by Maxwell Strachan, VICE

• “Social tokens better express the breadth and depth of a community.” Social Tokens and Creator-Centric Economies by Rex Woodbury

• “It’s the unit of desire, it’s what’s actually scarce and you can call it attention. You can call it affinity. You can call it loyalty. You can call it brand affiliation, whatever you want to call it. It’s like, what is starting to become scarce is people’s actual interest in you. And people’s interest in what you have to say, not your ability to say something or your ability to make something.” World-Building and the Early Internet by Alex Danco

The irony is that these imaginings pull you out of the present, instead directing you to dissect and ruminate over actions (or inaction) in the past, while distracting from the fact you may actually be at the precipice of yet another personal turning point — one you will inevitably come to replay your handling of at some other distant point in the future. Rinse. Repeat.

…We are always haunted by the myth of our potential, of what we might have it in ourselves to be or do. So when we are not thinking, like the character in Randall Jarrell's poem, that "The ways we miss our lives is life", we are grieving or regretting or resenting our failure to be ourselves as we imagine we could be. We share our lives with the people we have failed to be.

Missing Out by Adam Phillips

Lately, I have tried to bring a different awareness to these memories and try not to let my past self influence the recollections quite so much. Putting some distance between the sense of overwhelm, underachievement, incompetence or just general lack of confidence I may have felt at the time, and instead just reflecting on these moments with the perspective of an outsider. It’s in doing this that I’ve realised just how unreliable the earlier feelings actually were, and how little they served me in those moments in time - preventing me from fully experiencing the satisfaction I was otherwise entitled to.

All those times I thought I was ‘too late’ to something, and chose to stay in the background because I didn’t feel entitled to contribute or was worried about signalling that I didn’t belong, only to realise as the years passed that I was, in fact, rather early and everyone else was probably searching for that same sense of belonging as well. Those times I thought I wasn’t ‘good’ enough, so I held myself back in all manner of ways to avoid the risk of spectacular failure, only to realise where stepping forward and bringing everything I did have could have propelled me further than I could have even imagined. The times I just assumed those around me knew more than I did, leaving my instincts screaming for attention as I acted against them, only to hear the internal chorus of ‘I told you so’ a little too late. These things are all easy to see in retrospect, with the clarity of hindsight, but the reality is, none of those barriers should have mattered as much as they did in the first place.

“No amount of sophistication is going to allay the fact that all your knowledge is about the past and all your decisions are about the future.”

Thinking About Macro, Howard Marks

You see, even if I had been granted the gift of foresight to help me navigate past experiences toward what might be perceived as a more optimal outcome, perhaps it wasn’t the outcome I needed to be optimising for anyway. Perhaps what mattered was the process of learning to trust my gut, of speaking my truth, of fully leaning in to the opportunity I saw and seeing those around me as peers, rather than pedestal-dwellers of my own making, on that journey. Perhaps in the moment, it can never feel like anything but failure, and instead we can try and reframe its very notion. From a state of deficiency, to the process of acquiring and developing more desirable qualities through challenge, experience and putting yourself in the path of growth.

“When you focus on the past, that’s your ego. ‘I did this. We were able to beat this team 4-0. I did this in the past, I won that in the past’. And when I focus on the future it’s my pride.  ‘Yeah, next game, Game 5, I do this and this and this. I’m going to dominate’. That’s your pride talking. Like it doesn’t happen, like you’re right here.

And I kind of like try to focus on the moment, in the present. And that’s humility, that’s being humble. That’s not setting no expectations. That’s going out there and enjoying the game.”

Milwaukee Bucks player Giannis Antetokounmpo 1

There are well-worn cliches that deal with this notion, which suggests it’s an unavoidable or core part of the human experience. But if we can stop our mind flitting between the past and the future, and refrain from using those ephemeral states as a measure of our present self-worth, we might actually be able to keep our mind in the moment. And maybe next time it looks, feels or smells like failure, we might be able to more accurately identify that uncomfortability as our opportunity to stretch. To shake off the misconceptions we have of ourselves up to that point, and to loosen the grip on what we think we’re supposed to become. If we can do all that, we might actually start to enjoy who and where we are.

TECH

• “The rough outlines of future solutions are often understood and, in a sense, agreed upon well in advance of the technical capacity to produce them. Still, it’s often impossible to predict how they’ll fall into place, which features matter more or less, what sort of governance models or competitive dynamics will drive them, or what new experiences will be produced.” The Metaverse: What It Is, Where to Find It, Who Will Build It, and Fortnite by Matthew Ball

  See also: The Metaverse Primer

• “Optimists often seem intellectually lazier than pessimists, but increasingly, optimists are right.” Compounding Crazy by Packy McCormack, Not Boring

ECONOMY

• “No one has privileged access to the future and market forecasts tend to be about as accurate as calling a coin toss.  There are, of course, analogies that can be drawn about how the current environment maps onto previous historical data, but success in that depends crucially on how the future will, in fact, resemble the past, and whether the cited analogies turn out to be the governing ones.  The record seems to show that sometimes they will and sometimes they won’t and we are back at the coin toss.” Investor Bill Miller quoted in Thinking About Macro from Oaktree Capital’s Howard Marks

THE HUMAN CONDITION

• “We need more actual patronage, ones that provide both social and financial capital, and encourages more talented folk to pursue their vision. We need to try and figure out how good our talent recognition is and can be, and work monomaniacally on making it better. Any vision of the future that doesn’t have it would be one where we’re squandering our potential.” On Medici and Thiel, from Rohit Krishnan’s Strange Loop Canon

1

*h/t to Nick Crocker’s latest edition of Branches, where I finally paid attention to who Giannis Antetokounmpo is

In March 2015, I sent an email to a short list of women I admired to extend an invitation:

I have had an idea for a different kind of book club, and wanted to invite you all to be a part of it - it's called the 'What are you reading?' book club and the premise is very simple!

Instead of all reading the same book and coming together for pseudo-intellectual discussion that doesn't really amount to much (interspersed with the fact that no-one has really finished, or even picked up, said book...) and becomes more of a stress than anything, a group of awesome ladies get together to share a little bit about a book they are either currently reading or have just finished.  This way we either get to feel like we've read the books, or get some recommendations for what to read next!

Of the women I emailed, some knew each other, others were connected by one or two degrees separation, but the only common link across all of them was me, hovering in liminal space between professional acquaintance and social connection. Each person had been chosen because I knew that not only would they want to have a fun time, but that they would actually bring their A-Game with interesting and diverse books (and over time podcasts, articles and TV series as well. See below: the child-bearing years 😂 ) and that each would find the others as interesting as I knew them to be.

Our first meeting took place in the coworking space some of us shared (that happened to be run by my husband Josh). Everyone turned up on time, and we sat on Ikea stools around the long table in the kitchen (which was actually a salvaged strip of flooring from a basketball court), Duralex glasses filled with wine in hand and snacks in front of us. And one by one, we went around the table and shared, simply, what we had been reading, getting to know each other better in the process. And at the end of it we all agreed that, yes, we might just like to do this again.

It all sounds so simple in retrospect, like an expected or obvious outcome. But I remember feeling filled with butterflies, the fluttering of responsibility for the success of the evening. I had extended an invitation, these women had shown trust in accepting it and I wanted them to walk away with something valuable - not just a new book recommendation, but a new connection and a network of like-minded people they could plug into again any time. As we graduated from the after-hours office space to each other’s living rooms and dining tables, it becomes harder to remember a time before we shared book notes together.

Six years later, we have had more than 20 different people drop into the group from time to time, or stay for a season, but a core group of seven women has held fast throughout the time. Between us, we have welcomed eleven babies (!!), celebrated marriages, rallied around at the end of relationships, offered support and strength in the face of family illness, the death of parents and the tragic loss of one of our own original members. We’ve had integral members move overseas and start international WAYR outposts (and eventually boomerang back to Australia), we’ve navigated redundancies and come out on top in incredible new roles. We’ve bought, sold, renovated and moved houses, and have ultimately almost all left Sydney in our wake, scattering to regional towns up and down the eastern seaboard — from Noosa to Newcastle, Orange to Cradoc, Tas (with a pitstop in Melbourne in between!). From monthly catchups to annual book club retreats to an immortal Whatsapp group that keeps the thread of our connection alive.

We still talk about books.

But we also talk about so much more.

Friendship is a relationship with no strings attached except the ones you choose to tie, one that’s just about being there, as best as you can.

How Friendships Change in Adulthood by Julie Becker, The Atlantic

Forming friendships in life is hard. For most of us, they are primarily cultivated cultivate amidst the more formative periods of school age and young adulthood, where things are so much more heightened and interdependent — a constant tension between the identity and harmony of the group and the evolving sense of self. (If you’re lucky, these friendships are unshakeable and have a place of their own in our lives, with a protective force field earned over sheer time and shared experience.)

Forming or deepening friendships in the thirties is harder still. Competing priorities of career and family naturally deprioritise time and investment in friendships, all while the importance of having people who see you as separate to the other identities (mother, lawyer, CEO, wife etc) you layer on over time only increases. In my book club, I have found a zone of genuine support, encouragement and care, free of judgement or expectation - resilient in the face of busy-ness, impervious to neglect. I am constantly grateful for the role these women play in my life, whether individually, or just through knowing the fact the group chat can sit dormant for weeks and then explode spontaneously in wide-ranging conversation as we catch up on the lot, plotting our next get-together while navigating the borders that now separate us.

Why am I sharing this? While telling you how wonderful my book club women are feels like reason enough (there is a reason they make movies about book clubs), what I’m actually reflecting on is the gap that might exist in my life if I hadn’t sent that email six years ago. Would I have six wonderful individual friendships but miss out on seeing the power of the collective? Would we have gravitated to each other anyway? Would I have joined someone else’s book club and be forced to read a specific novel month after month? I shudder to think.

In a similar way, I wonder what might have happened if I had never built the courage to start writing here. I’m only early in my writing journey, but every time I press publish I feel a sense of completion to my own thoughts as well as the jittery tension of wondering exactly how and where what I’ve shared might strike a chord. The vulnerability in putting something out there, just like my invitation to book club years ago, is half the reward. And so I ask, when did you last put something out there? Your invitation is waiting to be received. ❤️

These pieces I write become part of my ongoing narrative, stakes in the ground that mark the funny milestones where I said to the thoughts in my head, “Alright, that’s enough running around in there – it’s time to come outside.”

On Keeping a Notebook - Paige Finn Doherty

Thanks for taking the time to read these thoughts of mine. I have made it a goal to continue growing The Liminal Space this year, so on that note, if this did resonate with you, I would love to hear it. Better still, if you think someone else might enjoy what I have to share, please send this email their way. 🙏

TECH

• A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

• “I believe the most important part of privilege is not that you are always safe or wealthy - it means that you often have the benefit of making decisions with an emphasis on maximizing upside as opposed to minimizing the downside.” The New Career Stack

ECONOMY

• “A widening gap. A gap between the “haves” and the “have nots,” between those with disposable income and those that don’t have jobs. A gap between fact and fiction, between those that have access to the truth and those that are fed lies non-stop. A gap that’s been exacerbated by the pandemic, certainly, but also by the forces of technology, media, and politics, not just in the last four years, but for the past decade.” From Nikhil Basu Trivedi’s Next Big Thing

THE HUMAN CONDITION

• “When you have gotten to a place of true depth with someone before, then the really cool thing about frequency is that it doesn’t matter how much time has passed, you can pick back up where you left off. That is an experience many people want, you know? That is the sign of a very resilient friendship.” On the 4 Seeds of Connection in Building Deeper Friendships with Kat Vellos, Masters of Community podcast

• “Perhaps one of the paradoxical benefits of the internet, in the long term, is shifting the way we think about peer relationships from ‘opt-out’, which it’s been since pretty much forever, towards ‘opt-in.’” Secrets About People

“Against the ruin of the world, there is only one defense—the creative act.” - Kenneth Rexroth

In Midnight in Paris, Owen Wilson’s author character Gil Pender has a classic ‘grass is always greener’ affliction, albeit with a temporal twist. His romanticised views of Jazz Age Paris and its leading figures, from Hemingway to Fitzgerald to Stein, have him questioning the absence of beauty and romance of his present-day environment. While on the surface he is a hapless dreamer who would rather inhabit a world of make-believe than confront his present reality, there is something so utterly relatable in Pender’s character flaw.

A fun icebreaker question I was once asked was, ‘which team or group throughout history would you have liked to be a part of?’ While no band or sport group came to mind with absolute conviction, I was instantly enamoured by the idea of being transported back to the very same era that is the scene of Midnight in Paris’s nostalgic timewarps. To sit with the philosophers, poets and creatives of the time around a table at Café de Flore, both dissecting and defying the societal and cultural norms of the time. The Lost Generation, as this collective came to be known, informed so much of the culture and collective memory of this era through their folkloric relationships and the artefacts they produced with each other’s support.

Throughout history, similar groups have converged and birthed some of the most pivotal cultural turning points, scientific or technological discoveries and socioeconomic shifts. From Plato and Aristotle’s Ancient Greek Agora, to Florence in the Renaissance, to the Bloomsbury Group of English writers and intellectuals in the early 20th century, the Lost and then the Beat Generations, 1960s counterculture figures like Joan Didion… they all played dual role in actively influencing and evolving, as well as simply observing and documenting their times. And of course, this pattern that repeats generation after generation, era after era, is no accident.

“They were convinced they were the products of a generational breach, and they wanted to capture the experience of newness in the world around them. As such, they tended to write about alienation, unstable mores like drinking, divorce, sex, and different varieties of unconventional self-identities like gender-bending.” - Kirk Curnutt, The Hemingway Project

It turns out smarter minds than mine (Brian Eno’s and Kevin Kelly’s to be exact) have mulled on a similar thing, using the framing of ‘scenius’* to connote “the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.” Through supporting factors like rapid exchange of ideas, mutual appreciation, local tolerance for novelty and the network effects of success, “the history of art and science is crammed with scenius,” Kelly writes. Author Austin Kleon extrapolated on these ideas further in his book to talk about the '“artists, curators, thinkers, theorists, and other tastemakers” that inform the “ecology of talent” that supports the birth of innovation, new ideas and ultimately the progress of culture.

Through this lens, it’s clear we’ve been in the midst of a prolonged period of scenius for almost two decades amidst the boom-bust-boom cycles of the internet age and the exponential rates of technological progress we are living through. But unlike previous instances of scenius through history, the presence of intellectuals, philosophers, artists and writers seems to have been substituted for the Musks, Bezos’s and Zuckerbergs, and the product managers, designers and marketers of the apps and interfaces that run our lives. Instead of being central to the discussion and development of scenius, the liberal arts in their purest form have become collateral damage as funding, attention and talent is funnelled elsewhere. It makes me wonder, what responsibility does the tech community have to ensuring these influences are still part of the narrative?

Kidrock at a tech launch party. Not what I mean.

In my first year of university, as a student in the newly established Creative Industries faculty, Richard Florida’s book ‘The Rise of the Creative Class’ was released. It was a rally against suburbia, and a call to arms for urban revitalisation in cities all around the world - in other words a prescription for the conditions of scenius that had perhaps been absent through the culturally void and greed-laden 80’s and 90’s. Florida’s Creativity Index had four pillars: the Creative Class share of the workforce, presence of the high tech industry, innovation (measured by patents per capita) and diversity of population as a way to measure openness toward different ideas and beliefs. In hindsight, the Creative Class epitomised the rise of hipster culture and gentrification, which created entirely new problems that were the subject of Florida’s most recent book, The New Urban Crisis.

This crisis is one where two of Florida’s four pillars, the high-tech and innovation indices, have become much more dominant than the other two. In many ways, the Creative Class share of the workforce has been subsumed into the high tech industry, meaning most creative output is a means to an end, instead of the means itself. And while in Florida’s original definition, the diversity index was solely focused on sexual orientation, we are all aware at this point of the broader ongoing challenges of diversity within the technology sector, and the relative homogeneity of decision-makers across the industry.

So how do we recalibrate this imbalance? What are the new indices we should be tracking to bring a social, cultural and moral richness back to our more geographically dispersed networks of scenius, as well as our physical cities? For starters, it’s about restoring value in and value creation opportunities for artists, creators and thinkers outside the boundaries of our current commercial incentive structures. Output that is not at the mercy of clickbait headlines, influencer strategy and follower count as a measure of its importance. It’s why platforms like Otis, Patreon, Quillette, Kickstarter and even Substack are so vital in creating new avenues to fund creativity for its’ own sake.

Anyone who has watched Netflix’s The Social Dilemma will be acutely aware of the harmful power of the apps and devices we use everyday. We experience our Facebook and Instagram feeds as if they are a more true reality than the one we are living in the offline world. They have all but replaced art and culture’s role as a lens through which to see the world — as an imitation of it, as the saying goes. But as Oscar Wilde said, ‘Life imitates Art more than Art imitates Life. The self-conscious aim of Life is to find expression, and Art offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may realise that energy.’ Perhaps if we are able to refocus Life (of all things, not just humans) in the centre of our global social narrative, a broader ecology of talent could be cultivated and the full potential of scenius could be realised once more.

*Thanks @BatkoOS for the reference to scenius

It’s been a while between essays, and I’m posting this in the spirit of ‘done is better than perfect’. Since I last published here, I’ve finished my mat leave and taken on a new role as Principal at Startmate, and have been in the throes of some of the most rewarding professional experiences of my life so far. Just last week, we held our second virtual Demo Day to celebrate our latest cohort (check out a replay here), and ended with an ‘after-party’ on a platform called Gather.town. Aimed at recreating the serendipity you might experience in real-world networking environments, in Gather.town you can roam around a virtual 2D space and when you are in close proximity with someone else, video chat pops up to enable to you chat in real time. It was so much fun and we almost forgot we’ve been largely separated from each other all year.

We are currently accepting applications for our upcoming Office Hours program - you can apply here - and before too long will be selecting the Summer21 cohort. Here’s hoping I can pick back up on my posting schedule amidst all this :)

TECH

• Much tea was spilled on Twitter about some of the content in this post by Ryan Caldbeck as he stepped down from his role as CEO of CircleUp. Controversy aside, it’s a good reminder that we need humanity in tech now more than ever.

• As far back as May, we were already experiencing Zoom fatigue. Gather.town and a number of other social technologies have emerged to try and fill in some of the missing pieces for human connection online.

ECONOMY

• With the US election looming on the horizon, if feels like a good time to re-read this.

• Related: The ‘tyranny of merit’ is tearing America apart.

HUMAN CONDITION

• Wagner was too big to cancel

• “New stories will help us understand the importance of seizing the means of computation and using it to build movements that break up monopolies, fight oligarchy, and demand pluralistic, shared power for a pluralistic, shared world.” Cory Doctorow on how he’s changing his approach to fiction to help the real world.

In the last few years, we have seen the dramatic downfalls of founders like Travis Kalanick, Adam Neumann, Steph Korey, and Elizabeth Homes, while the leadership styles of Bezos, Zuckerberg, Musk and even Jobs, posthumously, are often cause for concern. It appears there is false dichotomy between the qualities it takes to build a unicorn, and the qualities it takes to be an exceptional leader, and historically investors seem to have optimized for the former. This has started to shift over the past few years, but most investors will still find themselves confronted by a choice to ignore problematic personality or relationship dynamics in favour of the potential outsized returns of the business or market opportunity. After all, you can always replace a CEO.

One thing I believe isn’t changing fast enough are the messages and resources we provide to early-stage and first time founders that set them up for success on both fronts, in the absence of enough role models in the real world. We are in no short supply of toolkits, bootcamps, accelerators and resources focused on finding product-market fit, executing on a go-to-market strategy, pitching convincingly and raising capital rounds. There is, however, a dearth of information and conversation on how to be a self-aware human being in the midst of all of this. I think it’s partly because it suits the broader narrative of founders with a chip on their shoulder, or as Naval Ravikant suggests, entrepreneurs driven by irrational behaviour that results in outsized outcomes one way or the other. But the other part of it is more likely about time. Time for reflection, time for questioning, time for personal evolution is always at the expense of time needed to build the business at all costs. Perhaps the fact that we are staring down the barrel of some of the most intractable problems our species will face is the catalyst we need as we stop and consider what’s really important, and how we optimize for a sense of innate purpose, over profit.

A tangible way this conversation is starting to shift is the rise of founder coaching, and of investors not only encouraging, but actively supporting this kind of personal development in tandem with the professional learning curve founders are already on. As serial founder Hiten Shah points out below, “especially early on, you are the root cause of pretty much every problem that occurs in your organization. How to think, how to deal with emotions, how to communicate, etc… whatever style and medium gets you to make progress on your self.

An example is the influential work of investor and founder coach Jerry Colonna, through his Reboot program, book and podcast, where he normalizes the personal struggles that come with being a founder and CEO. In a recent edition of his newsletter, my friend and colleague Nick Crocker beautifully explored the role of high-performance sports coaching (which we expect of our elite athletes) and made analogies to importance of founder coaching (which is often de-prioritized, dismissed or just not talked about). There is a groundswell toward recognizing that being a high-performing founder can be greatly assisted by being a high-functioning, self-aware person in a more holistic sense.

So what does all this mean, and why does it matter? Back to my earliest motivations for following this career trajectory, I believe if we start increasing emphasis on the interpersonal skills that make a great founder or leader (like coachability, self-awareness, humility and empathy) and deprioritise qualities like hubris, egocentricity and hunger for power (which we mistake for confidence, vision and authority), we may begin elevating and supporting new kind of founders. Founders that will by their very nature be more representative of society, that will build different kinds of businesses, hopefully optimizing for what the world truly needs, rather than what might be insanely profitable but ultimately drive negative or unhealthy behaviours. We can already see examples of this new breed of founder inspiring the next generation of entrepreneurs: Atlassian founder Mike Cannon-Brooks, Canva founders Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht and Cam Adams, Buffer’s Joel Gascoigne, founder of Skillshare and now Otis, Mike Karnjarnaprakorn.

Can founders build more profitable companies at the same time as embodying the qualities of 21st century leadership: self-awareness, empathy, transparency, collaboration, equitable structures and democratic decision-making? The journey to proof is long, but our exemplars would suggest it is possible.

Can they be more fulfilled, more connected to purpose, more rich in the broadest sense of the word by keeping their own development and evolution at the core of what they do? Again, there is no single data point that can prove this out, but I would say there is more to be gained than lost in trying.

A note on coaching…

While coaching is certainly becoming more popular in the startup world, the collective understanding of what makes a good one, and what actually constitutes coaching in the first place is still being formed. I have heard VCs being dismissive of anyone but past founders or subject matter experts acting as coaches, and I have also seen comments made that the best coaches had often previously been teachers. In my previous role, I conducted behaviour trait analysis assessments and organised coaching for our founders, and my interest in people development led to me becoming a qualified organizational coach earlier this year (through IECL). I wanted to share a few thoughts on what a coach should be doing, and why a mentor, advisor or or consultant are not the same thing.

Many of the people who get called coaches in startup world would actually better suit the term ‘advisor’. These are the people with specialist knowledge of the field, who might be happy to get in the weeds with you, and who may be able to answer questions or direct you toward the best source of knowledge to help in decision-making. A good advisor is supremely valuable, but there will come times where your perspectives will differ, or you may in fact outgrow them.

A mentor is someone that might represent a future version of the person you would like to be. You might talk to a mentor about decisions you are pondering and what makes most strategic sense, and a mentor might give thoughts based on their own experience. This also can be catalytic in your decision-making, and mentors can be champions for you in areas you are looking to gain access or influence. However, similarly to advisors, there will be a time when your view of your own trajectory may not align with how the mentor sees you, or the value you can gain from the relationship diminishes over time.

A consultant? Someone who you pay to do something for you, because of their specialist knowledge and ideally ability to execute on it. Without the execution piece, you are really just outsourcing your own critical thinking process, and the outcomes will probably fall flat if not embodied in your own experience.

A coach has two key objectives, and should be measured only on their ability to do those things well. The first is to listen. The second is to ask the most pertinent question that will push your thinking. This is the best way to help a founder tackle the Gordian knots that hamper forward momentum. As Warren Berger, author of The Book of Beautiful Questions, puts it:

If you can help someone to think about a problem more clearly and gently guide them in the direction of possible solutions, you’re leaving room for that person to arrive at their own insights and make their own decisions—so that they have more “ownership” of potential solutions.

It’s this process of empowerment that is the unique domain of a coach, and one that truly teaches the founder how to fish, not where to fish and what to catch.

All four of these roles have value. And a person can bring a coaching mindset to their role as advisor, mentor or even consultant. But if you are looking to engage a coach, make sure you’re getting one. Questions beat advice, and while being coached is a muscle that needs training, over time even the simplest questions can yield the most powerful insights.

My friend and peer Jax Vullinghs has compiled a good list of coaches for founders in Australia. I’m not on it yet, but hope I will be some day :)

PS. Since my last newsletter, I have wrapped up after five years at Reinventure Group - you can read about the end of this chapter here. This week was my first week in the new role of Principal at Startmate, where I am responsible for finding the next generation of entrepreneurs and founders before they even know it. If this post resonates, get in touch at lauren@startmate.com.au

TECH

• I’m fascinated by the way the media and content landscape is evolving at the moment, from the platforms being used to the creators stepping forward. Gaby Goldberg’s take on the rise of the curator is spot on.

• Similarly, the no-code/low-code movement will be a defining point in the next generation of technology, democratizing what it means to be technical - here’s a great summary of this shift. (H/t @briannekimmel)

ECONOMY

• Not even Isaac Newton was immune from the irrationality that is public market investing. So much for what goes up, must come down. (H/t Thomas Rice for this read.)

• Related to my last post on the Resilience Economy, PlanetMoney’s The Indicator shares five things that have increased in popularity through lockdown. (H/t @bermster)

HUMAN CONDITION

• The realities of COVID19 has seen students across the US recreating the college experience miles away from the universities they’re enrolled in.

• The first episode of Small Giants Myths, Morals & Money finally catalysed me writing this newsletter. The final episode of Series 1 is potent. Get drawn in by the explanation of the etymology of prosperity in the first five minutes, stay for the wisdom of the remaining 40.