It’s a thoughtful interview in which two intelligent, caring people both acting in good faith but coming from wildly different cultural perspectives seek to bridge the gap between indigenous and Western cultures and priorities.

Now I’m going to begin with the obvious caveat here which is that I’m a British white woman with no direct knowledge or understanding of indigenous cultures, so I’m not going to claim any great expertise in this subject. But thanks to various friends, colleagues and brilliant books I’ve read, I’ve gained some understanding of just how much we can learn from indigenous and contemplative beliefs and cultures, and I’ve seen where some of the most significant tensions lie; and having seen some of them thrown into relief in this interview, I wanted to share my own reflections on it.

The first thing that struck me is that actually, a well-known member of the rationalist community inviting a spiritual leader from an indigenous community into conversation on a large public platform is an act of some bravery. This was particularly obvious from reading the comments, some of which were very supportive, but some of which were downright hostile, including one which started “what the fuck, Liv”. They urged her to “stick to interviewing AI governance/safety/macrostrategy experts” and to focus on “where the weightiest moral risks point to” rather than “interviewing for the cheap silly reason of not wanting to look narrow”.

For the rationalist community, who tend to prize evidence, scientific and probabilistic reasoning, and clear logic, giving airtime to figures who are directly advocating for spiritual and indigenous ways of knowing is clearly a departure from the norm, to put it mildly. The epistemic fundamentals of rationalism assume that beliefs should be grounded in evidence, and many indigenous cultures treat inherited knowledge, spiritual experience, relationship to place and communal practice as core sources of truth and understanding; an entirely different epistemological grounding. I’ve been in plenty of conversations with rationalists where claims from religious, spiritual or esoteric directions are shut down, dismissed or ridiculed.

What’s interesting to me is why these claims are perceived as such a threat, when at the same time, the rationalist community also prides itself on intellectual openness. This is where I’m impressed by Liv Boeree’s willingness to be open to these alternative forms of knowing, and to the potential that in order to uncover the truth we might also need to acknowledge the limits of what rationalism can offer.

Subscribe now

I was particularly struck by her openness in the podcast as she grappled with this paradox. In a discussion about the power of plants with powerful psychedelic properties such as Ayahuasca (which contains DMT, generally understood to be the world’s strongest psychedelic) and their role and significance in indigenous communities, Liv reflects:

“You talk about how people can learn from the water, they can learn from the birds. It’s funny because from my experiences, I agree you can use these medicines as a technology to talk to them. At the same time, the Western mind cannot comprehend this. I still don’t fully quite see how that could be, but I think for most people watching this, they would just be like wait, what, you can talk to the trees? You can talk to the water?”

There’s quite a few different things going on here. She’s acknowledging that her model of how the world works comes from a Western perspective and mindset, and that this frame is insufficient to hold a completely different epistemology and cosmology. But she’s not rejecting what she’s hearing simply because it doesn’t cohere. I think it’s interesting that part of the reason she doesn’t reject this is because it’s not just that someone else is telling her about it, but that she’s experienced it directly. It’s easy to simply dismiss a claim as ridiculous if it simply rests on the testimony of another person; it’s harder to do that when you’ve seen it for yourself.

So rather than collapsing into one side or the other, she holds the paradox, and does so in a spirit of openness and curiosity.

I’ve written before about the importance of being able to tolerate ambiguity in navigating complexity, and of practices such as discernment in being able to hold apparent paradox long enough for the sense to emerge. One of the things that this requires is enough of a sense of security and safety to not feel the need to assert that one way of seeing things is “right” and another is “wrong”. This is a very different skillset and capability to intelligence, analytic capacity and reasoning; instead it’s more about emotional regulation, attunement and relational holding. We need both; but it’s worth noticing that the first set of capabilities have typically been associated with public dialogue and debate, and the second with intimate, caregiving or cooperative settings, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to notice the coding of the first as male, and the second as female.

This isn’t specifically about gender, though; it’s more that any capacity coded as intuitive, relational or attuned has tended to be excluded from the spaces where we do the most serious public reasoning. We find ourselves in a cage of our own making, where the capabilities that might allow for more epistemic openness are excluded from the conversation. I find this both interesting and deeply ironic, but I’m also hopeful that the steps that we need to take to cultivate safety and to be open to alternative perspectives aren’t as huge as they might seem to be.

There was another part of the discussion that really stuck out to me as two people talking at cross purposes, however, and in this case not necessarily realising that they were. In this case the misunderstanding was ontological, which is to say, how they were understanding what actually exists, and how those things relate to each other.

The parts of the conversation I’m thinking of were when they were talking about ‘medicine’. Early on, Txana Tuwe referred to Ayahuasca, a powerful plant medicine that allows people to “enter into the consciousness of nature”. Liv responded to this by reflecting on her own experiences of the transformative power of Ayahuasca, describing how it helped her connect and communicate with nature, or “the spirit of Mother Earth herself”.

So far, so good, and they are more or less on the same page, but somewhere along the line their point diverges. It becomes apparent that Liv thinks of medicine in a Western way: if we are unwell, then we take some medicine, and then we get better. These are all separate entities or states, and medicine is a distinct “thing” that exists separately to other things, and these things relate in specific ways - there is a cause and effect, where taking medicine leads to better health.

So it’s not surprising that Liv reflects on the potential benefit of people being able to use ‘medicine’ to appreciate this deep interconnectivity of all things. She asks, “what are the ways in which we can access these medicines?” - as if it were a question of finding somewhere to access the pills (albeit in the case of Ayahuasca, we’re talking of course about a very powerful, potentially dangerous and rare set of compounds).

But many indigenous ontologies, including that of the Huni Kuin tribe, have a very different ontology, and this isn’t the way that they understand the interrelationship between objects and people. The clues are there in how Txana Tuwe talks about it. He says that “one of the ways for us to preserve our ancestry and the spirit of our ancestors is to connect with the medicines”, and then that “we prepare it and use it to connect with the ancestors.” From a quick reading, these might seem like they’re saying the same thing. On a closer inspection, the grammatical logic is doing something different. In the first, the connection is with the medicine; this as an act allows for the preservation of ancestry. In the second, the use of the medicine allows them to connect with the ancestors. To a Western eye, this looks illogical; we assume that we should be able to clearly separate cause and effect, and we might dismiss it as imprecision.

But actually what Txana Tuwe is showing is that in his worldview, these things aren’t separable. Cause and effect doesn’t work in the same way, because these aren’t separate, bounded things that a sequence can be constructed from. The medicine is not a separate thing; neither are the ancestors.

While the Western ontology starts from the premise that objects exist, as separate entities, and that relationships then arise as a secondary product of these entities, the indigenous ontology is relational. The relationships are the fundamental thing; the entities arise from these relations.

As such, medicine and ancestor aren’t two separate things that are joined together by a practice. The practice is the fundamental thing, and medicine and ancestor are patterns that emerge consistently throughout.

While it might seem on the face of it an impossible metaphysical claim, Txana Tuwe states this directly: he says “medicines are our ancestors. They were once people. Even the trees - all of them are medicines.” Again, this fusion of objects and agents; no single or separable cause or effect, because they are all combined.

I think it’s easier to understand this through a metaphor. If we think of medicine as a thing - say, a pill - we’re assuming that there are separate things (a medicine, an ancestor, a patient) that can enter into cause and effect type relationships.

But in the indigenous worldview, medicine is more like gardening. It’s not simply a thing that acts upon a person to produce an effect, but an ongoing practice and process of relationship and care. You don’t prescribe a short period of “gardening” and then expect a garden to remain healthy; its flourishing is dependent on continued attention to soil, water, sunlight, plants, seasons, and the gardener’s own actions. Health, in this sense, is not the endpoint produced by a discrete intervention; it’s something that’s continually generated and maintained through relationship among many participants.

So ‘medicine’, or Ayahuasca, isn’t just a pill that can be taken to solve all our problems. In fact, if the medicine is the coherent system, then Ayahuasca might not even be required, just as how in a garden with fertile soil, you wouldn’t necessarily need more fertiliser.

The irony is that there’s a chicken and an egg here. How can we come to break out of our Western ways of seeing, to understand and experienced this deeply interconnected web of life? Surely if we can just prescribe a sharp intervention of DMT globally then we’ll be dragged out of our slumber. But a mass application of fertiliser doesn’t automatically result in a thriving garden. Perhaps the real risk isn’t that we’re distracted from the weightiest moral risks, as some of Liv Boeree’s critics have suggested; it’s that we fail to take seriously what thousands of years of contemplative and indigenous tradition have held to be true, and therefore overlook the very tools we needed to tend the garden.

Here’s a smattering of readings that have profoundly shifted my own worldview through the perspective of indigenous cultures, and which I would urge you towards if anything in this sparks interest:

Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Sand Talk, by Tyson Yunkaporta
Etuaptmumk, or Two-Eyed-Seeing

I’ll also take the opportunity to acknowledge the Governing Together project, which I’ve been very fortunate to be a part of, and which is weaving some of this relational thinking into how we govern in a Western context, and demonstrating that this is a conversation that’s already stepping directly into current policy and practice, rather than only being a conversation for a podcast studio.

In the swirling mixture of things I’ve been thinking about lately, something that I’ve been circling a lot is around what it is to be interdisciplinary: to cross fields and domains, to build understanding and partnerships, to translate and to bridge gaps. It doesn’t really have a name or a role, although it is certainly a kind of capacity. It’s the thing which has driven how my own career has unfolded, and to be honest it’s been both a joy and a curse at times.

When I went to university, I studied history, I think primarily because it was the best possible way to be able to work with multiple overlapping threads of inquiry and over long timespans without having to narrow down too early. I specialised in urban history, which was a good way of using place as a way of not specialising at all, and urbanism became a way of projecting this mode of thinking into shaping the future, rather than cogitating on the past. So I trained as an urban designer, then a spatial planner, and worked in urban economics and policy, circling around place as a mechanism for how every thread - social, economic, environmental, political - came into contact, and often messy collision, right there on the street in front of us. When I started working as an advisor to developers, local authorities, engineers and designers who were shaping the built environment, I found myself taking more steps backwards to look more at the strategic context in which they were collaborating, making decisions and allocating funding. These days my work is much more around governance; how organisations, governments, institutions and ecosystems are structured to bring people together in the right way, to allow them to make effective decisions, to create trust and collaboration. When I describe it like this, it makes a reasonable amount of sense. When I try to give it a name or explain what I do in 30 seconds to a stranger, it’s… a challenge. I’m extraordinarily grateful to have the career that I have, and the flexibility that I do, where I can move between sectors and organisations doing little pieces of everything, and helping stitch it together.

At the same time, this has not been without its hiccups and stresses, and throughout my career so far I’ve had to tolerate bouts of crippling stress, imposter syndrome and anxiety; multiple cycles of burnout; and a constant challenge around how to make myself legible and legitimate without losing most of the actual value of what I’m doing.

I don’t share this for a moment to be a pity party, although I’m not going to pretend that I’ve come through it unscathed; but more to evidence how even someone who’s had an objectively successful career, and the multiple advantages of being White, British, having had a privileged and supportive upbringing, a good education and loving friends and family can still struggle. There are structural and systemic barriers to this mode of working.

If you step into a world designed for structured, linear thinking as a person who has experienced other systemic disadvantages, whether that’s social background, or race, or language, or disability, or gender, or any other intersectionality, then you are already fighting to make yourself legible. You’re not going to be explicitly pushing yourself to the margins when it was that hard to begin with. And if I’m right that the people with this capacity are more likely to be neurodivergent, which has also in turn been linked to a higher likelihood of being LGBTQI+, of experiencing mental ill health, of chronic physical illness, and of lower employment and education outcomes, then we might have a problem on our hands.

Subscribe now

In my view, if this holds to be true, it is a Very Big Problem, because we have never needed this kind of capacity more. We are now facing a set of interlocking and overlapping polycrises that require deeply integrated and highly responsive approaches to be able to address, working actively across the whole system. And yet far too often when I’m in a meeting or a discussion, I find that I’m the only one who’s able to bridge the gaps and see the bigger picture. I don’t think that’s always because those people don’t have the capacity, but I certainly think that the way we have structured our world has designed this capacity out.

Post industrialisation, and with the advent of the division of labour, we live in a world that rewards specialism and expertise, depth, and optimising of a single problem or output. That’s brought huge advances: a revolutionary improvement in living standards, and the significant reduction of mortality, ill health and poverty. I don’t criticise this for a moment.

But it seems that we’ve reached the limit of what this approach can do, and having now built institutions and systems that reward this way of thinking, we have a critical lack of the kind of connectivity that breeds real resilience. Whether we like it or not, we’ve now built artificial intelligence that will be capable of doing most of the depth and completion work that until now, we have done as humans. What we don’t have is the capacity to connect the interfaces. At the moment, when we manage to connect across organisations or silos, it’s more often by accident than intention. We rely far too much on those within the system who are sensing the frictions or differences and who are pushing at the edges of their “lane” to bridge the gaps. That takes resilience, and it takes people who are probably not naturally well-suited to these specialist roles being in the room, in the conversation.

I’ve had a sense for a while that there is an army of these types of thinkers who have the capacity that we critically need, but that they aren’t embedded across organisations, institutions and civil society in a way which unlocks this capacity and helps us shift institutions in the way that we critically need to. Those people who are present in the system are still far too often too hidden, and are struggling to articulate what their place is in the system that they are helping to hold together.

It was with this in mind that I posted a note on Substack about a week ago, saying that:

“I’m interested in finding people who are naturally good at translating between domains, and who either do it here through their writing or elsewhere in their work and practice.

My hunch is that they tend to be disproportionately neurodivergent, naturally interdisciplinary, and don’t easily fit into a single role type or function.

If that sounds like you, I’d be interested in connecting.”

And I’ve been inundated with responses, which was a little unexpected if I’m honest. But it seems like I picked up on a real signal, and when I offered that out, it seems to have struck a chord: I’m more convinced now that there is a real thing happening here in the latent capacity for connectivity which is going unused at a large scale. In particular, I heard my own frustration echoed and amplified throughout the comments. described “struggling to fit into a single role or a repetitive task, but I don’t know why”; talked about how she “desperately needed to combine domains but couldn’t find a space for myself in rigid work systems”. For this “makes it hard to translate what I do to others”.

I’ve been so fascinated and grateful to have about 200 strangers engage so openly and often vulnerably about their own experiences. I’m reminded of how all good collective action comes from shared vulnerability and that when we sense something, however indistinct it might feel, the ability to say, “I’m thinking this, how about you?” allows others to meet us there - either in recognition, or in challenge, so long as it’s done in good faith, and it therefore furthers our collective understanding.

So this has been a fascinating learning process for me, and through the various comments and discussions, it’s evolved my thinking on the subject. So I share this as my offering of what I’ve reflected and learned, in the hope that those who read this might in turn do the same back, and that we can continue to move towards something more coherent, even purposeful.

At a surface level, many of the experiences that people shared describe the multiple fields they’ve worked across, often pointing to a journey through different disciplines, or how they now combine them. often indicating how they’ve journeyed through different disciplines in their career or now work at connecting or combining them; described her route through marketing and graphic design, to philosophy and ethics, to spatial design; ’s went from landscape architecture and climate, to interactive mapping and storytelling, via data environmental & scientific data.

One reading of some of these framings might be to see it as a linear process, which steps from one field to another in a way that looks like translation or bridging. And translation was the language I used in my first post.

The various reflections through the comments, though, don’t imply that we’re simply talking about moving from one thing to another. In fact something more nuanced seems to be happening underneath for all those who are crossing and spanning domains with such apparent ease.

I don’t think most people are translating in the sense that you would if you used a dictionary or a cipher, just translating one to the other. We seem to be talking more about the underlying grammar and syntax, where there is a recognition of an underlying pattern in a field that sits below the surface. On the surface we see the places where these patterns manifest - in politics, or in mathematics, or in business. These are the places where we meet them as people in all their messy complexity. Below the surface we are sensing the pattern for how they interact.

Many of the comments I received were pointing towards this, including ’s:

“I often joke that I collect frameworks the way other people collect stamps. Design, ecology, meditation, mythology, psychology, nervous systems, systems thinking... eventually they all start having the same conversation.

I wonder if translators between domains are less interested in expertise than correspondence. The thrill isn’t mastering a field, but recognising the same pattern wearing different clothes.”

And ’s:

“This resonates deeply. I’ve spent my life moving between dance, engineering, technology, medicine, design, and the humanities—not as separate fields, but as different ways of seeing the same underlying reality.”

And ’s:

“For me every essay starts the same way. Pull a finding from one field, hold it up against something from a completely unrelated one, and look for the gap between what people assume and what’s actually going on underneath. Most of what I write is connecting two or more seemingly unconnected topics into a shared headroom.”

I think of this process as being about sensemaking: how we make sense of the world and structure it into something that is coherent. And when I do this, it is about constructing and reconstructing; trying out a frame to see if it fits, and waiting to see if things arrive that no longer cohere with it. When that friction or incoherence appears, I apply a new frame.

How appropriate, then, that I’m trying here to make sense of this whole question of what it is to bridge domains, and so having constructed through these comments and conversations my own possible way of understanding what this capacity is, I’ll offer it back out. I do that in the hope that you will share whether it resonated with you, where it fits and where it doesn’t, and we can continue this collective process of sensemaking.

For me it makes sense as a kind of process, which has a few steps to it.

1. Moving through a field of noise

We begin with the raw, embodied noise that’s comprised of all of the sensory information around us every day in the world. We absorb it through our senses, which initially (and imagine how this must feel at birth!) is an undifferentiated mess. Somehow, we need to filter this information and make sense of it.

2. Sensing a gradient in the noise

Within that mess, some of it coheres and some of it doesn’t. What we seem to be doing is sensing where the gradient of coherence is in the noise, and moving towards it in an experimental fashion to see if it gets warmer or colder. This seems to happen primarily below the level of conscious thought. I was struck by ’s reflections on this when they shared that “I’ve always understood how things will behave. On a scientific or work-related level, I often immediately see where to start.” Their description implies that this is far more about sensing and feeling than anything cognitive; they describe the encountering of incoherent as “like running a fingernail across Styrofoam”. I can resonate with this, and their thoughts made me particularly think of drawing, where if I sit down with a pen I usually have an intuitive sense of where to begin, in order to capture the overall feeling of the subject.

3. The coherence resolving into a pattern

The initial gradient opens up into coherence, and at some point this resolves into an identifiable pattern. This is the point at which it stops being a vague sense and starts being something graspable, even if only to yourself; I often find that it emerges as a metaphor an image, or simply a felt sense before words, but that I do at some point get an “aha” moment where the structure appears. (In these moments I’ll often take a pause and start scribbling to try and get to the shape of it before it slips back out of view.) I found a back-and-forth with particularly generative on this: we discussed whether or not what is happening is a bottom-up exhaustive search through every possibility, or something else. Kai quite reasonably said that this would take an unfeasibly large amount of computation or energy to complete. This led me to thinking that it’s probably closer to how stable diffusion techniques from certain AI models work (you’ll recognise them from image generation in particular): the model starts with unfiltered noise, then gradually coheres into an image by sensing a gradient, following it towards directions which have a higher probability of accuracy, and then removing noise until the coherent image appears. I don’t imagine that this is a perfect analogy but it points towards the remarkable efficiency of the brain in making sense of complexity and identifying the core patterns that underpin it.

4. Lifting the pattern out

Once the pattern becomes clear within the field, the next move is detaching it from the specific context that it showed up in, recognising that the pattern and the field it appeared in are not the same thing. It requires a level of abstraction, and the ability for that more abstract level of thought to travel across domains. As put it, “when it comes to translation, I think it’s between the abstract and the physical”.

5. Dropping it into another field, and having it hold

The final step is then placing that same abstracted pattern into a completely different field and having it still work there. This is what we’re doing when we use analogies or metaphors, but essentially what we’re pointing to when we do this is an underlying pattern or set of relationships which can be drawn from one context and applied to another in a way which actually deepens our understanding. The surface level context in which it appears is simply one manifestation, so while we continually point to these in order to ground and contextualise what we mean, fundamentally we are all pointing to the underlying patterns.

Having written that out, it’s funny to me that steps 1-5 sound as if I’m very sure that this is correct. Which is, I suppose, exactly what step 5 describes: I’ve taken something felt and messy, lifted it out of where it actually happened (a messy mixture of half-formed thoughts and comments and things I’ve read) and dropped it into a tidy numbered list, on a page. I’ve simplified it and re-framed it and to me, it still seems to hold its shape. After years of hedging my own opinions, I’ve learned that stating things plainly tends to land better than qualifying them into soup, and I think that’s true here too. But equally, this is my own sensemaking of the information available to me, and I don’t for a moment imagine that it will continue to hold true when more perspectives are added, so I look forward to it being broken down again.

If I were to characterise these underlying patterns that I’m pointing to, I’d offer that we are effectively recognising is the relationships between things, rather than the things themselves. Think of two ways of learning a recipe; one is to memorise the exact quantities of ingredients; 200g of sugar, 400g of flour. Useful if you want to make the same size cake. Useless once you need to cater for more people. If you memorise instead the ratio, or the relationship between those entities, then you can scale easily without loss. A ratio of 1:2 for flour and eggs. The same is true with music; a melody is defined by the relationship between each interval, and it can be transposed into any key. Learn it in one key only and you can’t recognise it when it plays it again. Learn the tune and the intervals, and you can play it any way you like. This seems to be what was pointing to when they said that:

“On a cooking level: I’m a pretty good cook, and even before I gained experience as a culinary journalist, I could often tell from a recipe whether it would work or not.”

And as put it:

I wonder if what you’re describing is less about translating between domains and more about recognizing that many domains are governed by the same underlying structures. Once you start thinking in terms of incentives, feedback loops, constraints, coordination, and information flow, finance, technology, biology, organizations, and even history begin to rhyme. The domains change, but the patterns don’t.

I love this idea that we are hearing rhymes in the world around us. In fact, I was struck by the number of musicians in the comments. I’m a musician myself, and for me, song, rhythm and music are the lines of coherence that pull together a noisy world. All of these kinds of relationships and ratios are fundamentally invariants - the most basic form of a pattern that remains constant, which is true in recipes, songs and triangles. It’s also how we understand that LLMs work. At a basic level, they are predicting the most likely next word in a sequence; but this is built on a memory which has used its training data to learn the relationships between things, and has encoded these in a mathematical representation of vectors. At a very fundamental level, I suspect we are doing something similar.

The other piece of this I’ve been turning over is not just what is this pattern-matching thing that we are doing, but what are the skills or capabilities that enable us to do it as humans, for which I again have some somewhat tentative conclusions or offerings.

I think a pre-requisite of step 1 is that we are actually able to perceive the noise in the first place. This requires a body! And the body and nervous system is allowing certain information from the external world in. If our minds and bodies are filtering out more of the sensory data that we use to make sense of the world before we we start to process it, then our perception is more efficient, but has less raw information to work with. (I’m going to avoid getting distracted by a rabbit hole here, which I could come back to another time, but I’ll note that my hunch that neurodivergent people might have a particular capacity for pattern-matching comes partly from this; there is evidence that certain types of neurodivergence have lower sensory gating.) I don’t think that this is a skill or capability per se, but more like a precondition.

I think there’s a second precondition alongside it, which is less about perception and more about self-trust. Steps 2 to 5 require the raw material to be there but they also require you to actually allow a hunch to surface and to commit to it before you’ve fully justified it to yourself. At this point, as I experienced plenty of during my 20s, self-doubt can drown out the subtle signals and interfere with the arrival of that through introducing hedging, qualifying, or leading someone to decide that they imagined it. A level of self-trust and emotional regulation reduces this distraction; certainly something I’ve noticed as I’ve got older, and better at getting out of my own way now. I think this is a sort of tolerance of ambiguity, which I also wrote about a while back in the context of how public institutions are able to navigate complexity, and which I think is the same sort of effect, albeit at a personal vs an institutional level.

Zooming in more closely, steps 2 to 3 are perhaps a perceptual skill, which is being able to find the signal in the noise. Steps 4 and 5 are more of a transfer skill, which is being able to lift the signal or pattern cleanly and then transfer it elsewhere without it degrading, and I think this includes communicating it as well as privately holding it. It feels to me, at least, that my ability to communicate clearly externally into the world, comes as a direct extension of how clearly I see the problem internally, within my own mind. I’m essentially communicating it to myself before I do it to others.

And underneath both of those capacities, both the finding and the transferring, I’ve been wondering if there’s also a switching capacity that’s doing the critical work, which incorporates both the divergent and convergent though: staying open and undecided for long enough to let a pattern surface, then converging on it sharply and precisely once it has. I notice in myself that the crispness of the convergent moment, which is how quickly and cleanly I can snap from “still listening” to “aha here’s the thing”, might be the real skill, more than either mode alone. I also find that from a personal perspective, again, the more relaxed I am and the calmer my nervous system, the better I am at this.

reflected on some of this, pointing to Baron-Cohen’s Empathising-Systemising theory (which I would note is contested, with some questionable assumptions about male-female differences, but that doesn’t mean the entire thing is wrong):

“The empathy is what tells me which pattern is worth carrying across a border; the systemizing is what lets me carry it intact. Neither alone gets you the translation.”

This prompted me to think of the empathising capacity as being much like divergence, and the systemising much like convergence.

So whether all of this is really several separate abilities, or one overall capacity that tends to show up together, I genuinely don’t know. I would be interested to hear any reflections on whether there are parts of this sequence that come to you more easily than others, or how they feel different, or whether these are actually just the wrong steps to begin with.

Considering I’m still reflecting on what this capacity or function is for perceiving and identifying the underlying structure of things is, I’m not convinced I yet know what to call it. But I’ve explored with interest the range of names that have been offered through the comments and that I’ve come across elsewhere: generalists, systems thinkers, boundary spanners, weavers, glue, polymaths. I think all of these have their uses, though for me none of them are quite landing yet. Generalist indicates the breadth and span, but not the depth of understanding or abstraction. A weaver names the visible connective act, which in practice can be the useful part, but not the underlying capacity that produces it; the same with domain traveller. Interstitionary perhaps gets the closest for me, which was mentioned by someone in the comments (who I’ve tried to find, but I cannot for the life of me find their message - please let me know if it was you!) in reference to and , who used it to describe individuals who work on the ‘things in between’, “connecting insights, people and resources between sectors, industries, companies, projects and individuals”.

An ‘interstitionary’ lands particularly well with me. In terms of its related domains, the ‘interstitium’ refers to the connective tissue or fascia in our bodies, which connects together our nerves, muscles, bones and ligaments (and as a person who experienced more than 10 years of chronic muscoskeletal pain, it was the discovery of the interstitium which helped me start to recover from this). I’ve also come across the idea of the interstice in materials science, where it is the space between atoms. My mum, who is a materials scientist specialising in superalloys, has described these patterns to me all my life. An internet search also suggests to me that the interstice is used in urban design. As an urban designer, I have to say, I’ve rarely come across the word; but the spaces in between buildings is probably the phrase that most urban designers would turn to as the reliable way of defining our discipline. Funny, isn’t it, how these patterns show up again and again.

Whether or not ‘interstitionary’ is the right word, perhaps I’ll just describe how it feels to me, and perhaps that is a better way of pointing to what is alive for me. What I imagine is a container which is large enough to encompass the field that everything else falls into. Within that container, we can see and acknowledge the interconnectivity between everything, we look beyond the nodes to the interstitial spaces that connect it all together, and we sense the gradients of coherence that run through it. We follow those patterns from discipline to discipline, extracting the more fundamental coherence that enables things to connect in ways that can be harmonious. Our ability to weave this world together is contingent on us holding a large enough container for us to all exist within.

For me, this is as much an emotional and embodiment exercise as it is a cognitive one. The act of holding that container asks us to be regulated, calm and to trust in ourselves and each other. It enables us to be curious and open, and to tolerate ambiguity in the trust that opening that space allows us to navigate this complex, messy, often painful and paradoxical world. I’m grateful to all those who are willing to sit in this ambiguous space with me and to allow all of that messiness to exist, in trust that the patterns which make it all coherent do exist, if only we are willing to allow them to make themselves known, and to notice them when they do.

For those of us who are still having this ongoing identity crisis about what role we play in this world of specialisation, I’d point you back to the spaces in between, and offer the words of Leonard Cohen as a word of hope for the future:

Urban design is one of those disciplines that has always struggled with something of an identity crisis (which is perhaps one of the reasons I’ve always resonated with it!). At a straightforward level, it deals with the level of urban form above that of buildings: the arrangement of streets, spaces and urban forms. It provides a bridge between the theory and practice of architecture, which is concerned primarily with buildings and what happens within them, and the larger questions of urban economics, town planning and land use, but grounded in a tradition of design: creative, exploratory, rooted in testing and iteration, and animated by the constant question of how well a place works for the people who use it.

There is a canon of what those of us in the field regard as its foundational texts. Many urbanists frequently cite Jane Jacobs as our spiritual mother; her 1961 The Death and Life of Great American Cities marked a substantive shift in thinking away from the top-down, regulatory, rationalist planning of the 1950s and 60s, towards an urbanism rooted in the lived experience of the people who use cities.

The two others we continuously point to are Kevin Lynch’s 1960 The Image of the City, which walks the reader through how we mentally make sense of, navigate and experience cities, introducing a language of paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks for how we do this, and a third, Christopher Alexander’s 1977 A Pattern Language.

Alexander’s text is one I’ve always held a little lightly. I remember reading it as a student, grappling with it and not quite resolving my feelings about it.

Subscribe now

Alexander was an architect and theorist who observed that people have a reliably consistent attitude to medieval cities as being attractive and harmonious. He set out to observe, and then codify, the patterns and systems underpinning the features people regard as positive, essentially producing a generative grammar in the way a computer scientist might (and in doing so, substantially informing much of the subsequent development of software engineering and Agile workflows through his work). If you read A Pattern Language, it certainly reads as a codified system: 253 patterns, everything from the distribution of towns across a region to the distribution of bus stops along a street. His stated intention throughout was designing spaces that feel alive and human. It is undoubtedly appealing, in that it hands a designer a fully codified system for how the elements of urban form relate to one another, democratising and empowering designers to reproduce the patterns of successful urbanism. And the detail of these patterns remain overtly human, pertaining as much to how it feels and is experienced as to its form:

“If children are not able to explore the whole of the adult world round about them, they cannot become adults. But modern cities are so dangerous that children cannot be allowed to explore them freely.” (A Pattern Language)

My challenge with it is this: as much as Alexander’s intention was to codify what it is that feels alive about cities, the act of codifying it is itself in tension with what he was trying to capture. To codify something is in some ways to cut off its aliveness, in that it produces something static or a snapshot, where the thing itself is a constantly moving, changing quality. I don’t think Alexander did anything wrong, exactly; if anything he was at pains to connect his work back to its underlying foundational theory. But I think A Pattern Language, as a text, and as it has passed into the canon, failed to sufficiently communicate that the pattern language was never the destination; it was a gate through to something else, which he called the timeless way of building. And the way it’s been picked up is understandable: it’s much easier to look at, study and absorb a code than it is to cultivate the underlying quality it points to. So readers and practitioners have tended to use it wrong, taking the patterns literally rather than provisionally, partly because the thing being pointed at has no name. You can’t be told it, you have to feel it, which is intrinsically challenging to communicate and pass on.

Within urbanism, Alexander inspired the subsequent New Urbanism movement, which introduced a more prescriptive set of design principles and codes for designing settlements, developed in large part by Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and first realised at Seaside, Florida. When this thinking crossed the Atlantic into the UK, it did so substantially through the work of Léon Krier, the architect and theorist behind the masterplan for Poundbury, in Dorset, developed for the Duchy of Cornwall under then-Prince Charles. Poundbury took the traditional architecture argument further than perhaps anywhere else in the country, and has become a rather polarising example of what this lineage produces. It leans hard on a traditional aesthetic (or dizzying collection of aesthetics combined), and there is a clear through-line back to Alexander’s codes, but it has become very detached from the original quality of aliveness that codified language was meant to serve. Walking around Poundbury, which I did for the first time a few weeks back, it feels, to me, strangely unalive. It’s trying to emulate something, and the effect is a copy of a copy of a copy, like an uncanny valley or a Disneyland that people actually live in.

From there the lineage continues into the introduction of the National Model Design Code into the UK’s planning policy; the principle of being able to codify design quality is an alluring one, particularly in a context where we are struggling to apply design rigour effectively throughout the system and something which seems to allow us to optimise that and apply it at scale is understandably attractive. But having become so detached from the original theory, what it does today is separate the process of design, and the living, breathing relationship that a designer and all of us as individuals has with a place, from the codified language meant to protect that instinct. There’s a risk that the code ends up blocking out the very thing it was built to safeguard.

When we walk through many of these places, we’re not having a direct relationship with the intrinsic pattern of humanity or feeling of aliveness. We are using codes which, on the page, are a simulacrum of aliveness, and attempting to use it to recreate what feels alive. We all remain students of Alexander but somewhere along this path, something seems to have got lost in the transmission.

Considering this gap I’ve always felt in my experience of Alexander, then, imagine my surprise when, earlier this week, browsing a shelf of second-hand books, I came across another Christopher Alexander text: The Timeless Way of Building.

I have no memory of ever being introduced to this book, but Alexander describes it as the foundation of the series, and as critical to understanding everything that comes afterward in A Pattern Language.

Alexander offers a beautifully constructed summary of the book via its table of contents, which in my view gives us everything we need to know. Beginning at the very beginning:

“A building or a town will only be alive to the extent that it is governed by the timeless way… it is a process which brings order out of nothing but ourselves. It cannot be attained, but it will happen of its own accord, if we will only let it.” (p. ix)

This is not something we can force or push into the world. It’s something we have to allow, and create space for.

“To seek the timeless way we must first know the quality without a name… There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named.” (p. ix)

This is something to be experienced, not named or codified.

“The search which we make for this quality, in our own lives, is the central search of any person, and the crux of any individual’s story. It is the search for those moments and situations when we are most alive.” (p. x)

This is a deeply personal search, for what it is to feel alive. It’s the quality we’re seeking both in ourselves and in our environments; in designing, we’re trying to bring the two into harmony.

“In order to define this quality in buildings and in towns, we must begin by understanding that every place is given its character by certain patterns of events that keep on happening there. These patterns of events are always interlocked with certain geometric patterns in the space… each building and each town is ultimately made out of these patterns in the space, and nothing else.” (p. x)

We can understand our spaces and places through an understanding of their patterns.

“The specific patterns out of which a building or a town is made may be alive or dead. To the extent they are alive, they let our inner forces loose, and set us free; but when they are dead, they keep us locked in conflict.” (p. x)

We can tell when a space is alive because it makes us feel alive. But to assess that, we have to be connected to what makes us feel alive in the first place, and if we can’t recognise it in ourselves, we’ll struggle to recognise it in our environments.

“The more living patterns there are in a place — a room, a building, or a town — the more it comes to life as an entirety, the more it glows, the more it has that self-maintaining fire which is the quality without a name. And when a building has this fire, then it becomes a part of nature. Like ocean waves, or blades of grass, its parts are governed by the endless play of repetition and variety created in the presence of the fact that all things pass. This is the quality itself.” (p. xi)

We recognise that sense of warmth and flow in spaces that are alive. We struggle to find language for it, because it defies language, but it’s deeper and more fundamental than simple preference.

“To reach the quality without a name we must then build a living pattern language as a gate... We may then gradually improve these patterns which we share, by testing them against experience: we can determine, very simply, whether these patterns make our surroundings live, or not, by recognising how they make us feel... Once we have built the gate, we can pass through it to the practice of the timeless way... And yet the timeless way is not complete, and will not fully generate the quality without a name, until we leave the gate behind.” (p. xi-xv).

A pattern language, in other words, was never the point; it always intended to be a gate or route that helps us move towards an environment that’s more alive, and when we’re collectively living within, recognising and contributing to that sense of aliveness, we no longer need the pattern language at all. When we’re inside the stream, moving with it, we don’t need the guide any more.

I think of the discussions I see and hear every day in the world of urbanism. Increasingly, over the last few years, we’ve heard an escalating debate between architects and designers, who’ve arguably become increasingly detached from public, democratic experience, arguing for particular principles of design. This has too often flattened into a dichotomy between what’s perceived as “beautiful” by ordinary people, which usually refers back to traditional design aesthetics, and what architects regard as “design,” which often points toward more contemporary approaches. We end up in long conversations about beauty as a matter of aesthetic choice, arguing over a codified version of the thing, rather than the thing itself.

I don’t think either side of that argument is right; I think both are, in the end, arguing about style and codification rather than aliveness, and I think there is a strong sense from members of the public that what they are seeing and feeling from their built environment does not seem to resonate with them. But I do think designers and architects are, more often than not, instinctively closer to the quality without a name than their critics give them credit for. Where they fall down is in translating and communicating it: the only means they have of expressing that instinct is through form, through the building itself, and that form is then read by everyone else as being the point, rather than as a gesture towards something underneath it. So the public ends up receiving the code, or the style, when what the designer may have been reaching for was the aliveness itself.

Nor do I think this failure runs in only one direction. I’m not going to claim that contemporary architects are always in the flow; I certainly don’t think that’s the case, although some are, and yet they fail to bring people with them. Whatever emerges from that state, however unfamiliar it looks, they can’t find a way to connect it back to the people who have to live alongside it. And others aren’t in the flow at all, but are simply following a different codified language of a modernist or “starchitect” canon, which is exactly as detached from the quality without a name as slavish pattern-copying at Poundbury is. Both are failures of the same kind but in different dresses.

We’re seeing a live version of this argument right now in the UK, in the recent work of groups like Create Streets, who marshal public preference surveys to argue that contemporary architecture is broadly disliked, and who tend to hold up New Urbanist places - Poundbury among them - as the answer. I think they’re onto something real in naming the dissatisfaction, but I don’t think they quite reach the deeper argument either; it remains, in the end, a debate about which aesthetic code people prefer, not about which places let people feel alive. And it’s not just a UK conversation. The same argument is playing out right now in the US too, from a reinstated push for classical style in federal architecture, to a more intellectual critique of contemporary design from figures in tech and economics arguing that aesthetics shape whether people even want new buildings and new housing built at all. It’s a live global argument; not surprising when it’s touching on something so deep as how we relate to our environments, and perhaps which makes it all the more important to get the terms of it right.

So it’s not difficult to see why Alexander regarded The Timeless Way of Building as the foundation of the whole series and the thing to properly understand before ever turning to A Pattern Language. A pattern language should, in theory, be a set of heuristics that speed up our ability to sense, and then design and create, buildings, spaces and places that speak directly to our hearts, and to become living places that emerge from us as living beings. But defaulting to a pattern language won’t necessarily get you there, any more than following instructions along a spiritual path will get you into its direct flow. They’re all arrows meant to speed up the journey but we shouldn’t mistake the directions for the destination. Once we’re in the flow, it moves us directly; until you’re in the flow, it’s very hard to see which direction to go in.

And critically, I think that for designers and architects who are able to each this sense of flow, this isn’t an invitation to rest on their laurels and preach to the world what that flow looks like; it is rather their responsibility to help guide and invite others into that flow with them.

I’ve felt a very strong sense in the last few days, having found this book, of something clicking into place. It’s resolved the missing piece in A Pattern Language, but it’s also resolved a much larger missing piece for me in how we are thinking and talking about design practice and design policy in Britain today, and what I think we’ve actually been trying to get back to all along. I spent five years working on this exact question at the Design Council, advising on architectural and design quality for buildings and masterplans across the UK, and I was directly involved in influencing and shaping current policy on design practice, design review and design coding. The Design Council was, and is, the Government’s go-to body for articulating and championing what good design is in the UK, but I think many of my colleagues in this space will share my sense that we’ve been grappling for a long time with this gap, and with how to even name it. I don’t for a moment think I’m expressing something here that no one else has realised. What I am sharing is that I now feel like I understand that gap and that I can name it, in a way I couldn’t before. This certainly doesn’t mean I know what to do about it (yet!) - but this is at least my attempt to put words to a piece that’s been missing.

I’d love to hear what others make of this and what it prompts and where it might or might not resonate, or where I’ve missed parts of this. I suspect there’s plenty more for us all to say on this subject.

It’s been a while since I’ve shared anything on here, which has been for various reasons (it’s not you, it’s me), but it’s always difficult after a pause to know how to break the silence. In that time there have been plenty of things I’ve considered writing about, but it turns out that the thing that does seem to want to be shared is about silence, which seems appropriate considering the context.

I’ve found that a more intentional practice around silence, space and what happens within it to have been quite genuinely transformative for me in the last year or so. It’s been prompted by various things in my life, perhaps the most obvious of which has been joining my local Quaker meeting, and Quakers have made the cultivation of silence - and discernment, or that which comes out of silence - into an entire practice and way of being.

Subscribe now

Learning for myself the value of stillness and discernment has made me curious about its history as a practice, which in fact goes way back beyond the Quakers - in fact we have thousands of years of codified traditions for discernment, going back to the Desert Saints of the 3-5th centuries, and it no doubt went back earlier than that. And yet having spent all my professional life working on how to solve complex problems and make better collective decisions, I’d never really found reference to it as a practice; just fragments at the edges. I’ve got really curious about why that is, and how we could learn more from it.

So I started writing about that, and produced lots of words which I might still share with you all that were, admittedly, more like an essay: a somewhat serious romp through the history, practice and potential of discernment and various reflections on how we can create spaces for silence in our we all get along in the modern world.

At the end, though, I felt like it was all a bit clever and all a bit dead, and that I’d committed the fatal error of “telling not showing”. That seemed strange when actually what’s so important about discernment to me is that it comes from the body, and that the secret seems to be more about how we can cultivate spaces where we can feel safe and relaxed even where ambiguity, the unknown, doubt and anxiety creeps in, which it inevitably does.

So instead I set myself a challenge: I used the morning writer’s hour at to give me a bounded chunk of space and silence in which I could see what I could discern about discernment, and here’s what came up for me, which is probably a far better illustration of the point than anything else I could possibly come up with.

I’ve been sitting here thinking about how usually when I write, it comes in fits and starts. I start with a few lines, come back to them, re-write most of them several times and force my thoughts into a shape that has a meaning.

I’m trying to write about discernment, though, and this is all about spaciousness, and allowing a thought its full time and space before curtailing it and forcing it into a form of words.

So instead, I’m staring out of the window for longer than I’m comfortable with, and holding a sentence in my mind while it thrashes around like a slippery fish. Other things bubble up around it, like anxiety and self-criticism. That sits uncomfortably for a while, until something else joins it, which is a is a kind of permission. A little voice pipes up saying, I’m allowed to feel that, that’s the whole point, that’s why we’re here. I don’t immediately ignore it, and I feel a bit more trust that something better will come out of the space, and the slippery sentence I was trying to hang on to flings itself out of my mind back to where it came from.

Other things filter in and out - the sound of the wind in the trees outside and the light on the leaves; disordered fragments of recent conversations with friends and colleagues. The part of me that’s narrating as I go, the part which you’re reading, buffers and halts. My mind hammers hard to get it back, before I remind myself to breathe and the sentence lets go. Discernment is about relaxing enough to let things through, trusting that order emerges in time, and staying in the here and now where it can. I reflect that I definitely haven’t got to the discernment stage yet; I’m still in the settling part. I’m testing and seeing if I can trust the container I’ve built. No, I don’t know where this is going. Yes, I am OK with that, just about, I think.

I wonder if I’m going to lose my audience with this aimless rambling, realise that’s a realistic possibility, and accept that that was inevitable anyway and to get over it.

I rub my knee absent-mindedly and think about what I’m going to eat for breakfast. I remember something else I was supposed to do, and gently and politely move it out of the way in my mind.

I find myself getting curious. I’m watching the unfolding of the present moment, and I’m wondering what discernment feels like to me. I find the meta-circularity of this whole exercise kind of funny. I wonder how much of my rambling you, the reader, will be able to cope with, and conclude I’ll have to edit it, which seems unfairly dishonest, but then life is unfair, and this makes me laugh as well. My tea is going cold.

I’m probably finding this funnier than I should - I’m definitely finding it funnier than I found writing about the history and practice of discernment, which was more like bearing down to squeeze words out of myself. That felt terribly sincere and serious, and this feels significantly less constipated, and much more open and playful. I reflect on how boring my writing must be normally as a result of this, and think to myself that I should try to lecture people less in future.

I sink down and arrive at a more grounded, settled sense, which I’ve come to recognise and name “sitting at the bottom of the swimming pool”. Here’s the place where it feels like I have more solid ground under me, where I can move around, or things can come to me, as they please.

I breathe more freely, and notice how much pressure I’d apparently been putting on myself about getting this piece of writing right. That all seems very unnecessary, and figure that if this doesn’t actually land, then it doesn’t matter - it’s allowed to just be an experiment, and I can always just do something else next time.

After all, just because this whole experience - around settling, and discernment - feels important to me, doesn’t necessarily mean it will to everyone else. I’m not here to preach or to insist that this is the solution to everyone’s problems.

A little voice pipes up and says, yes, but you do think it is, don’t you.

I look sideways and smile at the little voice. Yes, I suppose if I’m honest, yes: I do think there’s something in this practice that we’re collectively missing, something quite vital. Otherwise I wouldn’t be bothering to write about it.

I let that quiet urge to proselytise sit with my grounded sense of acceptance. They sit in mutual respect but neither neutralises the other. This one’s going to be more of a Mexican stand-off.

I let everything else move around them - I watch to the way the breathing feels in my chest, and listen to the wind in the trees outside, and think about a bill that I haven’t paid yet.

I think about how so much of my life - as a student, and in my working life - I’ve spent sitting in tension, forcing ideas and conclusions out of myself under pressure. I marvel at the difference to how this feels, in this more spacious place. I wonder if everyone else feels the same thing. Maybe other people are simply calmer than me? Maybe they don’t feel the need to force and strain? None of us are quite wired the same, and my brain definitely has a slightly haywire, restless bent. This certainly does something for me, but is it as useful for other people?

And something which finally feels still and true appears, not so much in words but more like a quiet, obvious truth that feels like it was there the whole time, although I’m sure I’ve only just seen it. Why don’t you ask them.

And that, finally, feels obvious: this was never supposed to be about me telling you what to do. It was meant to be a question for all of us.

How does this feel for you? What happens if you sit with a question for twenty minutes and give it space? What would happen if all of us tried this, together?

This time I turned the heat right down low, and I was letting them just sit. I spread the onions across the pan, gave them space, gently turned them, and paused to allow them to do what they needed to do. I pushed back my own inner restlessness, allowing them to go translucent, soften and produce the full sweetness that I rarely get to encounter in my own cooking.

In turn, it gave me pause too. There was a feeling of time and space shifting around me as I stood barefoot in my dressing gown in the early morning sunshine, still a chill in the air, warmth rising from the pan. The smell of onions opening and sweetening, the promise of a breakfast to come but for that moment, just a moment that didn’t need to pass and a pause in the relentless forward motion of everything.

Subscribe now

The paradox in this is that pausing and rest doesn’t come easily to me. To pause when everything in me wants to move forwards is like being held down against my will - I remember my frustration as a child as I struggled with tricky maths problems, and my mum would urge me to calm down, breathe and think clearly. To me it felt like being strapped to the ground with a gag over my mouth - my mind wasn’t able to slow down enough to allow the problem to sit and solve itself. When I was fixing or making something with my dad, he would urge me to be slow, gentle and calm, while I vibrated with frustration and impatience. I am the embodiment of “move fast and break things”. In some places, this is a useful strategy. It is not, however, always that optimal. What do I lose in that rush?

As I stood in the kitchen and turned the onions again in the pan, I felt an urge to capture and share the moment. I took a photo, and then laughed to myself that after months of not sharing anything on social media, it was something as arbitrary as a pan of onions that pushed me towards some instinct to share. I felt this sense of teetering on the edge, of trying to find the balance between stillness and forward motion. I recognised the constant calibration, of trying to move forward but not too fast, to hold myself back from rushing on, but desperate to avoid the feeling of stuckness and silence.

But I took the photo, and over the last day I’ve turned it over in my mind. What was the precise feeling of that moment, what was so particular about its quality and what it created in my mind and my body? What is it about it that resonated with me, how does it continue to feel as I inhabit that mental space, and how does that shift as the day unfolds beyond and around it? I gave it space to open and found myself this morning wanting to write it down. Here it is - the moment, the forward motion, not something that I put a lid on and put away, but something that I gave space to so it could open and live.

What have I gained from this? I’ve gained all the same sweetness, depth and flavour that the onions did from their pause.

What does it mean? Both nothing and everything. It doesn’t need to mean anything more than what it is. It’s simply a living thing or moment in the constant unfolding of everything. It’s a reminder of the value of finding that balance, space, and presence, capturing just the right movement that doesn’t stick and doesn’t rush, but moves with the same pace of things that are already unfolding around us and with us.

The shakshuka itself was wonderful, but I didn’t take a photo of that, so you’ll just have to take my word for it, and it’s not the point anyway.

Policy work, by contrast, is meant to be rational, objective and evidence-based. The culture of the civil service, think tanks and policy research prides itself on creating distance between the emotional messiness of how people actually think and act and the objective process of making policy. Where emotions are well-addressed in policy thinking, it’s usually through the lens of participatory practice, but even this tends to frame it more as “good process” rather than engaging with the emotional dynamics underlying it.

As my work has moved through think tanks, advisory roles and towards implementation in local government, I’ve increasingly felt like this framing misses much of what’s actually happening. Emotions don’t disappear, nor are they an uncontrolled, unpredictable force. They are an unavoidable reality of being human, and they exist all the time as we interact with the world and each other, in all the decisions that we make and how we work together.

Sometimes these emotions are small and manageable, and other times they are big and overwhelming. When we ignore them, they don’t just go away, and what I’ve seen is that right at the point when stress and friction appears, the system is least well equipped to be able to handle it.

I’ve been thinking through what might actually be happening here, and my mental model has shifted a lot recently. This post sketches out some of my current thinking, which I don’t expect to be either complete or fully resolved.

Subscribe now

I’ve loosely broken down the public policy process into three stages:

1. Politics: where issues are identified, debated publicly, and prioritised, through elections, campaigning, media attention and manifesto commitments.

2. Policy: where priorities are translated into programmes and strategies, through analysis, consultation and the design of interventions.

3. Implementation: where proposals become reality on the ground, through delivery in communities, frontline services, and the lived experience of citizens.

Think of any policy area - this could be planning, or health. Then consider the issues within it - these could be affordable housing and green space protection, or GP appointment access and hospital capacity.

What happens to these issues as we move through the process?

As issues move from politics -> policy -> implementation, three things happen at the same time:

1. The issues get bigger: they become more detailed, more concrete, and they affect more people, including those who weren’t involved at earlier stages.

2. Their emotional intensity increases: the stakes become more real, and the trade-offs become unavoidable.

3. They overlap more with other issues, producing friction.

It’s not the presence of emotions that causes a problem (on the contrary, they’re often what mobilises and motivates action and makes issues visible). The problem is when they collide and start to create emotional friction.

So when the emotional intensity is rising, and the friction is increasing, how do we manage this?

I think there are, loosely, three main mediating forces through which we manage emotional frictions:

• Narrative: this is a sense-making force, which provides coherence. It helps people understand why something is happening, creates direction and purpose, and can help people to understand trade-offs and consequences. It’s strong in politics, patchy in policy, and almost absent by the time you get to implementation.

• Relationships: this is a relational holding force. It helps people feel heard, considered, and not alone, and therefore absorbs the emotional heat. It’s strong in politics (through campaigning and relationships), intermittent in policy (usually through formal engagement or consultation processes) and very thin in implementation.

• Process: this is a co-ordination force. It organises activity and behaviour and determines who does what, when, and in what order. It makes things predictable by systematising principles that have already been established, but it can’t absorb emotional heat, it can only enforce what’s already been decided.

It’s not that process isn’t useful or important, but if we are still generating emotional friction, it’s not sufficient to mediate the conflict. This is the core problem, which is that just as issues heat up and collide, the system’s capacity to hold them disappears. The narrative breaks down, the relationships thin out, and the process takes over, just at the point at which we actually need emotional mediation.

There are plenty more implications and consequences that fall out of this. I’m hoping to share more as the thinking develops, and this broader topic of the psychological undercurrents within relationships, organisations and systems is something that I’ve been thinking about a lot in a number of different settings. In the meantime and as part of this process, I’d love to hear thoughts and reflections on this (including what doesn’t quite make sense or work!)

A particular nod to the team at Governing Together who I’ve been working with over the last year on how we create the conditions for trust to bridge divides, which has provided fertile ground for these ideas to develop.

In practice, none of these perspectives are wholly wrong; but most people are talking past each other, and are looking at different timelines, use cases and risks.

I’ve been following the debate, and using LLMs myself in various ways over the last couple of years. I'm not a software engineer, but I have the advantage of living with one, and I know enough to be able to see through the hype and frustration. As I've watched the conversation unfold, it's seemed increasingly critical that we can cut through the hype to the simple facts: what AI actually is, and what it can (and can't) do, both now and in the future.

In this post I'll unpack some of these foundations, partly for my own benefit, but also because I feel strongly that building a stronger collective understanding of AI is critical to us being able to understand and engage better in how it evolves and how we use it. I would very much invite responses, corrections, and suggestions, and I hope to be able to explore more of the implications further, ideally with others who are also willing to bridge those divides.

Subscribe now

What even is an AI?

When we talk about AI these days, we're usually talking about large language models (LLMs): tools that are trained on a large body of data which enables them to predict and generate the next word. We're mostly familiar with them in the form of chatbots, although they can be used more directly to enable applications.

The idea that all it is doing is predicting the next word seems to cause a reasonable amount of unease - surely this is too simple or reductionist? It's true that at a basic level, that's all that an AI is doing; but as long as the body of work it's trained on is large enough, and it can capture the nuance, context, subtext and relationship between issues, this is remarkably powerful. In fact that's essentially how the brain works - ours are just incredibly powerful and flexible.

The quality of LLM responses have changed a lot over just a few years in AI development. Prior to ChatGPT, reports were that AIs were interesting but mostly produced nonsense. Since ChatGPT, we've had a tool which has been reliable enough to actually be useful. Loosely speaking there are three things that determine the quality of an AI's output, all of which are interrelated:

• Scale: both the amount and the quality of the training data, and the number of parameters (connections) between the data. This drives the AI's overall "brainpower".

• Alignment: both the training methods, and the settings used. This ensures that the outputs are both safe and useful.

• Prompting: how users ask questions or set tasks. This is the equivalent to how well you drive a car, and the performance you can get out of it.

All of these things impact the quality of outputs that a user will get from an AI. The pre-2022 models were much smaller, which is mostly why they produced mostly word-salad, and in the intervening period models have become far larger - models today vary depending on use case, but tend to be 5-10 times larger in parameters - and are therefore significantly more capable. The early versions also sometimes went off the rails completely, which reminds us that alignment is as critical as raw scale.1 The third, prompting, sits almost entirely within the control of the user rather than the engineers, and we’ll come back to this.

So how good actually is AI, and what can it do?

Again here's where we easily become bamboozled between different claims. Debates fly around whether we have already reached Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which is a loose definition which essentially means whether an AI can do all of the intellectual tasks humans can, solving problems flexibly, adjusting to different domains, and using their common sense. OpenAI have associated GPT-5 (their current model) with "PhD level intelligence". On the other hand, there are plenty who turn to it to help with a task and become frustrated at its verbose and puffy outputs, which can still be guilty of mistakes or hallucinations.2 It can confidently state incorrect facts, struggle with basic maths, and sometimes misses logical connections that should really be obvious, at least to us.

So how can we carve a path through to reality? The quality and reliability of AI responses can be significantly influenced through the scale and alignment of the models, and AI companies will continue to work on these and perhaps yes, there may come a time when it exhibits a level of intelligence that outsmarts all of us. I think we're all agreed that LLMs aren't quite there yet; in the meantime, however, we already have a tool which is a remarkably smart assistant, even if a slightly unpredictable one. I think this difference between "what it does now" and "what it could do in the future" is incredibly important in both how we use and apply it now, and how we plan for it in the future. The question is - have we figured out how to work with it yet?

For me, working with an AI is like working with a new junior colleague. They're young, bright, enthusiastic, but not really sure what they are supposed to be doing. If I told them to just "produce a report", I wouldn't expect them to get it right first time. I'd need to explain clearly what I wanted, to check their work, and to iterate it with them. Essentially, this is what prompting is - the third factor which influences the quality of an AI's output. To get the best out of AI, we need to learn how to communicate and shape what we need, and to constantly question and test what it's saying. It's a dialogue, not an outsourcing service, and we should treat it as such.

This is why for me there are two big questions that we should be grappling with around AI. One is more technical (albeit with policy implications): how do we ensure future AI is safe and makes things better? But the other is about people: how do we use and apply what we already have in order to make things better? Perhaps the most challenging thing about this is that it doesn't just require convincing a fairly small group of engineers and decision-makers; it requires changing everyone's mindsets and ways of working, which is far more difficult, and so we’re struggling a bit more.

What's at stake, and how bad could it be?

Of course using AI is a personal choice, but in making that choice everyone should be fully aware of the risks - because it's not going to just disappear, any more than the Luddites' action against mechanised looms resulted in a return to handweaving cloth. Those who don't engage with it are likely to look up and rapidly find themselves in a world that is no longer designed for them.

This poses a huge inequality risk, with a growing divide between those who can use AI well and therefore solve problems, access opportunities, and make better decisions more easily. Within the workplace, staff who can use and apply AI will rise to the top, while those who either can't or refuse to will struggle to find a role for themselves. At a broader level, power and influence will concentrate in the hands of those willing and able to use AI, further excluding those who don't.

There are concerns about economic displacement which are genuine and valid. We're already seeing AI perform tasks currently done by humans, much faster.3 It's not quite as straightforward as "the robots are going to take our jobs," since like our junior colleague they still need careful oversight and steering. But as AI does replace people (and it remains to be seen to what extent this will happen), we'll see various effects: higher productivity and lower costs for businesses, which are likely to see more competition, lower prices and a lower barrier to entry. At the same time, we’re going to see job losses, the increasing economic exclusion of those who no longer have the skills that we need, and a shift of value away from workers in the form of salaries and towards tech companies in the form of technology contracts. On the more positive side, we will see more about how AI can transform opportunities for small businesses, public bodies and voluntary organisations, who already have unprecedented access to skills, knowledge and capacity from our new colleagues.

The honest answer is that we don't know exactly how this will play out. Some argue that AI will be no different from past technological shifts, and we will continue to adapt as we did with mechanised looms, steam engines and computers. Others argue that AI is different and will break the need for mass employment,4 requiring much more radical responses like Universal Basic Income or radical re-imaginings of how we spend our work and leisure time.

There are also other important considerations that I’m not going to attempt to go into in full detail here, but we should be thinking about and will need active consideration - including both the environmental and climate impacts,5 and privacy and data issues, particularly around AI being trained on personal or copyrighted data, and about representation and bias.

However far it ends up going, we should recognise that we have agency in this trajectory. How well we embrace this as individuals and organisations will determine whether AI becomes a tool to thrive and close divides between us, or a force that fuels resentment and widens them.

The role of Big Tech and why it matters

One of the biggest challenges we have about AI is about who controls and owns the means of production. The role of Big Tech isn't unique to AI - it's just the latest chapter in the role that a relatively small number of companies play in driving forwards innovation in technology, and Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Amazon and Anthropic sit among a relatively small group who own the infrastructure, models and ecosystems that is driving progress in AI.

Again, this isn't new - we've seen it throughout history in every industry, like the Victorian railway kings or steel magnates. Developing these technologies takes capital, investment, skills and risk, and barriers to entry are huge. Training an AI model takes huge amounts of compute, large datasets, and specific skills which are hard to find. Progress in the field therefore raises huge questions about trust, alignment and governance, and there are understandable concerns about whether to trust, and the guardrails required to enable it.

It's critical, therefore, that we think carefully about how progress in AI is governed: both the internal governance of tech companies, but also the role of policy and regulation in decision-making. Influencing this, again, takes proactive engagement and a willingness to collaborate.

The way forward: a middle path and the importance of collective and active engagement

The conversation about AI isn't, and shouldn't be, an issue for the experts alone. Ultimately, it's a tool: one that we can all use and explore for ourselves, and one that can already improve how we work and live. We would be far better off engaging with it than resisting.

It could help us save the world, but only if we learn how to use it; it could destroy us, but only if we ignore it; and it certainly can produce slop, but then so did your new colleague in their first week, and look at them now.

We don't need to panic or to dismiss it, but we do need to engage actively. Individuals, organisations, policymakers, and public bodies all have agency in how this plays out, and even more so if we do that together. At the moment, there's an open window in which we can shape how AI develops, but it won't stay open forever, and if we step back, Big Tech and early adopters will make those choices for us.

This isn't a situation in which we should wait and see - it's one where we should choose to engage rather than to avoid, and to collaborate rather than to fragment. That determines whether or not we retain agency in the discussion, and whether we ultimately gain or lose out from how it progresses.

In this post I'll explore the role of a modern civic cartographer, and I'll see if they can help us get out of the fog.

Subscribe now

So, I know I'm standing in the fog. What now?

Congratulations! Knowing that you are standing in the fog is the first, and maybe the most critical step. If you don't know what you don’t know, then you will just carry on doing... probably whatever it is you've already been doing. I have been surprised many times, with all sorts of different teams and individuals, the extent to which they are able to describe precisely *what* it is they’re doing, but not *why*, or why they're doing it that way rather than any other way. There's comfort in process, but it can be an unhelpful crutch, too. Once someone realises that they don’t know what it is they’re trying to achieve, then we are one step forward: we have a known unknown. What next?

Well, the problem with fog is that it is... foggy. If you were in fact standing in the fog, you probably wouldn’t just pick a direction and march forward. (When you think of it this way, it becomes quite remarkable that this is in fact what many people try to do in this situation). I think, again, this likely comes from a discomfort with uncertainty; it’s both disconcerting and vulnerable to admit that you don’t know where you are, and tempting to simply state a destination and walk towards it. If you do this, however, you may fall off a cliff. We have a real cultural issue with the expectation that we externally look like we know what we're doing. Perhaps a different approach is required.

Fog demands more of a tentative, exploratory approach: to feel out and try to make sense of where you are, and what’s going on. This requires not moving forwards for a little bit, or at least not moving forwards fast. This is more like mapping than navigating - we start by building a picture of where we are. If you've ever played Age of Empires then you'll be familiar with the experiencing of venturing into the greyed-out, unexplored areas of the map, which become visible as you move scouts and military units into them. This is how you discover resources, enemies and allies, and it's how you develop your strategy and tactics. This is about half of the game, and you probably won't be playing for long if you don't invest a decent amount of time into this process. Unsurprisingly, game designers call this unexplored map the "fog of war."

So too when we're working with these kinds of interlocking, complex problems that we're tackling in government or other similar organisations. How do we map the fog of war - and particularly, how do we do it alongside other people, when we're not just a single lone scout - but a whole city, multiple departments, and an ecosystem of partners, institutions and communities?

Mapping the space

As a modern civic cartographer venturing forwards into the fog, there are various different tactics that we might employ to help us understand where we are. This is, of course, a little different to simply setting off into the forest to see if we can find wood. It's essentially a research question, and there are a whole range of tools and techniques to use to our advantage. We might look at who the different stakeholders are - the department heads who'll need to implement changes, the community groups who'll be affected, the councillors who'll need to approve budgets. We're likely to meet with them, to understand what they're doing, what their challenges are and what processes we need to understand or navigate. We're also likely to review whatever data or insight we can gather, and understand the patterns and the gaps. We're probably going to look at what's done before, so that we don't try to do it again, and to understand how it relates to other projects that are already happening, where they might be trying to achieve something similar or will have useful insight for us to understand.

There is much to be said about this process; it's one which can be done well or badly, and it will be quite familiar to managers, leaders, people who've developed strategies, and which has become increasingly codified through methodologies used in strategy consulting. For the sake of not trying to re-invent the wheel, I'm going to skim over this for the time being, and suffice to say that this process is important, and ultimately constitutes the various pieces which will become our "map", and it is that map that will help us navigate the fog.

So who's writing our modern civic map?

Here we get to the real crux of the problem. Who is our civic cartographer, the person who will be figuring out where we are, and who we can go to in order to understand where we are and where we're going? The answer is that an effective map cannot be drawn by just one person. This is a collective exercise: the complexity of the problems we're working, the level of interrelationship between them, and the range of different perspectives and experiences that need to be brought into our collective understanding means that we are going to need a whole team of cartographers. In fact, we are all cartographers - in any organisation or community, there will always be something which only person knows. The question is more about facilitation - how can we identify and share their knowledge - and our own - between ourselves, to form a deep collective understanding? And how can we avoid the oversimplification and reductionism that could result from not involving enough voices in the process?

This reductionism of a single civic map presents real dangers to us - something that the political scientist James C Scott explored in his book Seeing Like a State.1 When governments try to make complex communities and states "legible" through standardised maps and surveys, they often miss the local knowledge and diversity of perspectives that were needed to govern effectively; the actions taken then miss much of the local knowledge, and communities become invisible, and increasingly frustrated. We need multiple mapmakers, all forming a collective map of our places. So how do we do this?

The value of artefacts in making the invisible visible

Some of the most effective creative people I've ever met have a knack for visualising their work as they think, and there is something very powerful about pulling out a piece of paper in a meeting and drawing a diagram to capture a nascent idea. Once it's externalised, it turns the invisible collective understanding of the group into a visible thing. This enables everyone around the table to consider it, see whether it aligns with the version in their mind's eye, and if not to amend and add to it. So long as everyone can recognise their thinking in this diagram, it allows it to be scribbled out, re-drafted and iterated until it represents the collective understanding of the group. Over time, this can become codified, stored, remembered and shared.

Produced in live-time, these kinds of artefacts can provide a stability and a direction to the shape of collaborative thought, allowing everyone around the table the mental comfort that the emergent thinking is being captured and provides a sense of progress and direction. If you’ve ever worked with a live-illustrator, or someone extremely good at taking notes on a whiteboard, you will have some sense of the comfort and creative joy that this can prompt.

Even when not produced in live time, the existence of an artefact functions in the same way: it allows for the capturing of that collective understanding, and becomes the external memory for the group, providing a single reference point to return to at a later date.

It's around this point - when, for example, a document is shared after a meeting - that we start to recognise 'artefacts' and their value, although we are typically constrained by our expectations of what they should be. In government in particular, we are uncomfortably obsessed with meeting minutes, routinely recording endless reams of minutes of useless discussion out of habit, or regulatory requirement. Meanwhile in some of the conversations where things are actually happening - like a snatched coffee after lunch - we often fail to just scribble it down or make those ideas tangible. I regard this as being a failure of awareness regarding the nature of the problem, where the method has been retained, and the purpose forgotten.

While there are cases where we need to refer back to this material for accountability or scrutiny (particularly in the public sector, where there are requirements on transparency), we tend to forget that it's primary purpose is not this at all, but instead to formalise knowledge - to be a learning and thinking tool for everyone involved, rather than being an end in itself.

From understanding to ideas

So far I've mostly been talking about simply understanding the space - the context in which we are operating, the people, the decision-makers, the risks, the opportunities, the projects and the overlapping challenges. This is one challenge, but there's another cognitive leap required, in order to articulate what might be done about it. This is actually harder than it sounds.

How many times have you asked someone what they want for dinner, and they've said "I don't know" or "I don't mind", instead of "I'd like fish and chips please", and how many times has this been more of a hindrance than a help? The pressure of coming up with ideas is enormous, especially if you feel the weight of making a decision on behalf of others. So too, if you are sitting in a meeting, and you are faced with needing to find a solution to a problem. For all the same reasons, this can result in a lapse into silence, and an uncomfortable feeling of being back in the unknown. We're not too good at sitting with this, and all too often this is resolved by someone leaping in with something like - "when I did this before, I did xyz". That's not necessarily unhelpful, but in my experience, these suggestions rarely involve a full consideration of whether or not that solution would be relevant or useful. How was the context different? Were they trying to do the same thing? Did it even work?

What does work in this moment of silence is being propositional in a way that remains open: treating this as a space for ideas, and where something emerges within the group, using it as an idea to test, rather than a solution to decide on. This is what designers would refer to as the "idea generation" or "divergent" phase - you are seeking to generate possibilities, not to move to solutions. Recognising it as a distinct phase in itself, and giving permission for any idea, however insane, gives you material that you can work with, and options to consider.

Here's where I would recognise the value of the "straw person" - proposing something not as an actual solution, but as an initial suggestion that can help move the discussion forward. Make that into an artefact, and you are back to something that is not invisible and abstract, but something which is visible and tangible. You can look at it, you can imagine it, and you can start to respond to it, critique and improve it, resulting over time in something that could become a viable solution.

How this worked in practice

Back to Newham Council, where (as I mentioned in the previous post) I was launched fresh into a local authority, tasked with understanding a series of complex regeneration partnership programmes where no-one really knew all of what was going on. I was right in the middle of the fog. I was having conversations, reading documents, holding meetings and trying to make sense of what was going on, initially for my own sake, but more critically, so that I could help communicate that understanding to everyone else who needed to participate, contribute or make decisions on it.

The critical inflection point for me in that process seemed to be the moment of hearing or learning something that was relevant to the project, and treating it not just as a piece of disconnected knowledge or data, but building it into my internal map of the context. That process of "sensemaking" is critical: for me, as for anyone, that connection happens intuitively, based on our capacity for pattern recognition. The challenge is then to capture it so that you both remember it (this bit is harder for me) and that others can understand it too.

So putting pen to paper was everything. As I started to build my internal map of the context, I starting drawing out whatever artefacts seemed to best reflect my mental model - a combination of timelines, diagrams, lists, organograms, process charts and maps. At this stage, you are not writing a story, you are drawing a map: so rarely is prose a good form to use (and so I reflect again, on how mad it is that we commonly rely on meeting minutes for this purpose). The two most useful diagrams I made, both of which were then referred to at least weekly for the next two years, were:

• A governance chart which captured all of the different decision-making bodies, their representatives, their sphere of responsibility, the hierarchy of decision-making, the frequency of meetings and how they interconnected with each other

• A diagram which I think was known as "That Huge Chart" but was in fact a somewhat Frankenstein-esque version of a programme roadmap, showing all of the interrelated projects stacked together, what they were seeking to do and how they overlapped in time

As I developed each of these, and anything else which the situation necessitated, as I reached the limits of my knowledge, I would take these to other people and use them as a basis for our discussion. First this would illustrate to them what I (and now, by extension, we) already knew, thereby scaffolding their existing understanding of the situation, and then allowing them to contribute, to identify places where their understanding conflicted, where they knew something different or they had additional ideas or insights that could be captured.

It was very clear that there was a big difference between the nature of a conversation when we didn't start with and use that artefact and shared understanding, and the ones that did. For some of the work that I was doing, there were people who came to the conversation with often quite firm, and often quite wrong, assumptions about the situation. These conversations were often emotionally charged, and being able to put something on the table to explain the situation immediately signalled that I had a command of the situation, and became perhaps the most effective tool I have ever found for reducing stress and conflict. This should be no surprise - their fear was borne out of uncertainty, and a growing shared understanding invited calm, more constructive engagement. It wasn't just those who brought fear and anxiety; it was also those who had previously been quiet and unwilling to contribute who started to engage. This was particularly true for people who were working on small or technical parts of the project, who were until that point only engaging with a very small part of it, and started to recognise their place within the bigger situation. This recognition of the interconnectivity and the ability to visualise it allowed them to participate and contribute, recognising that they did in fact have meaningful contributions and formed an important part of the whole.

This process was more or less my sole focus for a few months, and it took a little time before I started to feel frustrated that I didn't feel like I'd "done anything". Sure, I had a sheaf of work-in-progress documents, but one of my main tasks had been to "write a project plan" and since we still didn't really understand where we were, what was going on or what we were trying to achieve, we weren't much closer to having a plan to get there. It didn't feel to me like much had changed or any real decisions had been made. It took a little more time for me to realise that the work I was doing was genuine work, that happens in all projects of this nature (to some extent), but without a real name - a space that exists before the problem definition, and which constitutes the usually invisible process of building that collective understanding.

The problems with artefacts

I've lost count of the number of times that a project has started with the aim of all participants to produce a "living, breathing document" that doesn't become "just another report sitting on the shelf". This is an almost inevitable, but fundamentally difficult challenge to overcome - how do we formalise knowledge in a format that captures our emerging collective intelligence, without it becoming outdated, superseded or heavy? It seems to require very highly adaptive and responsive knowledge systems, where the friction of capturing and updating our information systems is as low as possible, and we have easy access to our collective maps and activities. I don't know the answer - and I'd like to explore it further - but I do strongly suspect it doesn't involve writing 35 page PDFs for every project stage, and expecting everyone to read them.

There are undoubtedly external pressures which can pull our focus away from the building of collective intelligence and towards the production of artefacts for their own sake - the notion of "deliverables" in a contract, or the desire to "have something to show" for a project or a piece of work, for example. For me this all points to the fact that artefacts are not, in fact, a distraction from the collective production of ideas but the fundamental tool for enabling it. I was particularly interested to talk to Gabe Stein about this recently, who was arguing that most teams in tech start ups spend their time generating artefacts that symbolise productivity instead of actually building things; I didn't wholly agree with him, but it prompted a fascinating discussion about the role of artefacts in productivity, which I think may prompt some further explorations on this topic. But perhaps this is part of the problem - we've got used to the idea of a report being an end in itself, rather than forming part of a collective enterprise of understanding. How do we pull artefacts back to their original function?

Shared understanding is shared trust

What's particularly clear to me now is that this process is not only about information exchange - it's also about relationships, emotions and trust. Particularly, perhaps, in government, where activity is both small p-political and big p-Political, and when working in partnership, where there are so many risk surfaces and such high potential for malign actors or misaligned incentives, building trust is absolutely key. And we already know that uncertainty breeds anxiety; certainty, meanwhile, breeds trust. A clearer understanding of the known knowns, and the known unknowns, helps us work together, collaborate better, and actually be in a position to be able to make decisions.

The importance of shared trust is something I've been reflecting on a lot recently, particularly thanks to some research I've been working on with Györgyi Gálik, Ryan Bellinson and Alexandra Bekker of of Dark Matter Labs. Their forthcoming work (which will be published in the next few weeks - and I'll link to it when it comes out) addresses the drivers of collective action, the everyday politics of behaviour change, bridging divides and reducing polarisation, and recognises the critical importance of trust to enabling this change. (I also credit it with introducing me to some of the ideas around sensemaking that I’ve referenced here).

I'm increasingly of the view that understanding the deeper emotional layer of all of our interactions is fundamental. We seem to have arrived at a frankly bizarre situation where we appreciate the importance of emotions and psychology in our personal relationships - in which we are typically making smaller decisions, at the scale of households or friendship groups - but not in our professional or civic relationships - where we are making decisions that potentially impact thousands of people. If we're going to be making more decisions collectively - and I'd suggest that in the face of the kind of existential risks we're actually grappling with, like the climate crisis and AI, we don't have much choice about this - we're going to have to get much better at getting along together.

What next?

Györgyi’s work, and a number of others in this space,2 are forming an increasingly energetic ecosystem of thinking and action around how we collaborate and make better decisions collectively, particularly at the city-scale. This post (and the part 1 before it) captures some of my current reflections and the directions of my thinking on some of these issues; I'd like to explore them further, and I'm particularly interested in how we bridge the gap between theory and action on the ground. What we can do to support civic leaders, the voluntary and community sectors, and organisations to build these kind of processes into their normal ways of working? If these are issues you're grappling with, I'd love to hear your thoughts, and any reflections on anything I've captured or missed so far.

Many of the ideas and reflections here will likely feel very familiar, particularly to designers and facilitators used to working in these type of ambiguous, complex or early-stage environments; and the context and the challenge of how this works within local government will, I imagine, resonate with colleagues across town halls and beyond. I don’t presume my observations to be original, but I have been surprised at the extent to which this ambiguous phase feels both very significant within local government, as a critical place for ensuring that we are solving the right challenges and diverting limited resources effectively; but also almost completely invisible, with little awareness within standard government practice and few tools or approaches with which to navigate it.

If this observation is true (although I’m both willing and curious to be challenged on it), then this seems to be a space worth investigating further - how can we build better awareness of this pre-stage 0 space within projects, teams and organisations? How can we formalise this into the way that we develop projects, processes and policies? And what new structures, tools or mindsets do we need to help build it into the day-to-day practice of civil servants and local government officers? If these questions and/or any of my observations resonate with you, or if you already have some good answers, I’d be very happy to explore it further.

Subscribe now

Some personal background, and the nature of foggy projects

I joined the London Borough of Newham in 2021 as an Associate with Public Practice, who are a UK-based not for profit organisation working to build the design and placemaking capacity of the public sector. Up until that point my career had been spent working primarily on behalf of local government and adjacent public bodies - both as a researcher in a think tank, and a strategic design advisor for infrastructure, regeneration and placemaking projects and organisations - but this marked my first foray directly into public service. The Public Practice programme includes one day a fortnight dedicated to learning and development (or group therapy, as I called it), which no doubt helped me maintain my sanity during this time, but also afforded me the time to reflect on what was happening in my day job, and to see some of the wood for the trees. If it weren’t for this, I might still be walking around in the fog, banging into things, so a moment of thanks for the excellent people at Public Practice for this.

The role I was placed into involved leading the Council’s response to two large strategic regeneration partnerships. They were both very early-stage initiatives, which were focussed more on political alignment, organisational structure and policy frameworks than on delivery; they both spanned multiple directorates within the Council, requiring a joined-up approach; and they were both partnerships with a large number of external bodies, meaning that most of the decision-making sat either outside the Council, or only partly with it. I think this makes them a particularly good training ground for this pre-stage 0 space: there was a lot of activity going on, but it was highly distributed across different organisations, teams and projects. There was often limited visibility on what that activity was, made more complex by the political and commercial sensitivity of the projects. And there were a lot of different people involved, many of whom had various opinions on the challenges and the objectives, some of which quite highly-charged, and many of which didn’t align. In other words, we didn’t really know what we were trying to do, and we didn’t really know how we were going to do it. In the words of Eddie Obeng, we were firmly in the fog.

For one of these projects, I vividly remember reading the documents I'd been sent in my first week, writing a list of around 40 questions to ask my team, and receiving the response: "These are excellent questions. We don't know the answers, so those are things for you to find out." (The mistake, of course, is assuming that there is yet an answer.) For the other, I remember receiving a phone call from our then-Corporate Director, who asked me if I could provide some additional assistance alongside my main work; not that there was any specific action which needed taking, he said, but more that it would help if I could just... figure out what was going on?

What followed was a year of intense immersion into the weird and woolly world of how we navigate this somewhat uncomfortable pre-stage 0 fog and try to get out of it together, safely. And every situation will look somewhat different, but I suspect many people in local government and beyond will recognise this feeling too, and to those who may have felt similarly at sea, I offer the assurance that if I could get out of it, then I imagine that you can too.

What is a project before it's a project?

Within architecture and urban design, we use the RIBA Stages to navigate our way through projects, which run from Stage 0 (Strategic Definition) to Stage 7 (In Use). They provide a helpful map to walk through everything that needs to be done at each stage; most sectors and disciplines have their own version (like Agile or Prince2) and they are all broadly similar in the key ways.

The problem with any project lifecycle is that it has to have a beginning and an end. Understandable: this is where the vast majority of the activity, decision-making and investment happens, and the stages through design, planning and construction require significant coordination and technical expertise.

But what happens before then, and how do you get to the beginning - to the point of identifying a need, or writing a brief? For an individual or small project this process is (relatively) straightforward: I could notice that I need somewhere to store my garden tools, measure up my garden, go out and buy a shed and build it myself.

But the more people involved, and the more complex the system, the harder this process is. Many projects, and particularly those in complex systems that require collective coordination and decision-making - like within government, or cities, or large-scale organisations - don't emerge from a single individual. Instead, there is a long period of loose thinking that gradually builds towards the collective understanding and the visibility required to get to the point of "Strategic Definition" - what are we trying to do, and how do we do it.

Most of my work in urbanism has fallen in this murky space, which tends to be occupied more by politicians, investors, policymakers and communities rather than technicians. This pre-Stage 0 space is where individuals or organisations are figuring out or articulating needs or objectives: do we need new housing, new infrastructure or better skills programmes? What sorts of things might achieve that - is it investment, regulation or advocacy? Is there an opportunity we could capture, or a need we haven't fulfilled? This is a huge co-ordination challenge, and while we have various kinds of infrastructure to help us scaffold this space - this is the role of legislation, policy and governance - those artefacts don't emerge from nowhere. This pre-stage 0 phase is defined more by an absence of things than a presence, is inherently invisible, and therefore rarely talked about - but also critically important.

The reason to linger in the pre-stage 0 fog

As foggy as it is, the pre-stage 0 space is also perhaps one of the most important places where we can have impact - this is the place from which we decide where to invest our resource or energy, and from which ideas, policies, business cases or projects ultimately emerge. Fail to notice it, and you fail to notice the potential opportunities that you might miss, the possible risks that you might not notice, or the underlying connectivity between the things that you do end up doing.

We know that some of the deepest challenges that local authorities are trying to influence - addressing climate change; improving health; overcoming poverty and expanding opportunities, and supporting social cohesion - are all deeply interlinked. Address one and you influence the other; you can’t tackle child obesity without thinking about how a family earns enough money each week to buy healthy food. Anyone in front line services knows this, but the challenge is how to actually be able to take a step back from implementation, to make sense of the complexity of the situation, and to appreciate that a space exists before stage 0 from which you are able to make different choices or work in different ways. This takes strategic awareness, cognitive load and time, most of which are things that are in short supply within resource-constrained local governments. The irony, of course, is that not lingering in this space often means that huge wasted effort goes into individual services or projects that are inefficient, solving the wrong problem, duplicating someone else’s work, or simply could be done better in a different way.

Building this collective understanding of the complex system in which we are all operating relies on drawing a clear (enough) picture, which is shared across the organisation, of their context, what the challenges and the opportunities are, of the work that they are already doing, and of their collective aims and objectives. In other words, it relies on a map - something which shows each individual person or team where they are, what they are doing, and from which they can navigate themselves - rather than forcing them to walk around and deliver critical services while effectively blindfolded.

This idea of a civic map isn’t new. When the “smart cities” agenda was first appearing, there were many promises and interesting case studies exploring the potential of “city dashboards” - a single reference point that could capture data from across the city, as well as performance metrics, acting as a powerful tool for internal coordination. And these initiatives have undoubtedly improved city performance - the Rio de Janeiro Centro de Operações is perhaps the best known example, which has enabled faster responses and more effective integration of services. But the promise hasn’t really borne out in reality. Early criticisms of the problems of these dashboards in simplifying the complexity of urban environments down to a few quantifiable metrics have never really been deeply addressed. And now there’s more of a growing recognition that building a really effective civic decision-making infrastructure will rely on far more than a dashboard: technology cannot simply replace or overlay the more fundamental changes we need to our governance, infrastructure and bureaucracy in order to help both people and machines interact more effectively together, both within and beyond the town hall, and build the understanding required to make better decisions together.1

These are questions that are being addressed actively within a number of different domains. In particular, the work of Geoff Mulgan and others on collective intelligence seems particularly pertinent here, and his book Big Minds, albeit a few years old now, is a hugely thought-provoking read on how it is that we make sense of things both as individuals and collectively, and what mechanisms need to be in place to facilitate this. I think there are also some highly valuable insights to be drawn from other domains such as computational social science and the interface between humans and machines - and particularly the question around the future role of AI - that can help us understand both how we can build this collective understanding of the systems we are within, and then how we can apply it in practice as decision-makers, policymakers and practitioners. These are explorations for another day, but would no doubt help us draw a better map, which we can all read and update together, in order to navigate with.

Is this a space, or is it a stage?

At risk of sounding esoteric, I wondered for a bit about whether this is a “pre-stage 0 stage” or a “pre-stage 0 space”. Does it exist as a moment in time, or is it a space that we inhabit? I think it’s the latter. We’re quite pre-disposed, particularly in Western cultures, to think of things in terms of time: we organise our thinking more around progress, development and planning, than we do around the way that each of the spaces that we inhabit function or feel. We are concerned more about what’s next, than about what’s around us. (This is even baked into our language and grammatical structures). That’s good in many ways - it helps us progress, develop, move forwards. In other ways, it’s bad. We’re not so conscious of simply being aware of what’s around us now - what’s the setting we’re working within? Who is involved and who is affected? And how does this connect to the broader environment?

I think conceptualising this as more as a “space” can therefore help us - more to give us permission to simply ask, “where are we now?" rather than being hung up on, “where are we going next?” And that’s the whole point of fog anyway - good luck making progress out of that fast.

The psychological challenge of inhabiting uncertainty

I think another part of the reason that this foggy space is so rarely spoken about and also why it is so difficult for people to operate in is that it is intrinsically abstract and undefined. Humans on the whole are not predisposed to be comfortable with uncertainty; there's various evidence that suggests uncertainty is a key contributor to anxiety,2 and our minds are expert-pattern creators, so we will much prefer to jump to a conclusion or speed ahead to a solution rather than spend time in this uncomfortable space. That's understandable, but a bit of a problem, especially when the challenges we're working on are so complex, interlinked and don't necessarily have an easy solution. It's particularly a problem when we are tempted to revert to previous solutions as an answer, regardless of whether they've worked or not, and helps to explain why it is that I've sat in so many meetings where people ask "how have other local councils done this?" or "are there any case studies that we can follow?” I'm not saying that case studies or sharing best practice isn't helpful - on the contrary, this can often give something around which to structure our thinking - but the temptation to jump forwards to action too soon misses out a critical step in our collective thinking. Nonetheless, awareness of the fundamental discomfort of this process is probably helpful for navigating it, and can encourage us to give ourselves a little more support as we walk out into the fog.

So where do we go now?

If I’m right about this pre-stage 0 space, then we have a bit of a problem: one of the most critical phases of any complex project or policy initiative is also the one that is arguably most difficult to handle. We’re walking around in a space where we can’t see anything, we’re anxious and lost, and worst of all, much of the time we don’t even realise that we’re in it. But it’s also exactly the place where we determine what it is that we want to do, how we want to do it, and what resources we will put into making it happen, and it’s critically important that we do that with others at the same time - so that we don’t all end up walking in different directions.

I think this alone probably justifies some further thought and attention, to help build at the very least our awareness of the fog that we find ourselves in. And also the good news is that it’s not like we’ve never navigated this before. There are plenty of quite well-established methods for helping us navigate the fog; here enter the facilitators, the designers, and the systems thinkers, who within a diverse set of sectors and professions have been doing this stuff for ages. Phew. Thank God.

In Part 2, I’ll share a bit more about how I ended up doing this: the tools and approaches that I used to try to make sense of the situations I was working in, and how they helped to turn circular conversations into more productive discussions. I’ll talk about the critical role of artefacts like maps, diagrams and charts in building our collective understanding, how they can help individuals and organisations build trust in each other, and what we might need to do to apply these approaches more systematically across local government.

These are, of course, all just stories, and there is always a different story you could tell, based on a different set of priors. Whether or not you or those around you would be able to accept that different story is a separate question (and likely depends on their attachment to their own stories), but to those who might say that seems too subjective ("of course there is an external reality!") - well yes, of course there is, insofar as there is empirical evidence that we can observe and measure and we seem to broadly agree on (Monet was a talented painter, the sky is blue, I make a decent stack of pancakes). But there are still people who’d prefer blueberry pancakes, or would rather have a Picasso than a Monet.

Subscribe now

Of course we rarely actually have control over the stories that we are telling, or which our minds are telling us. This is the real genius of our minds, an extraordinary capability for pattern recognition that has little to do with our conscious decision-making. As soon as we’re born, our minds are busy exploring and wandering, using pattern recognition to construct a version of the world and of ourselves which seems to make sense, something which can help us survive and which is consistent and resilient enough to enable us to navigate the world robustly. Through this process I might conclude that I am a kind person, I might present myself as a painter, or consider myself to be a liberal.

When new information arises that threatens that sense of self, then problems arise. Our story no longer stacks up - we feel threatened, we go into defensive mode, and we either defend (“I’m still a painter, I just work in a a bank 3 days a week!”) or we retreat (I won’t describe myself as a painter, or as a banker either). That becomes an exhausting way to live, reliant on defending the story that our mind has built to protect us, rather than simply operating freely in the world. Is that story actually still necessary? It could be, if there are real external risks that it’s protecting us from - ostracisation, judgement, or rejection. But we might also just be constructing something that allows us to judge ourselves, rather than to operate more freely in the world.

I have always struggled to find a consistent story about myself that seems to fit comfortably. There’s never any shortage of things to choose from - I have an uncomfortably large number of interests, preferences and hobbies - but I rarely know which one to choose. I enjoy running, cycling, painting, gardening, knitting, singing… but don’t assume I’ve actually done any of them in the last 12 months. I might describe my work as being urbanism, strategy, local government, transformation, or whatever else seems to be in my inbox that week, but don’t assume I’ll still be doing that in 12 months either. Even my name is a battleground - I use two different names almost interchangeably. I’m wearing so many different monikers for myself that I can hardly stand up.

But what I generally find is that I'm happiest and most comfortable when I simply stop worrying about how to present myself and just allow myself to act more spontaneously and instinctively, based on how I feel at the time and whatever decisions or actions seem to generate a sense of positivity in me. When this happens, it feels simply like I can interact more easily with the rest of the world, and generally speaking If I’m putting things out into the world - actively replying to messages, sharing photos or writing on the internet, telling effusive stories at parties with a lot of hand gestures - then it’s probably a sign that I’m feeling less constrained by my own stories, and looser about my identity and my relationship with the outside world. If I go quiet, then you can probably assume that everything’s got a little tight, I’ve become constrained by my own stories, and I’m defending myself from the world somehow.

This is more or less how I’ve felt for the last few months. I spent 15 months away travelling, during which I generally felt very free, open and unencumbered - unsurprisingly, separating yourself from any real external responsibilities or expectations can have that effect. But I was happy to come back to London, excited to be home with my friends and family and to establish a new kind of stability for my life. That’s been a challenging process both practically and emotionally, but probably unsurprisingly, it’s also been difficult to pin down which of those stories I’ve told about myself in the past my fit me now in a new stage of life. Somehow none of them seem to fit, and I’ve found myself gradually going quiet as I try to figure out what is I’m doing, what it is I want to do, and what stories might be a comfortable fit for that.

The inherent looseness of this stage of my life is, in many ways, a wonderful thing - it allows for possibility and experimentation. What’s been frustrating is that while I’ve been full of ideas and there’s been no shortage of creativity or productivity round here, I’ve still had a strong feeling of resistance when it comes to even identifying myself with any particular thing, let alone sharing it with the external world. When I do identify with something, allow myself to tell a particular story, and share something with the world, it creates some sense of comfort - at least I am this, and here’s something I can associate myself with. But that feels too limiting, I’m unwilling to only wear one thing, and I ask myself - why do I feel the need to tell that story in the first place? Why can't I just allow these things to flow more freely, allow them all in and out and not ascribe any of them to my fundamental identity or character?

The problem with this is it feels like I’m naked - of course it would be nice to be free and unencumbered of stories, but it’s cold outside and people keep looking at me weirdly. But I also don’t want to go back to how things used to be, where my wardrobe is full to bursting and I feel like I’m stuck in a perpetual changing room where nothing seems to fit and the buttons are too fiddly.

I think what I probably need isn’t more stories, but fewer. A proper sort out, to throw out the stories that don’t seem to fit or I hardly ever wear, and perhaps just a few things that can be worn on lots of different occasions, stories that are easy to move in and don’t take forever to take off. Perhaps something which is more custom-fit, with plenty of pockets and a label inside, “easy care, breathable fabric, machine washable.”

Over time you get used to that, and to a way of life which is like a bit like Gromit on the model train, laying down the train tracks as he goes. That becomes your life, and when you allow that to be the norm and accept it as a way of life, there's an inherent kind of restfulness in it. For much of our time away, I felt a sort of rhythmic calm in the constant churn. Nonetheless, everyone who has asked me what I missed while I was away has received the same answer. I didn't miss things or places (OK, I did miss spinach and ricotta tortellini, I'll admit that), but for the first time in my life I actively missed routine and consistency. That came as a surprise to me, since I'm not generally a person who values structure or predictability, but there's something about having a steady foundation for your life which seems fundamental to proper growth and progress, and which is rendered almost impossible by constant change.

For the last few weeks we've been in transition between these two states, living out here with my partner’s parents while we figure out what we do next, and that return to a fragile kind of stability has been something of a shock to the system. For the first few weeks back in London I had some existential version of sea-legs: I was constantly expecting to be moving or going somewhere new, and I found myself surprised when I kept waking up in the same bed. A sailor coming back to port has to adjust to being back on solid ground, and I needed to re-learn how to root myself in one place.

What's meant a great deal to me during this time, therefore, has been the little pieces of consistency and predictability that I've been able to build into my life. In and around job seeking, flat hunting, and catching up with friends and family, we've found some small routines: going to the gym, going out for lunchtime walks, and feeding the cat. One of my most appreciated, however, has been gardening. It's one of those activities that I don't usually think about very much, but which I've reflected on a great deal over the last few weeks, and I've found it's fed me all sorts of nutrients I didn't know I needed, like a sort of reverse photosynthesis.

Chris' parents are keen gardeners, and his dad has an allotment approximately the size of a small farm. Their garden has a wide border of flowers, plants and pots, and the allotment's nursery is spread across their house and garden, in the sunny kitchen window, out in the growhouse, and in the propagator in the potting shed. Going on holiday in mid-April is a risky business for a gardener on this scale, so there was some pressure to not neglect the seedlings in their critical phase of growth. My task was to tend the seeds in the propagator, and to transition them out once they germinated; to water all the seedlings and ensure they had enough light; and to start to harden them up outside during the day, getting them ready to be transplanted.

All in all this isn't a huge job (and a very reasonable exchange for rent, alongside keeping the cat alive and happy). Checking the soil, the leaves, watering, and moving the seedlings around takes probably around half an hour a day in total. It could be the sort of task that you would build into an existing routine - perhaps you would do it first thing in the morning, open up the growhouse, go round with the watering can, and get on with your day, a bit like any other chore like doing the washing up or cleaning the toilet.

What I forgot is that it's nothing like doing the washing up, because plants are not inanimate objects. You are tending a real, living thing, which changes all the time: partly through the relentless march of time and progress, as it grows and matures (or hopefully it does) and as it reacts and responds to its conditions. On a hot, sunny day, the soil will dry out more quickly, demanding a more regular watering regime, and an open door on the growhouse to allow the air temperature to cool. Certain plants will start to struggle without enough light, and after a few days you notice their growth start to wane; move them outside, and they will react and thrive. Leave the seedlings too long all in the same position, and they will grow fast on one side towards the light, unless you turn them around to allow them to grow tall and straight. Leave newly germinated seedlings in the propagator for too long, and they will grow leggy and weak, as they put all of their energy into trying to reach the sun.

This kind of attentiveness is demanded of a gardener who wants their garden to thrive. And yet that attentiveness is kindled in us by our inherent capacity for curiosity. Of course, if you simply rotate each day and deliver the same meal of water without observation, then you'll give the plants some of what they need, but only for a time, until their needs change and develop. Pay just enough attention to observe the changes, and the feedback mechanism informs you of the effectiveness of your care. Especially at this stage of life, plants are highly reactive. You can see by wilting leaves and dry soil that a plant is underwatered. The mind engages with the puzzle. Dryness needs water; give it an extra drink, and watch as it gurgles happily, fills its fibrous leaves and leans off again towards the sun. The attentive gardener is rewarded by a sense of achievement and fulfilment. Those rewards continue - come back the next day, and find that it has sprouted a new set of leaves. Over the hours and days you see new ones emerge. What an extraordinary feat of life.

I found that this pattern of care and growth became not just a routine but a new kind of purpose - I would regularly wander out into the garden during the day to observe the changes, at first the obvious ones, and then the subtle. Micro-adaptations to my care would result in new types of growth, stronger stems, happier leaves. How else could I help them thrive? An iteration loop informs me of my success, and how perfect and simple it is. Given how in most of life we receive only the most subtle feedback or signals as to how our actions change the complex world around us, it's unsurprisingly compelling to retreat to this perfect system in the nursery.

At first the speed of change is extraordinary, but before long this becomes all part of the normal way of things. The greater concern then becomes the absence of change - lack of growth or wilting leaves. I was surprised at the sense of mild grief I had at the failure of the kalettes to thrive. (They're, apparently, a cross between kale and a brussels sprout.) They probably had too long in the propagator, and struggled to thrive out in the growhouse. I watched as everything around them burst into leaves while they continued to limply hang over the edge of the tray. No amount of coaxing or tending could urge them back into life. I felt a kind of half-sadness, half-acceptance about it - as much as I felt myself responsible for their burgeoning life, it seemed ridiculous to assume that I could bend their nascent stems to my will. I've been granted access to this little cycle of life by observing it, but that doesn't mean that I can assume any ownership over it.

This new rhythmic pattern of life is all the more acute to me because of its complete incompatibility with the life I've been living for the last 15 months. I'm not saying you couldn't carry around a seedling tray in your backpack, but I've never yet seen it, and what would you do once it's outgrown its pot? A plant wants to be planted in one place, not constantly displaced. And when we're constantly moving around in the world, we're distracted by the changes dictated by geography. Stay still for a bit, and it's the changes of time that you start paying closer attention to.

Chris' parents are back from their holiday now, and I felt a little like the children I was babysitting have been picked up by their parents. I'm watching on slightly more from afar now as they continue to grow, and some of them have moved onto the allotment. It's a wilder world our there, more unpredictable, more complicated. There are foxes and birds and they don't get watered every day, but they're also stronger now and better able to cope.

Meanwhile, I've now joined my friend's annual sunflower competition. I bought my seeds, put the plugs in the propagator, and a few days ago transplanted the brave seedlings out into big pots. They're currently soaking up some sunshine and I've been singing verses of "Ah! Sun-flower" by William Blake to them. A few are thriving, but my current favourite is one whose first seed leaves grew malformed and twisted. It didn't look too promising at first, but its second set seem strong, and its stem is pretty sturdy. I've got high hopes for this one (which is good, because last year's winner reached 11 foot 5).

I know the Blake poem because I sang it a few years back (there is a particularly beautiful version of it in Jonathan Dove's *Passing of the Year*). I'd never thought so much about the words before, but it seems all the more pertinent since my return to solid ground, and it makes me all the more grateful to be standing in one place long enough to see these new sunflowers grow.

Ah Sun-flower! weary of time,

Who countest the steps of the Sun:

Seeking after that sweet golden clime

Where the travellers journey is done.

In recent years, I've come to really enjoy club nights in a way that I just didn't when I was younger. I still went out to Park End (i.e. your average sweaty high street sweat box) on a Wednesday night because my friends were going and, well, it was just what you did, but finding venues with actually good music, a positive and joyful atmosphere and proper, immersive and expressive dancing has been something of a revelation for me. The shift from clubs being somewhere where you go to anaesthetise yourself and then perform or parade, to somewhere where you go to feel free, lose yourself in music, and throw shapes all over the place, seems to me a more important distinction than people generally recognise.

Subscribe now

Take last Saturday - after a slow filtering in of the crowd and a gentle build up, my friend and I find ourselves close to the stage and surrounded by a crowd who are almost vibrating. Everyone hangs together in joyful anticipation, people share smiles and eye catches, and everyone moves in their own way. Some are grooving from the hips, some nodding, some moving their hands, and as the tension builds up the energy grows. Together we make an interlocking system in which everyone is engaged, aware and moving together, each person is interrelating and responding to each other’s movements, and everyone is lost in their own moment and experience of the music. As the tension builds we all hang in the balance together, and at the top, we wait, a beat of silence, and then the drop. The whole room implodes, and everyone lets go in a moment of collective ecstasy.

This happens all over the world in all sorts of places, week in week out, and that sort of thing gets me curious: on one level, this is a totally normal human experience. On another, this is extraordinary: to experience a moment of transcendence and collective joy with hundreds of strangers. What happens in these spaces, in the air and in the room, that creates this little window into nirvana? I know quite a lot about music, and I’ve been learning an increasing amount about the brain, so I thought I'd try to make sense of that experience and understand why it means so much to me. The rest of this post, if you can stay with me (and it is a long one, but hopefully a good one) explains what I found out.

The building blocks: rhythm, expectation, and entrainment

We all know to some degree that music has a powerful influence over our minds and bodies. We listen to REM when we're sad and we need to cry, or Technotronic when we're going to the gym and need to pump up the jam. But the specific and potent ways in which music can bind together with our mind and body is actually pretty amazing, and unsurprisingly more complicated than I thought at first.

It all starts when we begin to move to the music. We're all familiar with the moment of when we hear a tune playing nearby and our foot starts tapping. Note I didn't say "we start tapping our foot". This is more of an instinctual response than a voluntary one. There are a few things happening internally here: first, your ears are hearing and your brain is processing the music, and through pattern recognition, you are starting to develop what's called "rhythmic expectation" of the beat. We identify a pattern; our brain predicts when it will next fall; and when our ears hear that, we are rewarded with a little burst of dopamine. Now it has captured both our attention and it has calibrated a little internal metronome which keeps us engaged us in the music. This process is called entrainment: the synchronisation of the mind with a rhythm. (The psychologist and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, who has written a lot about the relationship between music and the brain, talks about this process as being key to how we derive anticipation and pleasure through music.)

So far our metronome is happily ticking away safely within our minds, but it doesn't stay inside for long. Once the internal metronome has begun, your entrained mind will then engage your body in the process. It might start with a tapping foot, or drumming fingers, but soon your body will find a rhythmic pattern, a process known as "phase locking", where certain parts of the body move to certain parts of the beat. What happens here has almost infinite possibilities, and researchers who've looked at this have had limited luck in understanding how it happens (other than that it's complicated, and it involves the entire body in various ways).

But we've all felt that moment when you've just arrived at a gig, you're standing in the corner with a beer, and you find yourself nodding or swaying along to the music. In whichever way it manifests, before long these patterns will become consistent and predictable and as you move, your entrainment and connection to the music becomes stronger and more solid.

So far, this first phase of dancing is called "basic entrainment". At this point, it follows the primary rhythm of the music, and most likely has a predictable and straightforward relationship with the core pulse of the music.

After a while you might feel like you're really getting into the music, and perhaps you put down your beer to allow your body to engage more fully. In addition to your nodding, you start moving your hips to the sound of the bass drum, which falls on the first beat, and your shoulders to the hi hat, which falls on the third. We're now entering what's called "multilevel entrainment." It's associated with increased neural engagement as you process multiple layers of the music at the same time, and it tends to correlate with deeper states of flow. As a dancer and a listener, you are probably feeling more deeply involved with the music at this point, and that pattern recogniser in your brain is more invested and engaged in where it's going. At the same time, you're probably going to become less focussed on other things that might have been on your mind: you're less worried about whether someone's going to kick your beer over, and you're no longer thinking so much about whether that person at the bar was looking at you funny. Instead you're more deeply engaged in the present moment, and you’re becoming held within the time bounds of the music rather than the external world.

Losing track of time: all together now

That feeling of losing the normal bounds of time is a powerful effect of music that applies whether you're playing, singing, dancing or even just deeply listening. I remember my singing teacher in school explaining this us during a choir rehearsal. She pointed out to us that the vast majority of the time, we structure our lives around the hours, minutes and seconds from the clock. This is a completely arbitrary time structure to us - we obey it because societal coordination demands it of us, but beyond the sunrise and sunset, most of the time it feels quite disconnected from our actual functions or activities.

Instead, when you sing together, the internal time structure of the music becomes the unifying reference point for everyone. Each person individually feels that rhythm within their body; through the music, it's shared between everyone; and it binds everyone together, keeping the music in time. Through the kind of subtle interactions that are involved through our bodies and our voices, both in singing, playing and dance, we collectively navigate that time-space together, and (usually) arrive at the end at the same time. If you have ever thought that musicians need a conductor to keep them together, try watching a barbershop quartet! And getting to the end of a piece of music and asking a group how much time has passed is like asking a cat what day of the week it is - it simply won't make sense to them.

But the impact of this collective rhythmic entrainment is powerful. When we hear and feel the music as a group, it creates a deep sense of involvement, unity and connectedness between the minds and the bodies of everyone involved. Everyone else around you has also transcended the normal bounds of time to be part of this separate version of time-space, and you are an intrinsic part of it.

Tension and release: how music engages us emotionally

I mentioned Daniel Levitin earlier, who wrote about how our brains reward us when our rhythmic expectation is correct. What I didn't mention is that not only does the brain give us dopamine when we accurately predict the rhythm, but when we predict the rhythm and it doesn't arrive in the way we expect it to, this produces a strong emotional effect in us.

That rhythmic surprise could consist of lots of different things: sometimes syncopation, which emphasises the "off" beat in the bar, or sudden rests or gaps, or changes in tempo, where it gets slower or speeds up. It can also include things like metrical dissonance, where you have two different metres occurring at the same time: perhaps there are 3 beats stretched over an underlying 4/4 pulse, or it could be that just one line in the music has a different pulse completely, like 3/4, which phases out of sync, exists in its own time-space for a while, and then resolves back with the main pulse 12 beats later.

The effect of all these rhythmic surprises is to create a sense of anticipation, tension and delayed resolution, which holds us first in suspense and then resolves at the point of arrival. (This is exactly what happens harmonically in music as well: one of the most powerfully emotional musical tools is suspension, where part of the previous chord is held over into the new one before it finally resolves, and is a big part of its emotional effect on us, often creating a sense of longing.) A musician, producer or DJ will use all of these techniques as part of the composition process, and all music contains elements which serve to mess with our expectations and pull on our heartstrings somehow.

The creative dialogue of dancing and music making

So why is this relevant to that feeling in the middle of the crowd at a gig in Camden? Well, partly because this is all part of why music is so absorbing, engaging and affective to us in the first place. But it's also because, coming back to the dance floor, this kind of creative musicality forms the next, deeper stage of entrainment. Something I've seen happen in a crowd (and on a few occasions experienced myself) is when someone becomes entrained to a rhythm which transcends the music completely. Usually, once you are entrained, you move with the music, and in most cases - although everyone might have locked on to a different line or instrument (and there could be many of them, and they could be highly complex) - you can see and feel how it is that everyone around you is involved, and recognise how it derives from the music that you're hearing. For someone who has deeply internalised the musical structure, though, they can then improvise on top of this, first entraining to and then dancing to a counterpoint rhythm that doesn't exist within the music at all.

This makes it a deeply involving and creative experience: you're not just responding to, but actively creating and participating in the musical experience. The movements and rhythms which come from the body can then be seen, felt and experienced by others, who can in turn riff off it, and create new layers of the music themselves. This becomes a huge creative playground for dancers and musicians, who are all actively creating the music around them, are aware of and responding to others' movements and rhythms, and are engaged in a subtle interaction and dialogue. It becomes a powerful collective experience for everyone who attended, and no individual version of it will ever be the same, in the same way that any improvised jazz tune will ever be the same.

Do you feel the beat or follow the line?

Combine all these types of dance response and you already have quite an eclectic picture on the dance floor. Someone's pulling wild shapes with their torso the middle of the floor, someone else is pogoing in the corner, and one person is drawing squares with their arms and boxes with their hips. But then look around you, and you might see some even more esoteric moves, and wonder where on earth these are coming from.

One night when I was at a small community rave in London, my partner and I were dancing together with our arms and hands making shapes through the air, following the top lines of the music and feeling like we were floating off above the crowd. Our friends, meanwhile, were engaged in what my dad would probably describe as "heads-down, four-square, mindless boogie": moving back and forth in a tight, rhythmic and focussed way. We seemed to be having a completely different internal and external response to the music, and one of them observed to me that she always felt and experienced the music in this way. Well, everyone has their own individual way of interacting and responding to music, and it turns out that when we dance we are primarily engaging one of these two types of response: either feeling the beat, or following the line.

When we feel the beat, we’re responding to the rhythmic entrainment that we’ve been discussing so far. It seems to be the most common form of dance response, perhaps because rhythm locks so powerfully into our physiology. But we can also experience melodic entrainment, where we follow the line, and that looks and feels quite different. In melodic entrainment, the mind is engaged not with the rhythm, but with the shape of the melody, predicting where it is going, following its movements and responding emotionally to its direction. Internally, this tends to be more emotional and expressive, and outwardly, this tends to produce more flowing and individualistic responses. The result: you will probably notice in a crowd when someone is melodically entrained. See, for example, the man dancing last weekend with his eyes closed, face enraptured, hands tracing the melodic arc through the air, while everyone else grooved around him. Now we seem to be creating a whole orchestra through dance, right there on the floor.

Rhythm and the regulation of the nervous system

So far, we've seen how all the different ways in which our minds process music can produce very distinct external physical results, in the form of a wide range of different dance moves. But what's happening to the body and our hopefully coordinated limbs is also happening within our other physiological processes too. The process of entrainment isn't limited to our external bodies: our heartbeat, breathing, and brainwaves can all become entrained too, and as they all tune into this same process of rhythmic integration, and we get deeper into 'the zone', it has some really interesting effects on how we think, behave and process things.

One of the key systems at play here is, of course, the nervous system, which is the communication network that exchanges messages between the mind and all the other parts of the body. The nervous system is responsible for everything our body does - both the voluntary functions (like movement) and the involuntary ones (like breathing).

It's become fairly well understood that the autonomic nervous system (which is responsible for the involuntary functions) exists (more or less) in one of two states. When we are stressed, or in danger, the body's sympathetic nervous system becomes triggered. This is the 'fight or flight' reaction: it increases the heart rate, directs blood to the most important systems, and releases stress hormones to prepares you for action. When the danger has passed, the parasympathetic nervous then kicks in to calm the body down. This prompts rest and relaxation, reducing our heart rate, slowing our breathing, and reducing tension. It's also known as the 'rest and digest' system, and it allows the body to recover, restoring functions which are switched off while under stress, like digestion, the immune system or sleep and recovery. These systems are switched on and off without our direct control, sometimes without our even noticing, and the fight or flight response can be triggered by any number of things in both our minds and in our external world - a memory of something stressful, or the sight of a lion in the distance.

In theory, the parasympathetic response should kick in naturally after the body has experienced stress, to prompt recovery and enable the body and mind to calm down. But one of the things we've become familiar with hearing now is how modern day life triggers many of us into a state of chronic stress, and in this state of constant tension, our bodies lose the ability to naturally trigger a parasympathetic response, deepening the cycle of stress.

Luckily, there are various ways in which you can 'manually' trigger the parasympathetic nervous system - breathing; meditation; physical touch; and our old friend, rhythmic entrainment. It's a powerful mechanism for this, because it taps into a whole set of the different internal physiological mechanisms which trigger the rest and digest response. The sympathetic nervous system, in readying for action and flooding the body with hormones, isn't particularly interested in dancing; it's paused all the non-essential functions to allow itself to fight or run away. But rhythm, movement and music have powerful grounding impacts on the body, which can help all of its internal processes to settle back into a state of rest. That explains why, when you start to get into the music, you stop thinking about your beer and the weird looks from the person at the bar, and become more focussed on the here and now and your internal sense of time.

Brainwaves and the beat

Given music is processed through our nervous system, then, it shouldn't be surprising that it also makes its way right up through the spinal cord into our brainwaves, through a process of communication between the mind, body and its external stimuli which is subtle, two-way, and constantly shifting. The brain is constantly cycling in and out of different types of processing, and the types of brainwaves that we produce reflect our present mental state. When we measure them through an EEG, we can associate certain wave speeds with certain kinds of mental activity, which looks a bit like this:

Delta waves (0.5-4 Hz): Deep sleep, healing, unconsciousness

Theta waves (4–8 Hz): Meditation, creativity, deep relaxation

Alpha waves (8–13 Hz): Relaxed alertness, pre-sleep/drowsy states

Beta waves (13–30 Hz):Active thinking, problem solving, anxiety

Gamma waves (30+ Hz): High-level cognition, peak focus, insight

Now, these frequencies aren't the same as the speed of the music in the way that we'd typically measure it; normally when we talk about BPM with music we are referring to 'beats in a bar', or, the underlying pulse of the music. A funeral march would probably be around 60-80 BPM; most pop songs are about 100-130 BPM, and techno is usually about 120-140 BPM. That would make techno about 2.33 Hz, and if our brainwave speed directly corresponded to the pulse of the music, we'd all fall straight to sleep every time we listened to Daft Punk.

Luckily the process is a bit more complicated than that. Most music contains subdivisions of its pulse, which form part of the percussion or the harmonic layers of the music. Some synth or electronic layers can involve rhythms so fast that they are barely audible, instead sounding like buzzing or humming; and the mind can still, in some circumstances, entrain on these layers. But as we already know, people can also entrain onto rhythms that they hear in their head, and a highly activated, engaged mind who is fully involved in the music can be facilitated into triggering gamma waves, even without hearing those frequencies externally.

This kind of relationship produces all sorts of interesting potential for brain activity, and some people have developed this approach to support a form of biohacking. To give just one example, this process is the theory behind "binaural beats". This is where two different frequencies of sound are played at once, one in the left ear and one in the right, and the difference in frequency - say one is at 100 Hz and another is at 130 Hz - gets processed in the brain and perceived as a rhythmic beat at 30 Hz. The idea is that your brain then entrains to this rhythm, and this can induce different mental states.

Sounds wild but actually this is nothing particularly new. There are plenty of examples across the world where drumming and rhythmic mantras are used to enter different brain states, particularly for trances or meditation (such as the Shamans and the Sufis who both use them as part of spiritual ceremonies). And perhaps this sounds esoteric to us, but then again, not really: being on the dancefloor at a rave is regularly associated with endorphin releases, altered states of consciousness, and experiences of unity, transcendence and a feeling of connection to something larger.

And that's exactly what's happening: in that space, with 1,500 people all entrained to the same music through their bodies and their brains, a whole room of people are being connected together in an alternative version of time which is, for all intents and purposes, a collective trance.

Back to the beat

Back to Sultan + Shepard in Camden. 1,500 of us are are moving with the music and losing ourselves in time. I find my body moving to the core pulse of the music, and my arms and hands turning in the air in front of my, drawing small circles around the rhythm of the top lines in the music. I'm not doing this consciously or intentionally: I can observe from a distance how my body becomes entrained and I phase lock into the music, but in the moment, this is just an instinctual response to rhythm and sound. I realise in watching this that this whole idea of rhythmic entrainment works both ways.

Music can drop us into that present, meditative state where we lose track of time, but the opposite happens too. When I sit quietly at home to meditate, and drop my focus away from thought and into my body, after a while my body naturally finds a rhythm. I'll find myself gently swaying, or moving my hands gently to and fro; sometimes I'll move my shoulders, or my feet. It keeps me grounded, helps me focus and gives my body and mind something to latch onto, and it doesn't come from any external stimulus - it comes from the body's natural instinct for movement. The body always has its own rhythm, even if often we don't notice it; we have an in-built metronome in our heartbeats, breathing cycles, and brain activity, and it's those systems that are responding to the call for synchronisation when we hear music, just as they synchronise between themselves when we are at rest, given the right conditions and environment.

When we go out and dance with a roomful of strangers, we take our body's natural instinct for movement and feed it with powerful stimuli that allow us to tap into these systems. A combination of skilfully crafted music, immersive lighting and spaces, emotional resonance and human connection all guide us into physiological states we often find hard it to reach, and we ride them on a wave of joy. In those moments it feels, and indeed it is, both extraordinary and transcendent. But that's not because there’s anything particularly extraordinary happening outside of us - it’s simply the other end of the same spectrum of processes that quietly and efficiently shape our minds and bodies every day. Nothing really matters when we’re dancing, but also everything does, too.

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?”" - David Foster Wallace

The water we swim in

I've lived in the UK for my whole life, and for the last ten years of that, my work has led me to work on all sorts of challenges around cities, urban design, economic development and infrastructure. I look at policy, strategy and narratives to make the right kind of development happen in the right kind of places, and being blessed with an analytical sort of mind, I tend to see some of the muddy waters in which we live where others, busy swimming, might miss them. Imagine my surprise, then, when 15 months travelling around the world caused me to fundamentally reassess the pond in which I've been circling. There are things, after all, that even if you are aware of them in an abstract sense, only really make sense when you experience them for yourself.

It was around this time last year that I landed in the dusty afternoon sunshine of Kathmandu, Nepal. I'd always wanted to go, inspired by the magic of the hippie trail and stories of Buddhist monks in the Himalayas. Much of it is every bit as extraordinary as you might expect - particularly up in the mountains - but don't let that fool you into thinking it's some kind of traveller's paradise. If anything, it's astonishing that it has continued to burn so bright in the backpacker's mind's eye, without seeing anywhere near the kind of infrastructure that has now made places like South East Asia so popular. Instead, we arrived into Lalitpur to find street after street dug up, pipework hanging out and everyone picking their way through deep troughs of muddy water under dangling clouds of overhead wires. There's plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables available from barrows in the street, but most of our groceries come from dusty hawkers selling milk by the bag and eggs from the sack. Take a taxi across town, but expect to be picked up by a bashed up Suzuki Maruti 800 from the 1990s, and duck your head so you don't smash it on the roof. Pray for the suspension, but don't get too excited: in town you'll be bouncing across unmade roads half the time, in traffic the rest. Try to travel further across the country, and I wish you good luck. To drive the 200km from Kathmandu to Pokhara, Nepal's second city, strap in for an 8 hour bone-shaker to crawl across rocky half built roads while being scrambled from the inside out. But if you choose to fly, remember that Nepal has one of the worst airline safety records in the world. This is a country stuck in the loop before development, desperately trying to build itself in the face of limited budgets, constant landslides and scant maintenance. This is not an easy place to dig yourself out from.

I've always been aware on some level of my privilege in growing up in an educated, white British family. I remember the moment as a child when, while running a bath, I started thinking about the sheer probability that I could have ended up living in this country, speaking this language, living in a house with my very own bedroom and hot water. But it's hard to see the water that you live in, and throughout my life I've been able to take for granted the basic privileges and quality of life that I have enjoyed. Stable housing; a trustworthy justice system; clean water; a good, free education; high quality healthcare, free at the point of use; reliable transport, roads and rail; state pensions, unemployment benefit, maternity pay. The list goes on and on.

And throughout my life, most of the narrative that I've internalised has been more about the inadequacy or declining quality of these services, rather than their value. If your starting point is to assume universal healthcare, the growth in waiting times is nothing but a burden. If you've always had a bus service to work, then the cutting of local services hits you so much harder. And if you grew up in affordable, comfortable housing, then the decline of social housing cuts a lifeline to which you've become dependent. Our default state is one of decline and loss, and yet we never felt what it felt like to gain those basic services in the first place.

Subscribe now

The privilege of post-growth Britain

Britain, of course, has the long standing advantage of having been the first country off the block in the industrial revolution. We have to go several generations back, and beyond living memory, to experience what industrialisation felt like. We now live with the legacy of not only 250 years of infrastructure, railways, roads, houses, telecommunications and industries, but also the advanced welfare system which later followed on. It's an increasingly small number now who could recall life before the NHS, and our nostalgia is for an age of plenty. It's no wonder that we can't truly fathom the privilege of this long history of reliable and accessible infrastructure, industrial production, financial services, social welfare, and scientific and educational institutions. The cumulative effects of economic growth have undoubtedly enabled some of the more sordid parts of our history, like colonisation and slavery, but also all of those which are the bedrock of everyday life: a stable state, a fundamental basic right to infrastructure, and all of the advantages on top of that: world leading banking systems, medical research, arts and culture.

This lack of appreciation isn't the result of some collective failing. On the contrary: the benefits were felt long ago, and in a post-growth nation, we now carry both the benefits and the costs. For many, those costs are increasingly large. As a nation, we bear high taxes to be able to manage and maintain some of the world's most advanced infrastructure, which contributes to our high cost of living. We are unwilling (quite reasonably, for what it's worth), to compromise on the quality or provision of national infrastructure - but meanwhile, it continues to decline. We haven't built a new reservoir since 1991; we are paying more than anywhere else for the infrastructure that we do attempt to build (the planning application alone of the Lower Thames Crossing has cost £297 million);1 and our other living costs continue to increase, particularly housing, thanks to a housing shortage and a broken planning system. The argument goes that economic growth sustains wages, infrastructure and quality of life, but for many this no longer holds true. Growth in the UK has been at a snail's pace over recent decades, but even that which we have experienced hasn't meaningfully translated into increased prosperity. We've seen steady employment growth; but instead of an unemployment crisis, we have an in-work crisis, with earnings growing at the slowest rate for 200 years.2 For most people below 40 in the UK today, we have inherited a society that we can't afford to pay for, and for all of those living in unaffordable, insecure housing, on low wages, and with a growing mental health crisis, the trust has been broken between the stated facts of growth and their lived experience.

No wonder that to a growing number in the UK, growth has become a dirty word, representing excess, greed, and the sacrifice of people and planet in the name of profit. Within this narrative, houses are built by private developers, who pocket the profits and people remain homeless. Salaries are paid to CEOs, who enjoy their holidays and profit from austerity. And while this way of looking at it is simplistic, it's not wholly wrong. Unfortunately, it's difficult to understand and hard to accept that these behaviours are usually caused by systemic failings, rather than bad actors, and given that challenge, it's not surprising that a sense of hopelessness and powerless pervades.

So yes, we undoubtedly have a problem, but we have a post-growth problem. Over the last few decades, the public debate on how to define growth and prosperity has become significantly more nuanced, and a whole host of theorists have successfully advocated for better measures of success (such as the national metrics of wellbeing used in New Zealand and Bhutan) and more balanced models of growth (such as Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics). And rightly so: growth is complex, climate change is real, and there are challenging trade-offs to be made, particularly when we start to push over the line of infrastructure which meets our basic needs.

Some of these anti-growth criticisms may be fair to launch at Britain, Europe, and the rest of the world's developed nations, but this water in which we swim isn't the same across much of the rest of the world. We are right in the UK to be having a serious conversation about the environmental cost of growth, and yes, wider measures of sustainability and prosperity are critical to our more nuanced understanding of how well our society meets our needs, but we forget what the cost of degrowth would really be. How would you know, if you've never lived without.

On the road, or, hoping that a road even exists

What I saw during the 15 months that I spent travelling re-set my baseline on the real value of growth. What you notice is the sheer extent of things that underpin our daily quality of life, freedom and comfort, and which we take for granted, thanks to a long history of industrialisation, development and civil society. Take the fish out of water and suddenly it can't breathe. There were certainly times while travelling that I felt I couldn't breathe. For most people, across most of the world, daily life is not straightforward.

One of our very first stops: Nuku'alofa, Tonga. On arrival, large customs queues at the small airport, with lines of people arriving piled high with suitcases and boxes. These suitcase remittances come from family members based in New Zealand and Australia, returning with clothing, appliances, tools and supplies. Much of it comes wired as direct payments. Up to 40% of Tonga's GDP is formed of remittances, gifts from the diaspora living abroad. The drive from the airport goes through fields of uncultivated or abandoned fields, where diseases and cyclones have decimated their agricultural production. Instead, the fields are filled with rusted out cars, machinery which they can't afford to get rid of. Part of their challenge is being so far from anywhere, and so vulnerable to the ravages of climate change. A supermarket sells nothing but Chinese-made Christmas decorations, minced beef and tomato ketchup. The small nation has one of the highest rates of obesity in the world, but how to change your lifestyle when your choices are so few?

Some weeks later: Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Outside the famous Borobudur Temple, a group of schoolchildren approach us. One slightly braver one steps forward. "Hello", he says. "We are English students. Can we practice our English with you?" Chris and I smile and say yes - this isn't novel to us any more. They form a semicircle around us, watching quizzically. These students, from Kalimantan on Borneo, are some of the luckiest ones: their parents have paid to put them through an English summer school, critical learning that will give them huge opportunities. They are here on a field trip, and made the journey across the Java Sea. "This is the furthest from home I travelled", one of them tells me. "We came on aeroplane." Sheer excitement in his face; "but we go home by boat. Aeroplane is very expensive." The boat alone, arriving at a port 4 hours from us by train, takes 40 hours. The plane takes only 3. Imagine what someone in London could do with a spare 40 hours - but then time takes on a different value in places like this.

My biggest contrast and most important lesson came from China. I'd never been before, but Chris visited 10 years ago - and now barely recognised it. In the last twenty years, China has built 200-300 million new homes; a high speed network which can get you from Beijing in the north to Guangzhou in the south in 8 hours; and more than 40 metro systems. Ultra-high voltage systems, water transfer projects and renewable energy installations mean that the country has reliable infrastructure that serves the needs of its growing population and some, and now you can sit on the Metro and watch families taking their children to Sunday afternoon parties; share beauty spots and tourist sights with Chinese people taking holidays; and walk down a street planted with trees and flowers that hums with electric vehicles, rather than the cacophony and pollution that characterises most developing cities. There are many things to criticise about the Chinese state and their all-out run for growth, and it is painfully obvious that this hasn't come at no cost, but the transformation is an extraordinary testimony to what mankind is capable of, and I felt it immediately and every day that I was there, in the simple and everyday quality of life.

Some months later, we arrive in Bogota, Colombia. What we experience there we find almost everywhere we go in South America: multiple times a week, usually without warning, the power cuts out, sometimes (if you're lucky) followed up by the belching rumble of the backup generator. And not just power, but water too: shortages as a result of old and insufficient infrastructure means that neighbourhoods take it in turns to have the water shut off, rationing water for the city. In many respects, Bogota is a huge urban success story: the efforts of former Mayor Enrique Peñalosa have created some world-class sustainable urbanism, with the TransMilenio rapid bus service connecting millions across the city and cycleways enabling a new generation of cyclists and walkers. But estimates from 2015 were that 25% of the urban area was made of informal settlements: distinctive self-built small scale dwellings made of breeze-blocks and corrugated iron built up the city's hillsides, built without planning permission, building codes or property rights, with limited and unreliable access to water, sanitation and transport, and living in constant risk of landslides and flooding. More than a quarter of the city's population live precariously and outside the bounds of formal oversight, regulation and security. Try building a stable life on that.

And just a few weeks ago: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I came down with a sudden bout of tonsilitis. In the pharmacy, I asked in broken Spanish for something for a sore throat. The young girl behind the counter asks me a few questions, rummages in a drawer and brings out a packet of penicillin. No prescriptions required here, apparently; and no obvious concerns about antibiotic resistance. Having access to antibiotics is a far bigger issue than resistance, and there's simply not the resources or the headspace to think beyond your current issues. I take the antibiotics. It clears up in a few days. I'm lucky to have been in a place with a plentiful supply.

So what does GDP actually feel like?

Every time we travelled somewhere new, we experienced a different level of infrastructure and development, and after a while I started to get a sense for what GDP actually feels like. From Uzbekistan, with its high speed rail and recently upgraded public spaces, you cross into Tajikistan, where just over the border a service station is cut into the edge of the rock, where bottles are cooled under a waterfall. Every time this happened, I would re-set my fundamental expectations of comfort and security. Progressively, all of the foundations that I take for granted at home in London were pulled out from under my feet: reliable clean water was replaced by a handheld water filter and a bucket outside; in lieu of spacious and efficient trains came an unreliable, unregulated and cramped shared taxi; after the freedom to walk down the street without fear, I stayed inside after dark, and deleted all the banking apps off my phone, ready for the possibility of being robbed at gunpoint.

After some months of this constant movement, like a fish in and out of water, I started to understand more viscerally how different levels of development serve different types of our human needs. Right at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy, there is an extraordinary and constant pressure on our infrastructure to meet the range of our physiological needs - food, shelter, healthcare, clean water. This alone takes huge resource and effort. Then further up, we start to prioritise our need for safety and security, through police and fire services, welfare and justice systems, and stable housing. Our social needs are met by communications, public spaces, and education systems, and our self esteem needs are met by broad education options, career opportunities, and recreation. Right at the top, self actualisation is facilitated by cultural institutions and creative spaces. We are right to defend our right to enjoy culture - it represents the pinnacle of human flourishing - but let's not forget how hard won that is. Many centuries of change have enabled us to reach those dizzying heights.

The huge privilege of being able to take this time away has shown me how deep my privilege runs. I've felt viscerally both the importance and the vulnerability of the fundamentals on which I've lived, and which have allowed me to exist in comfort, stability and safety. I realise more than ever the need to not take that for granted: at home, we have a responsibility to ensure that that infrastructure continues to provide us with the foundational services that we need to survive and thrive. For the rest of the world, our responsibility is to do what we can to enable, encourage and support them in meeting the basic human needs that we have enjoyed for longer than any of us can remember.

Every moment is nothing but perception. You move through the world and experience everything around you, via your senses, filtered through your mind. Every moment has the potential to change, to be looked at anew. All that's happening is what's happening now. What happens next could look, feel and smell different.

But perhaps the same things surround you - you might wake up each morning in the same bedroom, the same furniture, the same walls. Your day might look more or less the same - routines, commutes, familiar faces. You experience the same things, you feel the same way, you behave in the same way. You remember the past in the same way, you imagine the future to be the same.

Equally, there is always something that is shifting. Even if most of your life looks the same, there's change - your mood, the weather, conversations around you. Smells in the air, new sights. The neighbour has a new dog. The sky looks different today. Each change brings up new memories, new associations, and projects forward in new ways. Perhaps the future looks different. Maybe it feels different, a small part of it in some small way.

And then the more in your life that is different, the more possibility there is for each moment to look new. You travel somewhere new, you wake up in a new bed, and it brings a new set of associations and memories. The sheets remind you of a sunny, dusty morning you woke up in your grandma's house. A new set of pictures and feelings arise. Some are comforting, some are hopeful, some are limiting. The more you experienced and felt in the past, the greater your training model: your mind produces new permutations, associations, visions.

Stay in the same place, hold your mind in the same story, and your mind has nothing to feed off. It's hard to create novelty from sameness.

For me, when something shifts around me, I look at everything anew. My mind starts by exploring and re-casting what's in front of me, but then other things feel new too - particular memories get picked out to colour the scene, and new images or hopes arise for how it might look in the future. It's like cycling through the new argos catalogue. What else can be made to feel different? That's interesting. How curious. I hadn't seen it that way before.

Everything becomes a new constellation of now. The only moment you're actually within is the here and now - but all of it, past, present, future, imagination, becomes woven into one.

Sometimes I take a moment to just sit in that. When a windowpane reminds me of my old school. I'd forgotten that feeling. Peeling paint and high white ceilings. It feels fresh, and it brings a new flavour - I'm young, I'm small, the world is oddly bright. Let it seep round the edges and see what else it bathes in a new light. Something new to become excited about, or a warmth you hadn't noticed before. A new picture gets painted, and a new way of seeing my life and the world.

Our minds are constantly moving through all of these layers of perception, with a rich and incredible ability to tell you a story from any possible angle. Leave it to rove by itself and it will move with incredible speed and creativity. Really learn to relax, let your mind move of its own accord, and it will show you extraordinary things. We use a disappointingly small fragment of our own imaginative capacity, caught up in the day to day of living.

Sometimes in the day to day it gets particularly stuck, or you get caught up in it. A grey morning reminds me of a grey day in the past. It feels sad or small. That expands, and the day in front of me becomes sad and small too. My world contracts. I feel less inspired, more concerned, more resistant. My behaviour becomes smaller, I take up less space. I feel less free, and my mind roves less. It becomes a vicious cycle.

Far too often, we become stuck in tramlines. Our patterns of thought become repetitive and ruminative, and the deeper these run, the harder it is to carve a new path through the landscape.

Really, these are all just stories, and there's no right one. If we follow a story that is positive, supportive and encouraging, then we stand in better stead than those who follow a story that is painful and negative. Whether the story is good or bad, it's just a story. You don't need to only choose one.

The more we experience, the more we change around us, the more potential there is for our minds to shift. The more we relax, avoid resisting, allow ourselves to just experience what's around us, the more potential there is for every day to look new.

Subscribe now

I would probably ascribe this shift to a few different things. Firstly, that I've taken the last year off work to go travelling. The sudden removal of pretty much everything in my life which looks like responsibility - no job, no house, no calendar full of obligations, and the end of an extremely stressful self-build housing project I was working on - meant a rapid release of all of the stressors which my mind has typically latched on to and fed off.

Secondly, that this break seems to have given my brain the space to start to integrate some of the more intellectual insights I've gathered through three years of therapy into actually influencing my everyday experience of the world. Making the leap from "why has your life experience to date resulted in you constantly hitting yourself?" into changing thought patterns is a slow burn, and I don't think we're done yet, but there's movement on this front.

Thirdly has been a cluster of experiences, mostly through a newly semi-regular meditation practice, which have opened up what feels like different spaces in my mind. It's a little like finding a new corner of a room that you'd never noticed before, from which you can see the whole room from a new perspective.

I should emphasise that I am in no way now floating around in a state of semi-bliss. Maybe that is where this path ultimately leads if you keep wandering down it, but I certainly still get sad, anxious and pissed off at all sorts of ridiculous things, which my partner will be the first person to confirm. But there is a general broadening which makes it easier to move around the room without hitting things.

Think of the mind like an open field containing both land mines and wildflowers. We wander through this field as we go about our lives, sometimes intentionally, and sometimes subconsciously. There are places where you might wander that all of a sudden cause disturbances - sometimes that might be an ominous vibration beneath the surface, and sometimes it's a full on explosion, which catches you off guard and blows your legs off. And there are also places where you go that are suddenly beautiful - a warm patch of sunlight, or a carpet of flowers in bloom. Over time you come to learn where the places you can go are that are painful, and those which are pleasant and safe. You construct a mental map and start to navigate around to avoid those painful places, maybe taking ridiculous detours to get there.

Thanks to the shift that I've seen recently, I'm now able to rove around that field more freely, with less fear, and without encountering the same tensions or contractions that I once did in certain places. There's been more of a sense of curiosity that's come alongside this, which has meant that I've visited certain places that once caused me anxiety and can now be approached with more understanding or compassion.

Nonetheless there are still plenty of places in the field that, as I wander towards them, emit a kind of warning alarm. They pulsate with fear or anxiety and come blaring a cautionary "BACK OFF" public information notice that I am not quite yet stupid enough to ignore. I typically skip past onto more fruitful pastures.

One of those landmines that has been particularly powerful for me recently is a project I worked on a few years ago. Everything about it absolutely reeks of anxiety to me: the place where the project was located; the people involved; the work that I did on it; and associations with other things that were happening in my life at the same time. Whenever any of these things come to mind, everything contracts, and I see faces with eyes narrowed and lips curled in disdain, and strong feelings of distance, disconnection and failure. It's completely disproportionate to what actually happened - I doubt that anyone who was working with me at the time would have had any idea of the stress I was under, nor did anything objectively bad actually happen. But over time something about this project became associated with a huge amount of self-doubt and criticism, and now it sits there and glowers at me periodically. When I come across it, it immediately disarms my curiosity; interrupts any background sense of peace or happiness; and jabs me in the eye for a bit, just for fun.

This isn't the only one, and recently I've been thinking about the fact that these little pernicious landmines are still lying around in my mind-field. It's occurred to me that I might benefit from spending a little time with them in meditation, to try and actually observe and acknowledge some of these negative feelings instead of running away from them. It certainly goes along with the collective wisdom on this sort of matter - "learn to sit with your feelings", and so on.

That all sounds very nice and well, anyway, I haven't got round to it yet (mostly because it sounds a bit like going to the dentist). Nonetheless, this morning I woke up, a perfectly normal day, nothing unusual about it, and went downstairs to make a cup of tea. I stood in the kitchen and waited for the kettle to boil, and the same project popped into my mind. It was an aerial image of the project site, which is usually how I encounter this particular thought-chain.

And alongside it came - nothing. I braced ready for a wave of the usual anxiety and concern, and it didn't come. I instead felt the same mild sense of curiosity and contentment that has become my general background state seep around the image. Next, one of the faces of the project team came into my head, but this time he wasn't frowning; he looked normal, human, mild and unconcerned. I looked back at him, and we sort of looked at each other across the mind-field, from a similar place of mild, unconcerned curiosity. He smiled vaguely at me. I wondered what on earth all the fuss had been about. The kettle started whistling; I poured milk in the tea and went back upstairs. I carried on with my day.

I suppose the mind is an impressive thing. It appears to have incredibly well-attuned self-defensive mechanisms, and if it skirts around the land mines, that's probably because they're dangerous and should be avoided. But give it the right circumstances and tools, and leave it alone and stop poking it, and it also seems to have the ability to defuse those mines of its own accord. The best thing to do, which I’m increasingly finding with all sorts of things, it to simply get out of the way and let it clear its own path.

Setting out

Over the last 14 months, I've been spending most of my time and money travelling around the world. As I've been going, I've been doing a lot of writing for myself, capturing ideas and sketches of places. I suspect that as I start to piece together some of this into some coherence I'll share more, and there's an ongoing process of figuring out my own reflections and conclusions which I'm looking forward to bringing together in some way.

However sometimes you just need to start somewhere, and a story that has constantly been re-circling around my mind during this time has been from the very beginning of our journey, which we spent in Fiji and Tonga before going to New Zealand. What I've learned from this is a story about identities, narratives, power and powerlessness, and a question about the possibility that exists in all of us to re-imagine communities and places.

I should probably acknowledge my own limited perspective here: I'm a white British woman with next to no prior knowledge and experience of the Pacific islands and communities. What I know primarily comes from books, films, the limited fragments of news that crops up in the press, and from the branch of my family who are New Zealanders of British descent. Throughout my life I've heard snippets of their experiences living in a country and growing up through an education system grappling with the representation and integration of Maori and Pasifika communities.

And I think overwhelmingly, this is a story of struggle. Before I went to Fiji in November 2023, I could characterise my external perception of the Pacific Islands as follows:

• Glorious island paradise, featuring hammocks, expensive resorts, and pristine beaches

• Poverty struck communities, often displaced across the region to more economically developed countries, or living perilously with minimal economic future

Your choices of beach reading are pretty weird

What I experienced over the next couple of weeks undoubtedly changed this perception, as did some of my hammock reading in our first few days away. I picked up Epeli Hau'ofi's Sea of Islands, perhaps the most famous essay from 1993 by the Tongan-Fijian writer and anthropologist. In it, he characterised the dominant international narrative of the Pacific Islands as intrinsically weak, consisting of small, vulnerable islands isolated within a large ocean. From the perspective of land-based societies, we see island nations as dispersed, small and remote. By contrast, however, he recognised the defining characteristic of Oceania as being its ocean - and that it is this that gives it its strength and power. As a collection of sea-faring nations, tied for generations by migration and kinship, he suggested that there is scope to reframe this narrative and in doing so transform the potential of the region, re-focussing on the unity of nations rather than their differences to allow the region to live up to its true potential.

It makes for powerful reading, and for someone coming from western Europe, is a fundamental inversion of what we are primed to think of as strength. Regardless of whether you agree that the Pacific nations could truly thrive in 2025, it forces the reader to judge a part of the world that has a totally different geography, history and culture from its own perspective, rather than from a western one. It also highlights the potential transformative power of narrative. If both the international community, but also the Pacific nations themselves, accept the frame that has been put upon them by landlubbers, then they are condemned to act in accordance with those values, judge themselves against them, and come up wanting. The opportunity always exists, however, to shift that narrative, and live according to a different frame.

And perhaps that sheer scale of difference touches on why I wanted to go to Oceania in the first place. I've always been fascinated by the contradiction of the Pacific Islands. I read books about people stranded on remote islands, and heard stories in school about Pacific islands destroyed by nuclear tests that were nothing but a footnote in the history of the Cold War. I saw photographs of irridescent seas with green volcanic protrusions that looked like they'd just grown out of nowhere, and heard stories of whole communities sinking under rising sea levels. What's happening here? What are these communities and places really like, how do they work, and how much longer are they going to remain like that?

That meant that the Pacific Islands made it onto the beginning of our travel plans, although from a practical perspective, it's a surprisingly difficult and expensive region to travel around. My first intention to sail between them turned out to be harder than I first thought (perhaps I shouldn't be surprised at that), but we managed to find some reasonably priced flights that would take us to Fiji and to Tonga for the first two weeks of our time away. It was mostly budget that drove our decision-making, although this proved to be an interesting cross-section of the region to see. There are loosely three Pacific regions - Melanasia (which Fiji belongs to, and which is closer to Australia and South East Asia); Polynesia (which includes Tonga, and which is a huge, ocean-spanning region more characterised by sea-faring traditions) and Micronesia (which are the smaller, carol atolls to the north). They are all distinct in language, culture and migration patterns, although they perhaps have more in common than they do apart.

Fiji: paradise in balance

Fiji is one of the largest Pacific nations, and is one of the most geographically important and economically developed nations in the region, accounting for more than half the region's economic output. Across its 333 islands, it has a relatively diverse population, with a large Indian diaspora, and has both a successful tourist industry as well as a growing service sector and export industries. And it feels it too: we arrived into the busy international airport at Nadi in the late afternoon, and the bus took us through a somewhat unscenic but nonetheless busy town. Nadi was clearly a proper working place, with commercial activity, offices and factories that continued for miles as we travelled around the ring-road of the main island of Viti Levu. We spent our first days in the small town of Pacific Harbour, sitting by the edge of the lagoon, canoeing through the mangroves and sitting on the beach.

My first real insight into Fijian life came from Linni, our Fijian host. She lived a comfortable life running a B&B with her husband and her two children. She had been training with the Fijian national netball team in Pacific Harbour, when "the German" (as she called him - a man twenty years her senior) came to Fiji to work with her uncle. A process of gradual wooing ensued, including presenting first her uncle and then her family (who were from one of the smaller islands several hours away) with a barrel of kerosene. His intentions made clear, they got married, and then travelled to Germany to fill a container with German appliances and electronics. Their children now watch American TV on a huge curved screen in the house that they built by the lagoon. It was a success story for the girl from a small island, and Linni's future was secured by the serendipity of finding a foreign husband. She seemed to know that she had struck lucky, so she put up with the short-tempered habits of her husband with a surprising alacrity and warm humour.

Meanwhile, much of Fiji has thrived on international tourism. We spent a few days out on the tiny Likuri Island just a couple of miles off the mainland, a small resort with a few wooden bures on the beach. They were running a tight ship, with a constant stream of day trippers and a curated menu of activities: snorkelling, fire dancing, crab racing. Sitting in a hammock on the beach, I experienced that perfect moment of sandy-beached ocean-side paradise, although just up the beach I could see a group of workers busily clearing debris and rubbish off the beach, dragged in by one of the recent tropical storms. It's a fragile kind of paradise, and a nervous kind of success, always looking outwards to whatever the winds are going to blow in next.

Tonga: just something else entirely

From Fiji we flew outwards to Tonga, some 1000km to the east. The difference was palpable from the beginning: flying over Tongatapu (the main island, one of 170 that are scattered over a huge area of ocean) we saw the whole island all in one, and landed into a tiny airport little more than a shed. At the airport we were greeted by Toni, our octogenarian host who moved to Tonga from Lancashire in the 1990s after giving up drinking, divorcing his wife, and reading about it in the Reader's Digest, upon which he decided it would make a better life for him.

From the airport he told us a little about Tonga. "I don’t know what you were expecting, but you probably won’t find it", he said. "Everything was destroyed by the cyclone in 2018, or the tsunami in 2022. We don't have any crops or exports anymore. Used to be coconuts but now there's nothing." He gave us a short guided tour of Nuku'alofa, the small Tongan capital. "All good cities have to have a bypass. This is ours."

We had a strange few days in Tonga. If Fiji had shown me how a Pacific nation can exist in a fragile balance more or less in line with my initial perceptions, Tonga blew all of that to pieces.

We considered travelling out to the other islands, but quickly came up against the reality of Pacific infrastructure. The boat to the nearest island, 'Eua, only operated a few days a week, and wouldn't have arrived back in time for our flight back to Fiji. The nation's only airline, Lulutai airlines, ran flights to the islands out at Vava'u and Ha'apai, but a crash a few weeks earlier had put one of their aircraft out of action. I was given the facebook contact of someone at the airline who could book us a ticket, but no assurances that the flights would be running back. We decided to stay put.

We spent the week exploring Tongatapu in a beaten up mouldy Japanese car. On our first day, we went to the supermarket. We found a huge warehouse, filled from top to bottom with plastic Christmas decorations from China. The Chinese Belt and Road initiative and free trade agreements have flooded the island with small shops selling Chinese goods, but fresh food is hard to come by. In one corner, we found a single shelf of food: corned beef and ketchup. Thanks to its limited agricultural production, most of Tonga's food is imported; and most of that food is canned or processed, resulting in a diet which primarily revolves around fried chicken.

This diet is one of the main reasons why Tonga is now one of the most obese nations in the world. At the local market, we drove through the gate, looking for somewhere to park the car - before realising that the stalls were set several feet apart, and people were simply driving straight through the middle, winding down windows to speak to the stallholder. Again and again we saw the same things on the menu: fried chicken, fried fish. Our one sweet relief: ota ike, a Tongan raw fish salad, with coconut, lime and onion. One of the last visible vestiges of a fishing nation, available in a drive-thru.

That sense of a place in decline was only more obvious when we drove around the edges of the island. Ha'atafu beach used to be Tongatapu's finest beach, protected by a reef and home to some spectacular surf. We arrived there one afternoon just as a tropical rainstorm began, and sat watching through the window. The 2022 tsunami completely stripped it: there used to be a cluster of resorts, houses and shacks. It's now a long strip of rocks and debris, and the very slow process of rebuilding it is still underway. Nearly three years on most of the businesses have yet to re-open. Tonga remains the 3rd most at risk country in the world for natural hazards, with all of the South Pacific nations at significant threat thanks to their low-lying dispersed islands and undeveloped economies.

It's no wonder that Tonga remains so vulnerable to external influence. The Chinese influence extends beyond imports - new infrastructure has popped up across the country, although in the form of a Parliament building that apparently can't be used because of the inappropriate shape of its rooms. The Mormon church has grown significantly in the last few years: 19% of the population are now Mormon, and having seen the sparkling new churches, carefully manicured lawns and brand new houses built in clusters around them, you can see why anecdotally local families are keen to profess their loyalty to the church and secure their children a place at what are now the best schools on the island.

More to it than you might expect

What is fascinating is that, despite all of this, Tonga remains an incredibly proud nation, and is home to plenty of fun, humour and resilience. Tonga was the only Pacific nation never to have been colonised, and is instead the last surviving monarchy in the Pacific. They celebrate this with great pride, and banners across the streets celebrate King Tupou VI. On Sunday, when by law you're not allowed to do anything else anyway (no seriously: no working, no exercise, no parties), we went to the Centenary Church in Nuku'alofa and joined hundreds of locals, two choirs, an orchestra, and the King, for the Sunday service. Having sung all of my life, I have rarely heard such a huge and fantastic sound as I did that morning.

Once a week, a huge traditional Tongan buffet dinner happens in the town: it used to be at one of the island's main resorts, but moved to a temporary location after the tsunami destroyed the venue. Clearly this is not a place that lets a tsunami get in the way of a good party, and we arrived 5 minutes late to find every table filled, and an extra table was hurriedly arranged for us at the end. Perhaps in another place you might expect this to be full of tourists, getting the Tongan experience of a buffet dinner and dancing, but here we were the only foreigners. Instead the tent was packed with families and groups, all enjoying some kind of celebration or birthday, punctuated by loud toasts and singing. We filled our plates with suckling pork, ota ike and steamed fish. Hours of dancing on the temporary stage followed, including from children who were celebrating formative parts of their dancing careers with their first solo performances, before a steady parade of people from every table gradually made their way up to the stage to join in the dancing and demonstrate that they did still have some moves.

More than half of Tongans today are living overseas, in New Zealand, Australia and the USA, and sending remittances home regularly. Like many Pacific nations, this is a lifeline for these communities: but when they come back to their families, there's clearly still much to celebrate.

It's this sort of sense of fun and humour that is palpable in Epeli Hau'ofi's far less serious Kisses in the Nederends. The 153 pages of increasingly improbable satire revolves around the pain in the arse of Oilei Bomboki, who wakes up with a mysterious throbbing in his rear. He ventures on a journey to try to cure his pain, from traditional healers to western doctors. It calls forward a kind of bawdy sensibility of Pacific islanders that was censured by missionaries for decades, and a lightness of spirit that was somewhat provocative but must have been a relief in the context of the mostly serious postcolonial narratives that were emerging at the time. After all the struggle and strife, as Bomboki goes through a (confusing) and transformative process, he finally comes to terms with his fate in comic defiance: "Kiss my arse!"

Re-imagining communities

So what of all of this? And do any of these stories change anything? Fundamentally, I don't think what I imagined when I went out to the Pacific Islands was wholly wrong, although it was clearly incomplete. It is irrefutable that the Pacific Island nations remain incredibly vulnerable nations geographically, and are subject to some of the worst ravages of climate change. That contributes in turn to their ongoing limited economic development; and with long-term growth forecasts still projected to be slower than in more advanced economies, that gap will continue to widen.

To a certain degree, that fate would have been set even without external influence - but the colonisation of the Pacific Islands by European powers, the creation of national borders, and the introduction of immigration systems, has over a long period of time channelled the Pacific nations into a state of mind mimicking that of its land-faring neighbours, and determined a pessimistic fate for the region.

For those Tongans, Fijians, Samoans, Hawaiians, and others who leave home to find work elsewhere, to expand their networks and communities, and send remittances back to their home nation, our landlubber tendency is to think of this as desperation borne of the failure of the land to provide. By contrast, the entire Oceanic community was populated over time through migration of communities across the sea and through islands which provided different sources of shelter, safety, food and resource. For these communities, ultimately, being fixed to an island that is being ravaged by tropical storms and drought diminishes their resilience; a greater sense of freedom, innovation and opportunity would likely serve them well. That's not impossible to imagine, although it would require a fundamental recalibration of local and national identities; of both aspiration and action; and a very different response from the international community, which unfortunately looks unlikely in the face of tightening international attitudes to migration.

As for my lasting impressions, while I didn't come away with a sense of Oceania being a coiled spring ready to release, I also didn't experience a a place that is condemned to its own inevitable fate. There was a certain level of resistance, of defiance, of pride, and of humour which permeates through the various interactions that I had. There's a sense that these are communities that have been around for a very long time; that will continue to survive, regardless of the external pressures; and perhaps a time will come when ocean dwelling communities find that they have resources that the rest of the world needs when it comes to how to thrive in a changing, watery world.

___________

This piece captures a few fragments of things that inspired me in Oceania, but I remain a fleeting visitor. I'd love to explore more of the history and current debate of the region, and I would particularly love to be pointed towards other writers, particularly those from Pasifika communities. Those who've inspired me to date include:

• Epeli Hau'ofi

• Jacinta Tonga

• Patricia Grace

There are some very lucky people out there who know what they want to do from a young age, decide on a career path, pursue the right courses and opportunities, and slot relatively comfortably into that field. Until the point that we are spat out of the higher education pond (as Tim puts it) we follow a very structured, pre-determined educational route. Given that, it suits a lot of people quite well that generally speaking, the world of work is structured so that (despite a frankly boggling range of options) you can still continue into a series of structured, pre-determined routes. This kind of direction and specialism overall serves much of society very well - a level of predictability and structure serves a lot of types of people psychologically, but it also serves our collective need for expertise and skill, since it allows for rapid specialisation and fast learning. Unfortunately, that's never been me, and so I finished university as part of the still sizeable minority of people looking around with a vague sense of existential panic about what I was supposed to do with my life.

Being young and belligerent

It was at this point of confusion, in my last year of university, that I came across the excellent 80,000 hours while it was still a small university society. I'd been attending such spuriously named events as "the ethical careers fair" and bloody mindedly refusing to entertain careers in anything which might have offered a graduate scheme, when I ended up going for coffee with their founder. Their philosophy goes that if we want to do the most good, we should dedicate a reasonable proportion of our overall working lives to intentionally weighing up our choices, and focussing on the most effective careers. He urged me to go back to first principles, and to think more about what my skills and strengths are and how they could align with the most ethical opportunities out there.

This advice might have landed if I had had no idea what I wanted to do; but unfortunately, I wasn't a blank slate at the time. By this time, I had spent two years studying cities and urban planning, and I had something of a yearning that this was a field that I was passionate about, that had a huge amount of untapped potential, and through which I could make a positive impact on the world. His advice was to ignore that yearning completely, and instead start from the perspective of the good I wanted to do in the world. He wasn't wrong, of course, but in the internal conflict between what I wanted and what he advised, I simply completely ignored him. (Sorry, Ben. It was still very good advice though.)

If at that time, however, I had had the yearning octopus as a guide, I might have been in a better place to interrogate what was actually going on.

Who is this yearning octopus anyway?

In Tim's post, he sets out a structured (and delightfully illustrated) framework for how to interrogate the career pathway. It begins with understanding your own yearnings and fears for your career. These become the tentacles on your yearning octopus, and represent what you want or need: things like personal fulfilment, moral values, and practical needs. Tim then asks you to take these down to the interrogation room in denial prison, and really deeply examine why you want these things - and whether those desires are yours, or those imposed by others externally. For each yearning, what is really happening there? If you passionately want to work as a meteorologist, is that because you have a genuine and specific curiosity around cloud formations, or is that you simply want to work on something which generates passion and curiosity more generally? If you want to do something good in the world, is that coming from you, or from a sense of guilt or expectation that comes from your parents or your upbringing? Who knows what you'll find down there. The rest of the steps examine the career landscape and opportunities; evaluate your potential, including your skills and resources, and then map out potential paths that align both with these true desires and realistic possibilities.

It's a remarkable framework in many ways, although it's this process of examining your deepest yearnings that has been most interesting for me overall. It's also perfect timing for it to have come back in my orbit. Over the last year, I've been on a career break to travel, which is the first time I've ever taken an extended break from work. I'm also at an interesting point in my career: I have a nice round 10 years of work experience, which puts me at solidly mid-career, with a decent range of expertise and a reputation as a capable urbanist-policy-strategy person. I have range of options for what I could do next, but no particularly fixed idea of what that should be. Enter stage left, the yearning octopus, to take me down to denial prison and see what's really going on there.

My journey to denial prison

What struck me first as I started mapping out the various needs, desires and fears of my yearning octopus was how difficult it is to separate out the desires that relate to my career from those of my life as a whole. I don't think this is particularly surprising: considering how much time and energy we have to put into our work, it has a lot of heavy lifting to do in terms of fulfilling your needs and enabling your overall quality of life. But it also became clear that I've relied on my career to fulfil a significant majority of my yearnings over the last ten years. To secure a sense of purpose and identity, a feeling of having impact, external recognition and validation, curiosity and passion, financial security, social connections, and a whole load of other things, from one job - is asking a lot. Is it really realistic for one job to provide? No wonder there have been frustrations and disappointments.

I don't think the answer is to artificially separate out which yearnings are "career" yearnings and which are "life" yearnings - they are one and the same. But being able to map these out gives you more agency to be able trade them off against each other, and potentially accept a job that might only give you some of these - so long as you can still create space in other parts of your life for those yearnings, or accept that there will be certain periods in life where some needs will be prioritised over others.

My other surprise down in denial prison was that I expected to find specific challenges and issues that I would want to focus on. My whole reason for ignoring Ben's advice at the end of university was that I wanted to work in urbanism, and I've put a significant amount of time and energy into the field since then, as well as crossing over into a whole range of interrelated policy issues, like climate change, economic prosperity, skills, community development, housing, and public health. On one level, I'm certainly interested in all of these things.

In reality though, none of these individual "issues" came up as particularly important to me. I don't seem to have one particular thing which I want to fix or focus on. Instead, it turns out that what really excites and motivates me is the process of understanding the interrelationships between all the different parts of a system, and being part of the sense-making and problem-solving that that system requires. Everything is interconnected, and you could probably drop me at any point in that system and I would be equally motivated and interested to figure out where I was and how it interrelates to everything else around it. That realisation has been incredibly freeing for me, because it gives space to be both curious and excited about all the individual parts of the system, without getting arbitrarily detained by one of them.

The other things I discovered in denial prison were things which I’ve noticed around for a little while, but which have been brought up to the surface and perhaps which I hadn't given full credence to before.

• I value variety, and I want the option to work on a range of different projects and challenges (my worst nightmare would be working on one project for the rest of my career).

• I love teaching and coaching, and I get a very particular sense of satisfaction and joy out of helping people learn and grow, especially at the point at which they go and do it without my help.

• I don't want to be the most knowledgeable person in the room - I want to work directly with bright, critical people who I can learn from and share ideas with.

• And I do actually want to make a difference through my work, although I don't have too many delusions of grandeur about fixing some of the world's big problems. Instead, I want to help systems work in a more fluid way by figuring out how they work, picking them apart and putting them back together again, and if that in turn can allow things to actually happen and decisions to be made, then we (should) see progress and change in the world. (And if not, you missed a bit.)

There’s some value in getting older

I suspect that if Tim Urban had already written his blog post when I was 21, and I had sat down and done this exercise, I still wouldn't have had the perspective to be able to see any of these underlying motivations. Having had a few more years of living and working and been able to observe all of the things that either excite me or piss me off, I've gained something concrete to reflect upon and some decent evidence about what I might want in the future. How bizarre, then, that we put so much pressure and emphasis on making these decisions young. It won't be for everyone, but perhaps there's something to be said for using your 20s to gain as much experience and as many skills as you can, rather than rushing into a particular direction out of fear or expectation.

There's various evidence to suggest that people achieve their greatest impact in middle age, not youth. So given at 34 I still have at least 30 years of my working life ahead of me (and almost certainly more considering the drifting retirement age), I'm not feeling particularly concerned about wandering and changing course. When I re-examine the state of my yearning octopus again in 10 years time, I suspect that he'll have grown some new tentacles (and maybe lost a few), which would be impressive for me, but all part of a day's work for an octopus, which is a regenerative organism after all.

If you think you might want to go through this process yourself, I made it easier for myself by turning the original blog post into a step-by-step guide (it’s almost exactly the same content, just in an easier to follow format). You can use it yourself here.

expresses this beautifully. “Forcing the diffuse ideas and impressions in your head into a definite statement is an art form. You have to grab hold of what is floating and make it rigid and sharp.” It's a practice which requires discipline, care and focus, and reaps multiple rewards, in making you a clearer thinker and better critic (of both yourself and others).

And yet - how I’ve struggled! For years I've started and paused in trying to commit ideas to a page. I have a google drive, which I can barely bring myself to look at, littered with half drafts of things that I've tried to express and then never finished.

What seems to happen is an initial burst of curiosity, inspiration, and a desire to work through something that occurs to me; an energetic dump of ideas and thoughts; and then just as I reach a point of committing to a perspective or really crystallising it, something stops. The energy disappears, replaced by a paralysing cocktail of pressure, anxiety and perfectionism, and it remains unfinished (and forever associated with a faint sense of failure).

In fact, the only occasions where I've really managed to commit to and publish anything has typically been when I have some kind of external force propelling me. Usually there’s a deadline, and it typically involves a colleague, professor, or editor who can exert their authority over my internal wavering.

On one memorable occasion, the hard copy of a report that was due to be published the next morning, covered in my scribbled edits, had to be forcibly pulled out of my hands at 7pm by the editor. She refused to accept any more amends and instead insisted that this was it so that she could go home and go to bed. (She was, obviously, being far too soft on me - she probably should have done this 8 hours earlier.)

Of course when it was published the next day I cringed at places where I could have phrased something better - but despite the crippling perfectionism, it still represented a decently coherent and sharp perspective on the subject. Better than it existed in the world than not at all?

Where I've managed it, this level of commitment to sharp edged ideas is undoubtedly invaluable, and has meant that I've been able to make some positive contribution to the worlds of urban policy and research that I orbit around. And yet that seems like a high bar to reach, at least for me, and without that external pressure, what about those other ideas that have been relegated to the half-finished drafts folder?

I certainly value those sharp edged ideas, but I also greatly value in others an ability to explore ideas openly as they are being formed. Greater openness, less fear, and a sense of curiosity can permit someone to think things through out in the world. Even if it doesn't reach a solid conclusion, the action of writing helps the crystallisation occur; and where those edges are soft, or still in formation, it acts as a prompt for others to respond to. As a reader and a listener, I even prefer to engage with something that doesn't offer a final answer, rather than to come up against a hard-edged idea that requires a similarly hard-edged response. In the best form, those softer forms allow for dialogue rather than debate.

It's thanks to and her recent article on showing up that I've managed to write anything at all today. She reflects exactly these tensions about the writing process - and her response is, rather than giving up, to instead pay attention to that sense of tension, and to write about that instead. Once that's cleared out the way, you then have the mental space to go back to whatever you might have been thinking about originally.

Add to that, my own ideas and thoughts often feel to me like they extend across a broad and erratic set of themes. I can see how people might want to read a blog about urbanism (which is, I suppose, my topic of expertise, if you were to force me to commit to one, and if it wasn't allowed to be the Harry Potter books).

But to me this feels overly arbitrarily and limiting. Yes, sometimes I want to write about city-making, but I feel uncomfortably constrained by this: and every time I start writing something, I get distracted by the absence of all those other things that I think are important. My desire to present a coherent narrative of the world means that any individual thread of that becomes all-too conspicuous in its failure to reflect the complexity of everything else.

So how do I get over this? Again, I think, it's to let go. Perhaps to let some of those things make their way into the world, even half-formed, and see if a pattern emerges over time, without putting too much pressure on any of those individual threads to represent the full extent of the idea.

When I was younger I wrote a lot of music, and after a particularly productive stretch, I remember talking to a friend about my concern that I had written an incoherent album of no discernible genre, including everything from cheery folk pop to ethereal ambient dreamscapes.

Her response to me was that this was an unsurprising failure of my own lack of perspective. To anyone looking externally, there was a clear thread of commonality in the sound. That was, of course, the only thing I wasn't looking at, because it was all I saw all the time. I focussed on the differences and the inconsistencies, while being able to take a step back showed the real internal logic of what was happening both in my life, and therefore in my music too.

Yes, sometimes what happens in my mind is about urbanism, but it's also about all the other interconnected parts of the world which don't fit neatly into that paradigm. I suspect that that adds up to an unwieldy patchwork of urbanism, places, people, music, governance, the public sector, politics, psychology, meditation, the nature of knowledge, problem solving, economics, community, trauma, and knitting. And maybe not any of those, or perhaps something else. But I also trust that there are unbreakable threads that link all those ideas, which without being able to observe it from a distance, remain obscured.

So here I am, braving it for once, and hopefully committing to putting something out into the world, however soft-edged it is, and with some trust that the coherence will appear in time.