Chapter 1 - Turn on the good news

I don’t quite know why, but since a young age I’ve had a deep feeling that the world I was born into wasn’t quite right. I put on a uniform five days a week and went to school, where I would sit in the classroom with other children learning things that I was told were important, without ever really understanding why. I was told that I would need to get good grades in order that one day I could get a good job. But the adults who had good jobs seemed busy and stressed doing things that they couldn’t explain, dreaming of one day retiring so that they could do what they actually wanted to do, if they weren’t too late. To make it more strange, the adults would switch on the TV at the start and end of every day to watch the news, where I would see images of crime, war, natural disasters, pollution, and starvation. In my simplistic child’s mind, I couldn’t understand how all the adults could be so busy and stressed everyday, yet whatever they were busy and stressed with never seemed to solve these problems. Where was the good news? It wasn’t like the adults were all slacking off.

My head spun with endless questions that I still carry with me to this day. For example, why can’t we provide food and water to all of the world’s citizens? Why do we pollute the very planet we live on? Why are we so cruel to the fellow species we live alongside? Why is war legal? And why are we so sure about how to live our lives, when we really don’t know who we are or why we are here? These questions weighed heavier the more I looked, revealing a world that didn’t hold together under scrutiny.

As I grew older these questions led me to become increasingly interested in the concept of “sustainability,” which was a term I used as shorthand for wanting to create a better world for everyone and which I put at the heart of my career and personal life. I joined the Green Party, co-founded a sustainability-focussed business, and wrote a book on Sustainable Web Design. Meanwhile at home, my wife and I attempted to tick the boxes for sustainable living with our organic veg box, triple glazing, solar panels, electric car, and my favourite, our composting toilet. One year we picked a thousand cherry tomatoes that spontaneously grew out of the compost from our toilet. My naughty pleasure was offering juicy little tomatoes to friends, waiting for them to pop one in their mouth and then telling them that “they just grew out of our poo!” I often say that if you really want to learn about circular economics, start by closing the loop on your own poop.

Over the years I’ve written extensively online about various aspects of sustainability, been interviewed on the BBC and CNN as a sustainability expert and featured in the documentary film Responsible, pondering how businesses might help shape a better tomorrow. Yet, the more I do and the more I learn, the less I feel I know — a curious echo of my early questioning.

In the quarter century that I’ve been involved, sustainability has gone from a fringe movement to a mainstream topic embraced by celebrities, politicians, and even corporations. It’s now a multi-billion-dollar industry, with countless professionals working to make our lives, businesses, and systems kinder to our planet and our people. This should mean that we have made significant progress by now, but despite more effort than ever, we seem no closer to the utopian future that my younger self believed was within reach. In fact, if I make the mistake of switching on the news, I quickly get the sense that we’re slipping backwards.

Within the sustainability world, I’ve sensed a change too — a shift from the optimism and hope that my younger self was excited to be a part of, to a chorus of fear and blame, anger and shame, screaming that we are running out of time. While there have been pockets of progress, it seems that the broad ideas and tactics that have been promoted as the main solutions for decades have, on balance, not solved the big problems faced by humanity. This failure has contributed to a growing sense of despair, as we push the same ideas harder, only to find that these approaches aren’t as effective as we hoped them to be, while entrenched interests continue to push back with equal if not greater strength. Maybe now it is time that we take a step back to reflect on the deeper challenges at hand, and attempt to imagine new ways of thinking and being that might yield different results — from which new hope may sprout.

This book is therefore not your typical sustainability book; it’s been designed to give your mental muscles a proper workout, and in the process stimulate new insights, ideas, uncertainties, and possibilities, often from unexpected sources. In fact, we won’t have to go too far into our journey before you will probably realise that this is not really a book about sustainability, but about how we create a better world from first principles. That is what this book is all about — stimulating more creative, more holistic, more loving thinking to help us grow a positive, abundant future. If you are keen to expand your own thinking to wider horizons in search of new perspectives for a better world, this book is for you.

Beyond the window

In order to find new perspectives, we’re going to need to step out of our comfort zones and explore ideas that we too often shy away from, or don’t even realise are there to see. I’ll be honest that I feel nervous to write a book that pushes these boundaries, as if the progress police are always watching for anyone who dares stray from approved narratives. But that’s all the more reason to do it, because if we truly care about bettering the world then we need to keep stretching our thinking beyond where it was yesterday. It’s about time we allowed ourselves, and each other, to try colouring outside the lines.

There is an infinite world of ideas out there that are missing from the mainstream conversation, not just regarding the environment and social progress, but more broadly too. We need space to ask the unasked, to think what’s not yet been thought, and in doing so, maybe, just maybe, we can rediscover our lost hope and ingenuity. This book is therefore not about telling you what to think or believe, or prescribing solutions, but about taking you on a journey that constantly challenges your own thinking in order to help liberate your deepest thoughts, intuitions, and creative insights. To help you see the possibilities that are currently hidden outside of the window of acceptable thought.

This window of acceptable thought is known in politics as the Overton Window, named after the American policy analyst Joseph Overton, who in the early nineties proposed a model for assessing the viability of political policies. The model illustrated how political ideas at any particular time and place in history sit on a spectrum ranging from mainstream policy to “unthinkable” ideas. While there is really no such thing as an unthinkable idea, what Overton meant was ideas that are unspeakable due to being considered taboo, challenging, or unacceptable to an extent that they would be rejected by the public no matter how good they were. He therefore suggested that politicians who desired to have a successful career should always keep themselves and their proposals within the current window of acceptable thought.

While staying within the Overton Window might be good advice for politicians wishing to further their own careers, it can leave society with a lack of genuine leadership when it needs it most. We find ourselves today in turbulent times, facing a vacuum of inspiring ideas to collectively move us forward. It seems that the billionaire tech-bros are the only ones with a bold vision on the table, and it apparently involves writing humanity and Earth out of the story, turning us into cyborgs, and jetting a select few off to Mars. Maybe that’s what some of us want, but if it isn’t then we will have to allow ourselves to imagine and share alternative visions.

It is true that the window of thought does shift over time, but as the polarisation of ideas intensifies, it seems like our window is not widening, but narrowing. We are told to “follow the science” while media outlets publish content that tells us not just what to think and who to listen to, but also who and what we must not listen to. In this book, I’m taking the bold step of saying that we should actively seek out perspectives that we don’t seem to be hearing, whether they be on the opposite end of the political spectrum, wild conspiracy theories, lone dissenting voices, indigenous wisdom and ancient myths, strange ideas, or even things that are currently illegal. We should trust ourselves to be open and curious, without losing ourselves in other people’s narratives, or even in our own.

We must therefore look outside of Overton’s Window into Overton’s Garden, the garden of possibility that we have ignored for too long. Stepping into the garden outside the window will expose us to far greater diversity of ideas than we can see from inside, broadening our perspectives and offering us new, potentially vibrant possibilities. We have much to explore here, and you might be surprised just how diverse the contents of Overton’s Garden are.

Toward the end of this book though, we will seek to go even further and move beyond the garden into the wild lands beyond. This is because even though the garden is far richer, more vibrant, and spacious than being indoors under artificial light, gardens by definition also have boundaries. The word “garden” actually means an enclosure or fenced-in place and is related to the word “guard,” not describing the living things growing there but the fences or walls that keep everything else out. Hence we will be journeying through the garden to find new perspectives, with the garden itself acting as the gateway to a land of truly unlimited possibility beyond. A land where everything is connected and nothing is fenced off.

Before we venture out though, it is only right to inform you that stepping outside of the window of acceptable thought into Overton’s Garden and eventually climbing out of the garden into the unwalled wilderness of our minds, while opening the potential for new hope and ideas, won’t all be rainbows and unicorns. There are reasons that we don’t normally step beyond these boundaries, because it can be scary to explore outside the safety of society’s walls into the unknown, where monsters might be lurking. Not only that but outdoors we have to take the weather as it comes, rain or shine, and cannot switch the lights on when the sun goes down and things get dark. And having not looked at it for so long, we’ll find that the garden will no longer be manicured and neat, more likely being overgrown with brambles and plants that we call weeds.

This may well be a good thing, as even gardens are sometimes better when we loosen our grip on control, and if we rummage through the overgrowth, we might find hidden beauty, seeds of wisdom, healing leaves, and delicious fruits. Stepping outside of the window, and venturing beyond the limits of the garden is an act of courage, as we step into a great adventure in search of the not yet seen.

If at any point on this adventure you are tempted to turn around and run back inside, I encourage you to trust that there is light on the other side of any darkness, as the spring will always come if only we endure the winter. So, if you don’t mind popping on a warm jacket and a pair of gardening gloves to protect you from the prickles, I invite you to venture with me outside the window of acceptable thought, to see what’s out there in Overton’s Garden and beyond.

In Part One we’ll step into the garden to explore some of the overgrowth and weeds in the mainstream sustainability narrative that are rarely discussed, and how acknowledging them might help us to expand our thinking, focus our efforts more effectively, and might unexpectedly nourish us. In Part Two we will move beyond what we typically see as the boundary of sustainability and look at the fauna in the garden — human and non-human — to explore the fabric of our society that underpins almost everything in our modern world. We’ll find that while systemic change may be necessary, the ecosystem that we need to change might be very different from what we have believed until now and possibly more toxic than we’d imagined. This middle part of the book may be particularly challenging for some readers but I encourage you to stay with me through this shady patch of the garden, as well as the brambles at the entrance to Part Three, beneath which we will uncover the fertile ground of the human mind that may be the key to unlocking our potential, individually and collectively. Finally, we’ll take a giant leap over the garden wall into Part Four where I’ll be putting you to work planting new seeds of creative hope in the unbounded lands that lie beyond. My intention is that by the end, you’ll feel more empowered to find those seeds within yourself, embrace your inner weed, and grow yourself as a source of nourishment, medicine, and beauty, to support the healing and betterment of our shared world.

If you’ve enjoyed this sample chapter and are keen to read more, please do hop over to the Overton’s Garden website and order a copy of the full book. I’m really excited about this project finally being birthed into the world and hope that you will join me for the ride.

Pre-order Overton's Garden

Also, if you are involved with a podcast, blog, newsletter or magazine that might be interested in an interview or guest content with me in relation to Overton’s Garden, I’d love to hear from you.

I feel that our society has a rather unhealthy relationship with creativity, collectively agreeing that certain activities such as painting portraits, making movies, composing music, designing clothes and dare I say it, working in advertising, are officially classified as creative endeavours while many other things are not. And by extension, our society has agreed that the people who do these “creative” activities are creative people, a special class who are somehow different from the uncreative majority.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot in recent times and while I might be wrong, I think this idea we have of creativity is a very unhealthy distortion of the truth. A distortion that discourages people from embracing their full creative potential.

But to see that, we have to dig in to what creativity really is, which is itself a somewhat uncertain matter. What follows then is simply some of my current thinking that I hope will in some way resonate with you, or at least get you thinking. Let me know if it does…

To create is to be creative

Creativity literally means the ability to create things, or to perform the act of creation. Whether we realise it or not, we’re all creating things all of the time, and not necessarily even in the physical sense.

It could simply be that we've created an experience for somebody to enjoy by welcoming them into our home in a unique and special way. Or that we've created an opportunity for someone to see a new perspective in life simply by sharing some carefully chosen words. Or it could be creating a friendship by embracing an opportunity to connect with another soul. Creativity also comes forth as physical acts such as creating a meal, or starting a company, or planting a tree. And then there’s the creative act that spans the physical and the spiritual more than any other, the creation of a child.

Creativity is simply the act of creating new things in the world, and we're all doing it all of the time to a greater or lesser extent. Those of us who think that we're not creative might simply need encouragement to loosen our grip on the definition of creativity that society has conditioned us with. Then again, even if we loosen our grip on the definition, we might throttle our own ability to create, sabotaging our own creations with self-doubt, fears of failure and judgement, and other negative thoughts. We hold ourselves back from straying outside of the lines of what we “normally do” or what we feel is safe.

Creativity in it’s most basic sense therefore is the act of daring to create the things in our minds, without inhibition. It is an act of confidence and self-belief.

It is daring to say what we really want to say. It is breaking our own routine to do something that we are being called to do. It is daring to try doing the thing we don’t believe we can do. It is listening to and acting upon the quiet voice within us that wants us to do something different.

Of course, there is a large element of skill in the actual process of bringing ideas into reality and making them real. Some people are more gifted musicians, carpenters, cooks, or mathematicians than others, but I think it is a mistake to confuse technical prowess with creativity. People with limited technical ability can still have hugely creative visions, and can still attempt to bring them into the world even if they lack sufficient control over their physical body to produce it all themselves. We may have to call on the talents of other people and use whatever tools we have at hand to bring our ideas into the world. But at heart, the spark of inspiration that initiates these creative acts exists within all of us.

Divine inspiration

It may well be the case that we all have the potential for creativity bubbling within us, even if it is suppressed or ignored. The question is, from where does this creative potential arise?

You don't have to believe me, but I have a deep sense that while some of us might take credit for being creative people, creativity doesn't actually come from us, at least not if we follow it back to its source.

I’m not the first person to suggest that ideas might be things that we receive rather than things that we create. It is often said that ideas are cheap, and maybe this is because we are given them for free. If this is the case, then creativity is not the act of creating ideas, but the act of tuning in to the ideas that are floating around in us the ether and bringing them into the world in a form that others can experience. And every time we do so, we change the world.

It may be that the universe offers ideas to the right person at the right time, and our choice, or free will, is to decide whether we listen to these subtle messages, whether we act upon them, and how we interpret and distort them.

We can all learn to tune in more and to listen to the whispers of the universe. We might explore techniques to quieten our minds or to find places, activities and methods that help us pick up the signal from the cosmic radio station, Creativity FM. And we can all work to overcome the limiting beliefs that hold us back from exploring and pursuing our full creative potential, unfurling a little more each day.

This is something that I've been increasingly focussed on in recent years. I’ve always been interested in creativity and simultaneously been held back by my own limiting mindset, but for the last few years, particularly since I burned out and stepped down as Managing Director of my company, it’s been something that I have been actively trying to cultivate.

When I created the game Gyan Chaupar a few years ago, it was as if I had been possessed, albeit in a good way. It felt like something led me to find the ancient game in India and told me that I needed to understand it and create a new version for the modern era. It didn't make any rational sense whatsoever, and who knows the real explanation, but for a period of months I was animated by a creative force that wanted me to bring it into the world. It was something that came through me, not from me.

Seeing our own potential

Paradoxically, even though it came through me and as such as I can take only partial credit for creating the game, it was the game itself that helped me to understand how much creative potential I have, and how we all have it. When playing it with friends one day, I landed on the square for creativity and reflected on what it meant to me and my life. I commented on how I've always wished I was creative and that I'm at a point in life where I'm trying to find a way to see if I can unlock my creative potential. One of my friends looked up from the board, stared into my eyes and said:

Tom, what are you talking about? You're one of the most creative people that I know.

The thing is that I genuinely didn't believe him. And yet, the more that time goes on, the more I realise that what he was saying made sense from his perspective. From an outside perspective, he had a vantage point to see the things that I had already created in my life, from my business, to my home, to my relationship with Vineeta, to my first book, and even to the game we were playing in that very moment. I was too blind to see these things as my own creativity because I was always comparing myself to other people who appeared far more talented.

And I bet the same is true for you to some extent. You might not realise how much you are bringing into the world every day through your own creative acts, many of which don’t fit into our culture’s very narrow box of “creativity.” We are constantly creating, yet are often blind to our own creation.

And perhaps we are right to not give ourselves too much credit, just for the wrong reasons. If our creations are, to some extent, the creations of the universe being channelled through us, then they are not truly our creations. But equally, to tell ourselves that we're not creative people is to close the valve and stop the flow of the universe's creation. So we must find middle way. To keep the valve open and to see ourselves as creative vessels, conduits, or channels. A key part of the creative plumbing of the universe. A cosmic component that helps birth new things from some unknown realm into this physical world.

Or maybe we are just biological computers iterating new combinations of things. Some people would prefer to believe that, and how can we ever know? It may well be that both are true to some extent and that what we see with AI and it’s apparent creativity is simply a supercharged, gas turbine powered version of this latter approach, brute forcing new combinations of existing ideas.

Realistically, I think it is fair to say that most new creations in all their forms are new combinations of existing ideas. Genuinely new ideas are extremely rare but even these incremental ideas are useful to move life forward, and AI can’t come up with them, nor manifest them into our world, without humans at both ends of the chain to feed it with inspiration and interesting questions, and to receive its outputs, interpret them and decide how to act upon them. The creativity of artificial intelligence, however impressive it may sometimes be, still somehow relies on human consciousness to point it toward what it is supposed to be creating.

But these iterative ideas, whether from a human or a machine, also represent a finite bubble of creative potential. They are the box that we must learn to colour outside of if we are to truly progress. Progress is inherently driven by creativity, by new thinking that leads to different outcomes from the thinking we had in the past, whether that is in our personal lives, our organisations, communities, or humanity at large. We must therefore find ways to tune in to the deeper signals that provide us with what might be called “divine inspiration” and keep expanding our creative potential outwards to new horizons.

It’s time to lean in

I've increasingly been trying to lean in more and simply follow the messages that the universe is providing me, even when I don’t know where they are leading me or why. Doing so has had some surprising outcomes, not just in the creation of the game mentioned above, but in many areas of my life. It’s led me to experience things that I never thought possible and see new perspectives that have opened my heart and mind to be able to see a far greater sea of possibility than earlier in my life.

To give you an example, it’s how I unexpectedly wrote the album Stealth Defenders of the Status Quo earlier this year, having never been particularly musical and never written a song in my life. Seemingly out nowhere, I was once again possessed in some sort of creative fever that led me to create the album in just a few short weeks. I could have resisted and ignored the signal, but I leaned in and surfed the wave. It turned out to be deeply meaningful to me and some of those who have listened to it, even if it’s not for everyone. And yet it's not necessarily the case that I'm a talented songwriter. Having been buoyed in confidence by this experience, I decided to try writing some more songs, but in the absence of this prior guiding force, they all fell a bit flat. Maybe one day the universe will offer me some more.

And then perhaps the more notable example of me leaning in to this cosmic creative signal is my new book, Overton's Garden, which is a book I had to write even though at times I thought I shouldn't. The idea of writing a book about how we might be able to move towards a better world by looking outside of the Overton window of acceptable thought is inherently controversial, not because of any negative intent, but because it inherently asks us to push at the boundaries of our culture’s current thinking and break them down.

I am somebody who has always been terrified of getting in trouble, terrified of putting a foot wrong, and shy of putting myself in the firing line of any kind. And yet, here I am creating a book that is inherently unsafe in its content. My rational mind has worked very hard to tell me that this is not a good idea and that it could damage my reputation or upset other people’s views. And despite that, for the best part of 2 years, I've been consumed by a deep sense that the universe is trying to create this book through me. And I think that’s a good thing. David Bowie once said:

that if you feel safe in the area that you're working in, you're not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you're capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don't feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you're just about in the right place to do something exciting.

And I think that when we follow the flow of inspiration, we find ourselves in those places where we are a little out of our depth, where we have to learn to swim, and where our best creations emerge.

It was the case from day one for Overton’s Garden, as I hadn’t even planned to write a book. The idea just “dropped in” when I was meditating one day, complete with the title, the concept, the structure, and a deep sense that this is a book whose time has come and that needs to be published in 2026. I cannot explain that, and perhaps it was just something coming from my subconscious, but without that guiding force this book would not exist.

We can argue all day long about whether ideas come from our subconscious or from some other realm, but that is to miss the point. There are ideas that are trying to come into existence through us all of the time. This isn’t unique to certain “creative” people, but is true for all of us in different ways. Our job is to listen carefully to the ideas the universe is offering us each day (and each night), and then follow the thread. When we lean in to it’s direction of flow, truly special things can happen.

I hope that today’s article has helped you to believe that you are a uniquely creative person and that the universe wants you to open the valve and let new things flow through you into the world. You might still not see yourself as creative in the conventional sense, but if their is one thing that should never be conventional, creativity is surely it. You are a creative person, and the universe wants you to open the valve.

Curious to enter Overton’s Garden?

If you care about creating a better world and are keen to tap into more of your innate creative potential, you might enjoy venturing into the garden of your mind with me in my new book, Overton's Garden.

It’s now in the process of being printed and officially releases on September 11th 2026, just a few weeks from now. I have this strange mixed feeling of relief that this intense period of work is coming to an end, combined with a strange sense of loss that this particular creative act is nearly complete.

Despite surface appearances of being a book about sustainability, Overton’s Garden is under the surface, a book about creativity. It is a book about finding our true selves, relearning how to think and feel for ourselves, seeing the world with fresh eyes, tuning in to our own intuition, and finding the confidence to live in tune with the harmonious wisdom of the universe instead of mechanically marching to the drum of the culture that we have been conditioned by. It is a book about creating the conditions within ourselves for genuine progress, and letting it flow out into the world.

You can pre-order it as a beautiful printed book, eBook, or audiobook on the official website at overtonsgarden.com

Thanks for reading!

— Tom

I’ve noticed a growing number of people making frustrated comments about how they are fed up of being made to feel guilty for doing things that they enjoy. These people are often environmentally minded people who like me, have themselves helped to spread messages promoting more frugal, conscientious, eco-friendly lifestyle choices. And yet it seems that some resentment has built up.

In a world where the news bombards us with doom, gloom and fear while most people carry on with their lives as if there is nothing to see here, those who care deeply can end up feeling that they are neglecting their own needs and desires, sacrificing their own wellbeing for a world who couldn’t care less. It can feel as though ignorance is bliss for many, while those paying attention feel like they are carrying more than their fair share of the burden.

Have you ever felt this way?

I know I have from time to time, and that tension has been the thing that caused me to stop and pause to reflect on the topic of abstinence, which is closely related to this feeling of giving things up and missing out.

And although it might sound really counter-intuitive, I think that contemplating abstinence might have potential to help us live better, without the shame, guilt and resentment that too often comes with feeling that we have been told to make sacrifices. In a world where it is easy to feel like we are not doing enough, abstinence can actually be an invitation to do less.

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Don’t take slugs from strangers

When I was a kid, there were a lot of messaging telling us children to “Just say no.”

If a stranger offers you sweets, just say no.

If a stranger asks you to go with them, just say no.

If someone offers you drugs, just say no.

All good advice to give to children, although in my case I feel they might have started the drug messaging a bit too young. I remember being taught to “Say no to drugs” at my primary school, with the message being repeated with a great deal of seriousness by my Mum when I got home.

The problem was that I was too young to have any concept of what drugs even were. I imagined that they must be similar to slugs, and so I should be on the lookout for strangers at the school gate offering edible slugs. Furthermore, if I ever found any slugs, I must never put them in my mouth because, I was told, they could kill me! The messaging must have worked because to this day, I have never put a slug in my mouth.

Although I didn’t realise it at the time, what was being taught to us children was a form of abstinence; an active choice to not partake in a particular activity or aspect of the culture.

Looking back, I realise that I’ve so far lived a life with an unusually high level of abstinence. I decided not to drink alcohol as soon as my friends started getting pissed and vomiting on the floor. I’ve never been a coffee drinker, and I rarely drink tea, though I do have a soft spot for Vineeta’s homemade Chai. I’ve abstained from eating or buying animal products for well over a decade, and since 2016 I have not flown in Europe and have only flown to see family on other continents.

Even my business, Wholegrain Digital, is in some ways well known for its unusual level of abstinence. It has policies specifically defining what it will abstain from, including a “no fly” policy, a client screening process that defines what type of clients or projects it will not work with, and a vegetarian food policy. Furthermore, “Sustainable Web Design”, which I helped to pioneer with the team at Wholegrain, is in many ways a philosophy with abstinence at its core.

The question is, why bother?

Despite what I might like to tell you, it is clearly easier not to abstain. Why not just fully partake in everything that the people and companies around us are doing? After all, everyone’s doing it!

A private jet to utopia

Last year on our summer holiday, having driven our electric car to Switzerland, Vineeta and I began our journey back home to England. As we left Basel, our satnav routed us out of the city and directly past the entrance to the airport. I looked at Vineeta and said,

It’s going to take us two days to drive home from here, and yet we could have flown in just a couple of hours. And I bet there are hundreds of people in that terminal right now about to fly home without even having considered that maybe they shouldn’t. Why do we make life so hard for ourselves?

We then saw a private jet coming in to land and spent a moment dreaming about how luxurious it would be to have a private jet that could take us wherever we wanted, whenever we wanted. Just for fun, I looked it up on my phone and found that for a mere 15,000 euros, we could charter a business jet to take us from the EuroAirport near Basel to Bournemouth Airport, just a few miles from our home.

Private jets are something that I think about more than most people because I see them every day, flying over our house in the New Forest National Park, coming in to land in Bournemouth. I’m always amazed that there are so many people wealthy enough to fly on these things.

But now I was sat in the car passing Basel airport and wondering, why would rich people not travel by private jet?

It’s easy to say that private jets are obscenely polluting and an equally obscene waste of money, but everything is relative. To people poorer than me, my electric car is obscenely polluting and an obscene waste of money. I could try to argue that this isn’t true, but relative to someone who can’t afford a car, it is true. We all have ways of justifying the lifestyle that we want to have, especially when it’s normal for “people like us.” People like me drive an electric car, and people like that fly in a private jet.

It reminds me of an interview I saw with Bill Gates some years back, where he was asked how he could position himself as a climate champion and yet also fly on private jets. His answer was simple.

“Well, I’m a billionaire”

To be fair to Bill Gates, he apparently flew economy class for the first ten years of being a billionaire but then got a taste for the private jet life and claims that it is now his “guilty pleasure” that he more than compensates for via direct air capture technology to remove the emissions from the atmosphere. I can see how that is a fairly easy position to self-justify, even if many will disagree with it.

In my own case, aside from that momentary dream of flying home in a private jet, I actually enjoy travelling by land and seeing where I am going rather than popping up in a new place after a short plane ride. It’s a choice that comes with the occasional frustration but also a lot of satisfaction and enriching experiences. But I also do fly to see family, because for me that is something that I feel is too important to compromise on. These are my own terms of abstinence, not set by anyone else, and not to be imposed on anyone else either.

But all this talk of private jets brings us back to the idea of just saying no. In a world of moral decay, with a seemingly insatiable appetite to consume anything and everything until there is nothing left, it may be that all of us in this culture need to learn some self-control. To paraphrase the character Dr. Ian Malcolm in that classic scene in Jurassic Park, we may need to consider the possibility that just because we can do something, doesn’t mean we should.

The problem with abstinence is that abstaining from things that make our lives easier or more pleasurable is really really hard. It’s hard to say no to temptation, and it’s hard to not fully participate in the predominant culture that surrounds us. Every little decision to stray from the norm takes mental, emotional and physical effort, and that can be tiring.

Furthermore, just like its opposites of indulgence and excess, abstinence can be unhealthy if it becomes too dogmatic and rooted in negative emotions such as shame and guilt.

What I’m proposing today therefore, is not a rigid set of rules telling us all what we should stop doing. In fact, I’ll admit that I am somebody who values freedom and generally feels that we should have as few rules as possible. But I also feel that to live in a world with few rules, we all need to take responsibility for ourselves and try to ensure that we don’t behave in ways that lead other people to feel that we need more rules.

Yet what we see in the environmental movement is a lot of talk of the need for governments to impose more rules in order to force people and companies to behave responsibly. Essentially the narrative is that people should feel guilty for having their thermostat set too high, for driving a car, for flying on holiday, or for buying a new pair of shoes, and if guilt won’t motivate them to stop then the government needs to clamp down on it. Meanwhile everyone is feeling judged and a little bit miserable.

So what’s the solution?

Make your own rules

I think a big part of the problem is that nearly all of us desire things that we feel we probably shouldn’t, and we don’t like other people pointing it out. It’s much easier to just ignore the problem altogether, or to pretend that we are somehow perfect while pointing fingers at others who appear worse than ourselves. None of it is healthy, but if we stop looking at others and dare to look at ourselves, we might find things that can actually benefit our lives, while also benefitting society.

We can start by reframing abstinence from a form of monastic suffering to an active and personal choice to say no when we believe that saying no is the right thing to do. It simply requires a personal choice to be honest with ourselves about what our own conscience is telling us and to be prepared to prioritise what we think is right over what feels easy, at least some of the time.

When we put abstinence on the table as a thing that we should at least consider in our personal lives and in our organisations, we create a pause to ask whether there are places that we are not acting in accordance with our own values and best judgement, and whether there might be a way for us to pull back, at least a little.

To do so effectively requires us to be honest with ourselves and practice self-compassion. When we do this on our own terms and not as a performance for others, I think we can find opportunities that really enhance our lives. And if more of us did it even a little, I think we would see some interesting positive shifts in our society.

But abstinence is a really hard sell.

Perhaps abstinence is too harsh of a word, and a safer word like "moderation” might be the key. If you prefer a different framing, then absolutely choose a word that works for you, but I’d like to offer a word of caution here.

I regularly hear people using the phrase “everything in moderation”, not to justify moderating their consumption, but to justify maintaining their consumption. The problem with the word moderation is that it’s too often the excuse not to abstain rather than the reason to abstain. It’s an inherently blurry word that discourages clarity of where the limits actually are, whereas abstinence, even though it sounds far less fun, encourages us to be more clear about where we think the limit should be. That way, even if we only partially abstain, as I do with flying, we are at least still honest about where we think the line should be and that we have chosen not to go all the way.

It might be that you abstain from using AI, or from eating more than one biscuit a day, or abstain from eating red meat, or from buying things on Amazon, or from making snarky remarks to that colleague that irritates you, or from telling little white lies. Whatever it is that you think you should limit, whether partially or entirely, it is far more likely to be successful if you actually define it clearly. Abstinence is an invitation to do that, whereas moderation is an invitation to blur the lines.

While we no doubt all have different opinions on what is the right thing to do, in many cases the bigger picture is that the world would be a better place if more of us abstained from things that we personally believe we probably shouldn’t do.

And this is really my point; instead of making each other feel guilty or having governments tell us what to do, why don’t we each tune in to our own moral compass and see if there are some things that we feel we should abstain from? If we do it on our own terms, we can ensure that whatever we abstain from is right for us, and you never know, we might even enjoy it.

The abundance of island life

To wrap up, I want to just highlight that part of the problem with abstinence is that we live in a culture of believing that happiness means having everything that we want, when we want it. But that’s not really true.

To take a quote from my new book, Overton’s Garden:

Numerous studies have… demonstrated that increased material consumption beyond a baseline of meeting genuine physical needs doesn’t actually improve wellbeing, and in fact can do the opposite. A systematic review of studies on this topic found that a majority demonstrated that in wealthy nations, “reduced consumption is associated with higher levels of well-being or that there is not a significant relationship.” It seems that once the material base of our human hierarchy of needs has been met, the pursuit of yet more material consumption may interfere with our ability to fulfil our psychological, emotional, and spiritual needs that we are drawn to pursue.

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This is true in organisations as well, where abstinence may be challenging, but that challenge can yield great results. Sustainable Web Design principles can help us design genuinely better online experiences. Screening clients can contribute to a business with a reputation for integrity and a motivated and fulfilled team. It is also widely accepted that the worst design brief is a blank canvas, because constraints force us to try harder and be more creative. And Lucy Montel highlighted in a guest post last year that sometimes the key to better, is less.

Even at the extremes, when abstinence is imposed with a sense of joy and wonder rather than shame and guilt, it can be a highly enriching experience. For example, I’ve had the pleasure of knowing ecologist Christian Leppert, who is one of the most fascinating people I have ever met. Christian loves to conduct lifestyle experiments and some of them have taken abstinence to extremes that most people would never consider.

For one of his experiments, Christian decided that he would travel everywhere by the slowest form of travel available. Not “slow travel”, but slowest travel. He would actively look at public transport timetables to find the slowest option. To most people this probably sounds ridiculous, but to him it was an opportunity to actively slow down to a more natural pace of life, appreciate the geography of his travels, and perhaps meet interesting people along the way on these long and slow journeys.

This was nothing though in comparison to his favourite experiment — Island Life. Earlier in his life he had visited Hawaii, and while waiting for a ferry to a neighbouring island had got chatting with some locals at the port. He asked them about the island he was about to travel to, hoping that they could offer him some good tips of what to see and do while he was there. He was shocked by their response, which was that none of them had ever been there. How could they never have travelled to the island just a short distance away? They had a very simple answer:

Why would we travel to the next island, when we already have everything that we need on this island?

These people were so genuinely content that they captured his imagination and so he began to dream of one day experiencing island life. The problem was that he lived on top of a mountain in the Black Forest in Germany. How could he ever experience island life?

Ever the creative thinker, he found a solution. He made a map of the area where he lives, and then marked everything below 1000 meters of elevation as ocean. He now lived on an island, with his home just above sea level and he gave himself the birthday present of spending a year on his island.

What he experienced was fascinating.

His whole pace of life slowed down and yet he had far more time to enjoy things he loved, such as walking in the forest and tending to his garden. He observed that travelling away from your home not only takes time and energy while you are travelling, but time and energy thinking about it before you travel. If you cut it out of your life, a lot of space frees up. At the end of the year he declared that it had been the best year of his life and when his partner asked him what he wanted for his birthday, to her dismay, he asked for another year on his island.

I use these stories to highlight that abstinence can be joyful and enriching, as well as helping us learn a lot about ourselves, but we have to do it on our own terms and not have it forced upon us by others. The moral framework here is one of our own making, whereby we decide the limits of what we will say no to and why, being compassionate of our own needs and aware of the world around us as we navigate the delicate balance of life.

What will you say no to?

So on that note, I encourage you to consider whether there might be forms of abstinence that you might actually like to try. Have a think about these questions:

1. Are there things in your life that you think you should give up or cut down on, but don’t? What is the honest reason?

2. Are there things in life that you would like to abstain from but haven’t? What is standing in your way?

3. If you can’t completely abstain from something, is there a level of partial abstinence that feels achievable?

4. Are there things that you think your organisation should abstain from? What might the challenges be? And how might it benefit the organisation?

You don’t have to tell me the answers to these, but if you’re feeling like sharing anything in the comments, I would love to hear from you.

And if you enjoy my writing, check our my new book, Overton’s Garden, a wild adventure beyond the boundaries of acceptable thinking to unlimit our minds in search of creative hope for a better world.

The new book is called Overton’s Garden and it has been a real labour of love that I am so happy to be able to now share with you all. In this post I’m going to tell you all about the new book, how you can get it, and also introduce a new Oxymoron membership with some exciting benefits. Let’s dive in!

Stepping into the garden

I have been working on Overton’s Garden pretty intensely since November 2024 when the idea for a new book popped into my head during a meditation, including the name and the overall structure. The premise was this…

It feels like we’re at a point in history where humanity faces multiple major crises and unprecedented rapid change, while at the same time real social and environmental progress has been feeling increasingly stuck or even drifting backwards. And yet, it has also felt like there is something of a vacuum of inspiring new thinking and vision to move us through these times toward a hopeful future that we can get excited about.

The book therefore posits a simple question, which is this — if the ideas we have are no longer working, where can we find new ideas and inspiration to move us forward? And it offers a simple but radical answer — that to find it we must look outside the window of acceptable thinking, known in political circles as “The Overton Window”. In response therefore, the book offers you what might be considered over 300 pages of “unacceptable thinking” to reinvigorate your mind.

It invites you to join me on a daring adventure beyond the boundaries of mainstream environmental and social narratives, exploring a neglected ecosystem of thought, with its seeds of hope, nutritious fruits, and medicinal herbs, as well as its prickly brambles and dangerous creatures.

Together it takes us to places that you never expected to find in a book on sustainability and social progress, and in doing so you might just begin to transcend the boundaries of your own perspective and socially-imposed limits, rewilding your thinking and planting new creative hope within your own being.

This is without doubt the most ambitious writing project I have ever undertaken by a significant margin, constantly pushing me outside of my own comfort zone to find new insights. It’s been over a year of deep research during which I sometimes felt like my brain was going to explode, not just because I was holding so many threads together at the same time but because I was also experimenting with going deep inside my own consciousness so that I might help you go deep inside yours.

What have people said about the book?

I am so grateful to have had some incredible people generously take the time to pre-read the book ahead of publication. Here’s a little of what they’ve said about the book in their own words:

, Founder of the Institute for Practical ekoPhilosophy summed it up beautifully as follows:

Tom Greenwood writes the way the best thinkers think — by wandering into territory that doesn't belong together and showing us why it does.

What I loved most is that the book never closes a thought prematurely. Just when we might want to tick a checkmark, it keeps opening, giving invitations to think further. To me, this book is therefore about what becomes possible when we stop letting the familiar define the edges of the real.

Hannah Cox, Founder of the Better Business Network (and who ran 100 marathons recently for charity), described the book as:

A funny, disarming way to help you think in colour, rather than black and white. I came away excited about the future, and ready to throw the word sustainability out the window.

Samantha Cooper, Director of Business Declares said:

A fabulous book - I’d encourage anyone to dive in and be taken on an adventure. Tom’s warmth, compassion and super sharp insights make this an enthralling read. It has the wisdom and breadth of a lifetime’s studies combining so many interconnected strands. The solid ground is pulled from under us, opening up the opportunity for freedom and a lightness to expand our thinking and consider what it really means to be human and to act in accordance with our true nature.

Emily Danby, Mediator and Relational Facilitator said that:

Having felt awkwardly on the fringes of the sustainability world for some time, it encouraged me to see the bigger picture of my social impact work, and keep going!

Asim Hussain, Founder of the Green Software Foundation described it as:

A book that lifts the blinds and shows you who put them there in the first place. It swaps fear for clarity, and clarity for actual agency.

And James Gill, CEO of EcoSend, commenting on one particular chapter said:

Don’t send your children to school until you’ve read this book!

What I can promise you is that whatever your position on things and regardless of how many of the ideas in the book you agree with, it will stretch your mental muscles, open your heart, and as a result you’ll come away with new ideas and perspectives that help you to show up in the world more empowered to make positive change.

My hope is that it will help meet the unmet need at this time in those of you who care deeply and are hungry for new thinking.

Where can you get it?

Overton’s Garden is now available to pre-order as a beautiful printed book, as an eBook, and as an audiobook on the book’s website at www.overtonsgarden.com.

All versions of the book will be released in the second half of 2026, as soon as possible once the final stages of editing, proof reading, typesetting, illustration, and printing are completed. I’m aiming for late summer to deliver the eBook and Print Edition. I’ll be recording the audiobook after the written version is complete so that will likely be in the autumn.

I really hope that you will feel inspired to read the book and support the project by ordering it for yourself or a friend. Pre-ordering helps me enormously by supporting the initial production setup and print run, so thank you in advance. 🙏

Pre-order Overton's Garden

After each version releases, you’ll also be able to get them from other retailers, online and off, which I’ll announce when the time comes.

Finally, there is another way to get the book, and that is right here on Substack.

Introducing Oxymoron membership!

I’ve been writing here on Substack for four years now and I haven’t added a paid subscription option, partly because I want to keep my core content free, partly because I was too busy writing Overton’s Garden, and partly because I only wanted to do it if I could offer something of genuine value to you in return.

Now the time has finally come, as I want to build a more meaningful community here engaged in finding new perspectives and creative hope in these “interesting times”. The new paid membership options are therefore an opportunity for us to connect more deeply and co-create something special moving forward.

So what is in the membership?

First up, I want to reassure you that my intention is still to keep all core content free. Paid membership is for those who want more and who are keen to support my work further.

Standard Membership

The standard paid subscription comes with an eBook copy of Overton’s Garden (on release), plus a Q&A “Ask me anything” chat, and quarterly webinars where we can share ideas and have meaningful conversations. It’s $6/month or $60/year.

But what I really want you to consider is this…

Founding Membership

I have created a Founding Member tier that includes the same things as the standard tier but also comes with these additions:

• A print edition of Overton’s Garden posted to you on release

• The Overton’s Garden audiobook (download on release)

• Read every issue of a new community zine posted to you with each issue starting late 2026, plus help shape its content

It’s $72/year, so the same as monthly membership and only a tad more than the standard annual plan. You’ll get the physical book and zines posted to you wherever you are in the world. I’ll announce more about the zine at a future date but my vision is that we can co-create something truly inspirational and mind expanding as a printed magazine, and give you something that you can look forward to receiving in your post box and actually holding it in your hands, offline.

These plans are available now so please consider upgrading and support the evolution of this work.

And to those of you who generously made a pledge here on Oxymoron in the past, you’ll automatically be converted into a Founding Member. Big thanks!

Get a paid membership

And of course, if you have any questions, always feel free to ask me.

I’ll be back soon with new content for you to enjoy.

I hope you had a lovely, sunny weekend.

I just wanted to share a quick note about how this newsletter (if it is indeed a newsletter), is evolving, including some small changes.

For four years, Oxymoron has been my home for writing about “sustainable business”, stemming from the idea that those two words pulling against each other is an interesting place to find new insights about how we can run more responsible organisations, improve the world of work, not to mention evolve ourselves and our society.

Over the last few years, my own thinking has broadened and I’ve been writing more and more about the bigger questions sitting underneath sustainable business: what it actually takes to create a better world, how we evolve ourselves toward that end, and why the most useful thinking almost always lives inside apparent contradictions.

This echoed my original decision to name this newsletter ‘Oxymoron’, but encompassed an ever growing plethora of paradoxes that I am seeing in the world around me. The original framing of “sustainable business” has shifted from being a focus to being a constraint, and I have been nervous to branch out to much for fear, if I am being honest, of losing you.

As I stretch my own thinking further and further, I may venture into places that you may not have expected to go, that you didn’t opt-in to, and that don’t align with what you thought you had subscribed to.

So this is me saying that I’m going to be venturing more beyond “sustainable business” and I would love you to join me.

Where we are heading with Oxymoron is a new framing as follows:

How do we unlimit our thinking for a better world — and find more expansive hope at the edges?

As part of that, I will soon be announcing some new developments as follows:

1. My new book, which I will announce here first (very soon!)

2. A printed zine that I’m excited to work on, including contributions of writing, art, poetry and more (perhaps from you)

3. A paid subscription here on Substack that will include a lot more than just the core newsletter posts

You don’t need to do anything for now. It will still be me, just with a broader frame.

Thanks for being here. I hope you’ll join me for the ride.

— Tom

Vineeta and I have just come back from celebrating our wedding anniversary with a trip away to Amsterdam, and what a time we had. As we wandered the canals and admired the iconic architecture, we were flying high as kites.

High on gratitude that is.

Gratitude that we had met each other all those years ago, that we had had the courage to tell each other how we felt, that we have enjoyed 18 wonderful years of marriage together (plus the bit before that). Gratitude that we both have good health, that we are genuine best friends, and gratitude that we have the privilege to travel by train all the way from our little village in England to Amsterdam. What a treat!

On the first morning after we arrived, Vineeta saw one of the hotel’s cleaners in the hallway and told him that we didn’t need our room cleaned that day. She said that it was perfect already and all we needed was a fresh bath mat. He seemed so grateful to be relieved of some of his workload, while at the same time grateful to have be seen and appreciated.

I became acutely aware that the cleaners in a hotel are some of the most significant people when it comes to ensuring that guests have a pleasant stay, and yet they are typically a hidden class, kept in the background as much as possible. Yet really they should be presented as the heroes of the hotel. The people who do hard work for low pay to make a really meaningful difference to people’s experience when staying away from home.

It made me really aware of wanting to keep the room clean so that they have less work to do, rather than the opposite, which I know is wrong but is easy to slip into, of thinking that it doesn’t matter if I make a mess because the cleaner will come in every day anyway. Keeping the room tidy was not just good hygiene, it was an act of respect to the cleaners.

Later that same day, we were both ravenously hungry, having skipped lunch, and so we headed out for dinner to a cute little Japanese restaurant called Vegan Sushi Bar. It had a really warm, welcoming and relaxed atmosphere that far exceeded our expectations from its rather unimaginative name. It was exactly what we needed and we were grateful to have found it.

We ordered a mixture of dishes to share — gyoza, a bao bun, wakame salad, satay noodles, some green tea and a yuzu lemonade. Then Vineeta looked at me and said something that genuinely blew my mind.

Don’t you think it’s amazing that we just turned up in a foreign country, and these strangers have taken us in and are cooking us a beautiful dinner?

I’m so grateful for their generosity.

We had done nothing to deserve this other than implicitly promise that at the end of the meal we would wave a bit of plastic in front of a credit card reader and transfer them some magic tokens. I had never seen it that way before. I had taken it for granted that we could walk in to a restaurant anywhere in the world and have a meal, so long as we paid for it.

And here is the crux of today’s post, that the act of paying money for things encourages us to take them for granted and lose sight of how lucky we are to have them. We often don’t think that we need to be grateful for things precisely because we have paid money for them.

“I paid for it, so we’re even. I don’t owe you anything more.”

That seems to be a common attitude, even if many people never intend it that way.

Yet the thing we get in return for our money is nearly always more valuable than the money itself. In the case of our meal at Vegan Sushi Bar, the crops had been nourished by the Earth, watered by the rains, energised by the sun, and tended to by farmers, before being harvested, processed, packed, transported (probably several times), all by people who we have never met. Only after all of this had happened could the people in the restaurant chop it, cook it, season it, and deliver it so beautifully to our table.

Every tiny step in the life of those ingredients contributed to us having the opportunity to enjoy such a wonderful meal, not to mention the human energy that had gone into creating the restaurant space itself as a beautiful setting for us to enjoy the food. We had so much to be grateful for, and yet it was so easy to take it for granted as just a meal that we were buying.

Money creates a sub-conscious sense of entitlement. When we use money as our means of exchange, all forms of trade, whether paying for a meal, buying a house, or paying an employee to work at a company, become transactional. They get reduced down to a simple mathematical equation in which the true wonder and generosity of people and our natural environment don’t really factor.

You might not think that this really matters, because money is such an efficient and useful means of exchange, but in a society where money has become part of the central operating system of how people interact with the world around them, this is a real problem. It seeps into our attitudes towards everything, reducing our responsibility in life to simply paying money for things without having to think or care more deeply. “Money” as the primary currency of human exchange, gradually rots our society from its core.

When we click ‘Buy Now’ or wave our credit cards over a contactless machine without making eye contact with the human on the other side of the counter (if there is one), we get what we want on demand with no need to even say please or thank you.

And even when we do say please and thank you, the transactional culture that we have acclimatised to means that we are rarely being authentic. We might think we have good manners, but often saying please and thankyou is just a superficial nicety that we have been trained to say, not a sign of genuine gratitude. It masks the fact that in many cases, we expect to receive the product or service in exchange for our money, regardless of how politely we ask for it.

Genuine gratitude is not about saying please and thank you, even if that can be an effective way to show it. Genuine gratitude is an act of pausing to feel the love of others and of the universe. To feel it in our bodies and our minds as we receive good fortune, in whatever small form it comes. It is opening our awareness to the myriad of people, circumstances, and forces of nature that had to come together in a very specific way in order that it be possible for us to receive a genuine gift.

And this is the point, that the thing that we receive in return is always a gift, but the monetary payment inhibits our ability to see it. Monetary transactions create a separation between us and the gifts that we receive, whereas gratitude strengthens the connection.

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I’m not saying that we should abolish money. At least not yet. What I am trying to highlight is that in many ways, gratitude is more valuable than money, and that if we embraced it as a parallel currency, we could significantly improve our lives and the lives of others, not to mention benefit the broader living world that we are all a part of. At the risk of sounding cheesy, I would suggest that in some ways gratitude is the currency of love.

I don’t just mean romantic love, but universal love. The force that creates order out of chaos, that holds stars together, that germinates seeds, that creates friendships. The force that Susan A Gay wrote in 1909 as being

The primary force, creative in its character […] the foundation of the cosmos, the first law which could bring life on the physical plane into being and maintain it.

She goes on to assert that the evils that exist in the world are the result of a failure to sufficiently express love through our beings. That love inherently creates goodness in every aspect of life because it is self-giving rather than self-serving, and that without it we come to see everything and everyone “only as an instrument of personal gratification.”1

To feel and to express genuine gratitude is to cultivate love inside us for everything that has given love to us, and to offer it back in return. Gratitude is a positive reinforcement cycle of universal love, that elevates us all and leads to a more harmonious, less fractured world. What is being emphasised here is that love and gratitude are not just nice fuzzy feelings, they change how we think and behave for the better, making the world a better place in tangible (if unpredictable) ways.

I know from many years of running my own business that to be genuinely appreciated by a client is one of the most rewarding and motivating feelings. It warms the heart and soothes the soul, even at times when the work itself may be hard, boring, stressful, and perhaps even unprofitable. To receive a spoonful of genuine gratitude can melt the hardship away and make it all feel worthwhile. Likewise, in reverse, even the best work — interesting, fun, lucrative — can turn sour and feel soul sucking when a client makes a comment or behaves in a way that indicates that they see us simply as a resource that they are paying for and not human beings who they are grateful to.

Gratitude energises the best parts of a human being, elevating their thoughts and behaviours, lighting the flames of intrinsic motivation, giving people purpose and confidence, and inspiring them to be more compassionate and generous. The currency of gratitude is never a win-lose, as is so common in the heartless world of business, as it is always a win-win. Whether you are giving or receiving, gratitude always makes life better.

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Today, therefore, I am simply proposing that gratitude, genuine gratitude, could be one of the simplest and most effective moral frameworks there is. I know it might not sound like a moral framework, but to commit to cultivating gratitude in every aspect of life (including business) is perhaps one of the simplest and most enjoyable ways to guide oneself toward more ethical thoughts and behaviours.

This week, therefore, I want us to consider what gratitude might look like if we embraced it as a parallel currency in business.

How might we interact differently with our employees, our employers, our suppliers, and our customers? How might we think differently about the resources that we consume? How might we gain greater awareness of the complex web of life that makes everything possible?

We can contemplate this for our own businesses and try to embody more gratitude in our day to day work to see how it changes our behaviours, changes our relationships, and changes us.

We can also contemplate what it could mean for mega-corporations like Amazon, BP, or Volkswagen, to embrace genuine gratitude as a currency of equal or greater importance than the financial currency that they currently prioritise. How might it change the quality and user experience of their products and services? How might it change the way they structure their pricing, not to mention their terms and conditions? How might it impact their employees and the vast networks of suppliers and freelancers that support them? How might it change their relationship with the communities that they depend on and that they impact? We might even ponder how the relationship between the company and their shareholders might change if genuine gratitude flowed both ways.

My intention is not to prescribe all of the answers here, but simply to suggest that beautiful things can flow and ripple out from an attitude of genuine gratitude. And unlike money, it doesn’t require us all to agree on the currency for us to start using it. We all have the opportunity to opt-in at any moment. We just have to take a little pause to see the gifts that life given us.

And with that, I want you to know that I genuine appreciate you being here reading this. Even if I don’t always know that you have done so, the fact that you took time out of your day to contemplate the ideas that I share here on Substack means a lot to me and encourages me to do more. Big thanks! 🙏

Let me know what thoughts this has sparked in you by leaving a comment, and please do share or re-stack if you’ve found it interesting.

You can find the previous posts in this Moral Frameworks series as follows:

• Are we at sea without a moral compass?

• Could morality be the saviour of capitalism?

• Should business adopt the Toltec Four Agreements? (Moral Framework 1)

• What if companies were evaluated in Willy Wonka’s Egg Room? (Moral Framework 2)

I’ll be back soon to explore another moral framework to help us improve our organisations, our society, and our own lives. Until then!

— Tom

Let me explain.

Last week, I was just coming to the end of a meditation when out of nowhere, the words “The Egg Room” popped into my head. They appeared loud and clear, with no explanation, yet somehow were coupled together with the dates 1912 and 1929. It was very mysterious.

I’ve learned that while bizarre “thought pops” like this often seem random and irrelevant, they can in fact be the source of fascinating insights if investigated with curiosity. The human mind sometimes offers us profound wisdom in the strangest of ways, if we are paying attention.

I wasn’t aware of anything called The Egg Room, but intrigued by the potential meaning of this message, I searched online and found two major references. One was in a computer game called Deltarune, which as someone who doesn’t play video games didn’t really resonate with me. The other was a scene in the 1971 film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. Having watched this film many times as a child, I enthusiastically took a closer look and was surprised by what I found.

The film contains a scene where Willy Wonka takes his guests into a part of the factory called The Egg Room, in which giant geese sit upon high perches laying golden chocolate eggs. And believe it or not, it is in this egg room that we will find today’s moral wisdom.

You might think that in comparison to the Toltec Four Agreements explored in the last article, this sounds rather like a load of nonsense. And you wouldn’t be alone in thinking that. In fact, when Wonka’s guests are first introduced to the geese that lay the golden eggs, the character Henry Salt declares

It’s a lot of nonsense!

To which Willy Wonka responds by singing quietly under his breath

A little nonsense now and then,
Is relished by the wisest men

Let us then proceed in that spirit to investigate the wisdom of Willy Wonka’s Egg Room with open minds.

How do you know a good egg?

You might remember that Henry Salt, a multi-millionaire businessman, had obtained a golden ticket for his daughter to visit Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory by buying up an obscene number of chocolate bars. His daughter, a spoiled brat by the rather unpleasant name of Veruca Salt, sees the giant geese laying golden eggs and demands to her Daddy that she must have one.

Henry Salt, an archetype of capitalist power, pulls his wallet out of his suit pocket and says

Wonka, how much do you want for the Golden Goose?

To which Willy Wonka calmly replies

They’re not for sale

Thinking it’s a negotiation, Salt bats back

Name your price

To which Wonka cooly hits a nerve by responding

She can’t have one

Veruca then breaks down into a full blown tantrum, singing the iconic song I Want It Now, while dancing around the Egg Room smashing things up as the Oompa Loompas try to contain the chaos. She concludes her dance routine by climbing up onto the platform of one of the quality control machines, called Eggdicators, from where she sings the final line of the song

I don’t care how, I want it now

Unbeknown to her, the Eggdicator does a quality control check on her and its quality indicator swings from neutral to “Bad,” automatically opening the trap door beneath her to drop her into the garbage chute. Her Dad, realising what has happened, dives in afterwards to save her and as he does so, the dial of the Eggdicator once again swings to “Bad.” Despite being dressed in the finest attire, the Salt’s were two bad eggs.

In the Egg Room scene, Willy Wonka explains to his guests that the reason they need the Eggdicator is because many eggs look golden from the outside but yet are rotten on the inside. They therefore need to judge quality not on surface appearances, but on the real substance within the egg.

What appears to be a silly scene from a children’s movie about quality control in a sweet factory is in fact a commentary on the rotten moral core of capitalist culture and the fact that there are things in life far more important than money.

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Insatiable appetites

Of course, the idea of a goose that lays golden eggs did not originate in a 1971 children’s film. Instead, it apparently originated from a fable told by the ancient Greek storyteller Aesop, likely from around the 6th century BCE, though his existence as a real historical figure is uncertain.

In the classic fable, a poor countryman and his wife own a magical goose that lays one solid golden egg every day. The owners grow wealthy by selling the eggs but become impatient and greedy. They believe the bird must contain a great store of gold inside its body, so they kill it to seize all the wealth at once. Upon cutting it open, they discover that it was in fact just an ordinary goose with no gold to be found inside. The goose was now dead, and so was the source of their wealth. Just as in the Willy Wonka movie, the fable tells us that greed eventually kills itself.

Now you might remember that when The Egg Room popped into my mind in my meditation, it was accompanied by two dates — 1912 and 1929. What on Earth do they have to do with this story?

The honest answer is that I have no idea, and I can’t find any information connecting these dates with any sort of egg room or golden egg (though two Fabergé Easter eggs were apparently made in 1912). If you just look up what these years are famous for though, you get a rather interesting answer.

1912 is the year that the RMS Titanic, the Golden Egg of the White Star Line, sank on its maiden voyage. And 1929 was the year that the Golden Egg of the global economy, the US stock market, collapsed into the Great Depression. In both cases, we have something that was perceived from the outside as golden, but yet fell from glory when weighed on the scales of reality. In both cases, the golden egg had been rotted from the inside by greed.

Which leads us to the question: how many businesses today would be labeled as good eggs on Willy Wonka’s Eggdicator? And how many, despite their shiny golden appearances, would turn out to be rotten at their core?

At present, the golden companies of today’s economy are mainly tech companies, for example those sometimes referred to as the Magnificent Seven — Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla. Looking outside of the big tech companies to the wider economy, today’s golden companies include those such as Saudi Aramco, Warren Buffet’s investment firm Berkshire Hathaway, Walmart, weight-loss drug makers Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, ExxonMobil, Chevron, JPMorgan Chase, and don’t forget the globally dominant payment providers Visa and Mastercard.

If we put all of these companies on the Eggdicator, would we find them all to be golden eggs or would we see trillions of dollars of “value” dropped down the garbage chute? In other words, if we valued them in moral integrity rather than pure financial greed, how would they weigh up?

I have my opinions, and I’m sure you have yours. And I do see companies in this world that I believe are genuinely good eggs, such as the ethically sourced food company Zaytoun, the IT support company Fluid IT, fellow web design agency Mightybytes, my friends at graphic design agency Leap, and Riverford Organic Farms.

Turning the mirror on myself, I can see that as a co-founder of Wholegrain Digital, one of my core responsibilities is to try to ensure that no matter what challenges or temptations we face, we always do our best to ensure that the company is a good egg.

Cosmic potential

At its core, Willy Wonka’s Egg Room is showing us that we live in a culture that wishes not just for a golden egg for Easter, but to gobble up as many golden eggs as possible. A culture so blinded by greed that we don’t even stop to evaluate the goodness of what is inside the eggs.

And here we find the real reason for the egg metaphor, because the egg, as understood by many ancient cultures, holds the cosmic potential from which life emerges. The colour of the egg’s shell is really not important. That is simply surface appearance. What matters is the vitality and purity of the source potential inside the egg that will enable it to grow into something beautiful.

We should therefore be looking not at companies external appearances, but inwards to the source from which they sprang, and the core from which they operate. Among other things, we should be asking:

• How and why did these companies come into existence?

• Who are their founders?

• What are their true motivations?

• How are these companies structured?

• Who owns them, and why?

• Who funds them, and what influence do these funders have?

Just asking these simple questions can very quickly reveal clues as to whether a company is pure at its heart and likely to grow into something truly beautiful, or if it is in some way poisoned or rotten in a way that will lead it to grow into a monster, if it hasn’t already.

Even if a company looks beautiful on the outside, what is on the inside may reveal something quite different, as we saw for example in recent years with the Brewdog scandal that involved accusations of a toxic culture of fear, sexual harassment, and misleading marketing, eventually rotting the £1 billion golden egg from the inside until it entered administration last month.1

How to weigh an egg

Just like the Toltec Four Agreements explored in the previous post, Willy Wonka’s Egg Room does not give us a clear set of do’s and don’ts to use as a moral framework. Instead it calls on us to look deeper beneath the surface of ourselves, of each other, and of our organisations, and to trust our intuition as to whether something genuinely feels right.

This isn’t a new concept. The Egyptian Book of the Dead, more properly known as The Book of Coming Forth by Day, originated around 1550 BCE with roots in even older funerary texts and it tells us of the ancient Egyptian belief that after death in the ‘Hall of the Two Truths,’ the deceased will stand before a giant set of scales where the jackal-headed god Anubis acts as the guardian and operator of the balance. It is told that Anubis carefully places the deceased’s heart on one pan of the weighing scales and the single white feather of Ma’at on the other.

If the heart is lighter than or equal to the feather, it means that the person has lived a life in accordance with Ma’at — the ancient Egyptian goddess who embodied truth, justice, cosmic order, balance, and moral righteousness. Only then are they allowed to proceed to the blissful afterlife.

On the other hand, if the heart is heavier than the feather, weighed down by sin, lies, violence, or imbalance, then the goddess Ammit “the Devourer,” depicted as part crocodile, part lion, and part hippopotamus, immediately eats the heart, upon which the deceased’s soul is annihilated forever.

Just like the Eggdicator, the invisible truth of inner purity is measured against the unchanging standard of divine truth and justice embodied by Maat.

There is some indication of what the Egyptians of the New Kingdom considered moral behaviour, provided in the accompanying Negative Confession, or Declarations of Innocence, a list of 42 sins that the dead person’s soul would have to declare that they had not committed.2 Ultimately though, the scale operated by Anubis was a single measure of inner purity.

The message is clear, that while lists of rules and laws might be useful to guide our behaviour, the true moral framework is the weighing of our own hearts. We can list all of the good things that we have done and rationalise why we think that we (or our organisations) are good eggs, but when it comes down to it that is all just the foil wrapper. What truly matters is the intent with which we have acted and the purity of our thoughts and actions when seen from the inside. Were they motivated by love, compassion and generosity, or by greed, fear and resentment?

The Eggdicator and the Scales of Ma’at show us that there is a fundamental truth to the moral purity of a person or an organisation, and that on some level we all have the ability to sense that truth if we just take the time to tune in and see it. If we listen to our own intuition, we can feel when something is rotten and when it is not.

If we look then at our own organisations — their mission, their behaviours, their cultures, their true motives — how light would they be on the scales?

It’s OK if the answer isn’t quite what we would want it to be. We are all imperfect, and what matters most is not that our hearts are as light as a feather today, but that we are honest with ourselves about where we are at and then do our best to move in right direction.

In that pursuit we could consider how our organisations might change for the better if board meetings involved an honest weighing in of the heart of the business? How might leaders change if they honestly weighed their own hearts? And how might employees show up at work differently if they too did the same?

While it doesn’t prescribe moral behaviours for us to follow, Willy Wonka’s Egg Room, just like the Scales of Ma’at, may give us the simplest moral framework of all. The one that tells us that we cannot cheat the universe, and that if we focus on purifying our hearts, we’ll naturally purify our organisations, not at a surface level, but at their cosmic core.

That might be all it really takes to create more responsible organisations, but we live in a culture that is afraid to ever truly weigh its own heart, fearing what the scales might reveal.

Thanks for reading. Let me know what thoughts this has sparked in you by leaving a comment, and please do share or re-stack if you’ve found it interesting.

You can find the previous posts in this series as follows:

• Are we at sea without a moral compass?

• Could morality be the saviour of capitalism?

• Moral Frameworks: Should business adopt the Toltec Four Agreements?

I’ll be back soon to explore another moral framework to help us improve our organisations, our society, and our own lives. Until then!

— Tom

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So in this series of articles, I’m exploring different moral frameworks to see how business, society, and life in general, might change for the better if we embraced clearer moral principles. You can find the first two articles in this series here:

• Are we at sea without a moral compass?

• Could morality be the saviour of capitalism?

Today I’m going to explore the first specific moral framework in this series, and I’m beginning with the Toltec Four Agreements. If you’re not familiar, the Four Agreements were popularised by Don Miguel Ruiz, a Toltec nagual (shaman) from the Eagle Knight lineage in Mexico, through his book, The Four Agreements.

I was introduced to the concept of the Four Agreements a few years ago by my friend Matt Hocking, and later stumbled upon a copy of the book in Nimbin, Australia, which as the spiritual heart of Australia’s hippie movement, felt like the perfect place to read it for the first time.

I want to flag that you might read the first part of this article and wonder what on Earth it has to do with business, but I think once it starts to sink in, all will become clear. And I want to begin this series with these four agreements, because unlike moral systems such as Christianity’s Ten Commandments, these simple agreements are more foundational. They don’t tell us what to do, or even how to judge success, but instead help us to find greater moral clarity within ourselves. In fact, framing them as agreements, rather than as rules or laws, is a key part of what makes them interesting. So let’s take a look.

What have we agreed to?

The Toltec philosophy teaches us that everything in human society, although appearing solid and fixed, was in fact made up by humans who went before us. This is something that I‘ve believed since I was a child, so maybe that’s partly why this resonates with me and I wonder if it resonates with you too.

Explaining this concept, Ruiz writes in his book, The Four Agreements:

Before we were born the humans before us created a big outside dream that we will call society’s dream or the dream of the planet. The dream of the planet is the collective dream of billions of smaller, personal dreams, which together create a dream of a family, a dream of a community, a dream of a city, a dream of a country, and finally a dream of the whole humanity.

The dream of the planet includes all of society’s rules, its beliefs, its laws, its religions, its different cultures and ways to be…1

As soon as we are born, with our minds still fresh and open to infinite possibilities, the people around us begin to domesticate us by teaching us how the world is and how we should behave. Without even realising it, we come to agree with most of what we are told, even when deep down it doesn’t feel right or doesn’t truly serve us.

The reason that we make these agreements is because “the only way to store information is by agreement.” This might sound odd at first, but the reason is that all communication works by agreement. The reason that you can read this article is because those of us who speak English have agreed what these symbols on the screen mean, as well as the verbal sounds that we agree mean the same thing. Agreement is the foundation of language.

In our modern culture, we call the information that we are given knowledge, and this knowledge is reinforced through rewards and punishments, creating a consensus reality in which even those of us who consider ourselves to be free thinkers, actually take most things on blind faith. We come to agree with most of what we are told by the people and culture we live in, forgetting our own inner voice and eventually, in most cases, unwittingly participating in the domestication of those around us, not to mention ourselves.

Ultimately, we have agreed to value the information imposed from the outside of us more than we value the intuitive wisdom and true knowledge that we can find inside of ourselves or through our direct experience.

We cannot see who we truly are; we cannot see that we are not free.

This disconnect leads us to live inauthentically, constantly out of sync with our true selves, living our lives “based on false law.” And these false laws of our world are at their core, based on fear — fear of judgment, fear of rejection, fear of punishment, fear of scarcity, fear of authority, and fear of death. But our biggest fear of all “is taking the risk to be alive — the risk to be alive […] and express what we really are.”

We would rather reject ourselves than take the risk to embody our true selves, but this inauthenticity drains our energy, leaving us with just enough energy to get through the day but little left to truly make our mark on the world. We have quietly agreed to maintain the status quo, even when we dream of something better. To borrow the title of my album, perhaps we are all Stealth Defenders of the Status Quo.

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We must then learn to break the myriad of invisible agreements that don’t align with our inner truth and that don’t align with the best interests of humanity and the wider living world.

But breaking the agreements that we’ve made, not just with others but with ourselves, is incredibly difficult, especially when in most cases we’re not even consciously aware that we ever made them. As a solution, Toltec wisdom offers us four new agreements to make with ourselves, that if we commit to them, will gradually help to dissolve these other agreements that we have made throughout our lives, ultimately setting us free. These four agreements are as follows:

1. Be impeccable with your word

2. Don’t take anything personally

3. Don’t make assumptions

4. Always do your best

Let’s take a look at them one by one.

Be impeccable with your word

The first agreement is by far the most important, and it’s incredibly simple on the surface. It begins with the principle that words come before action and are the most powerful tools that we have as humans.

We talk to ourselves in our minds and these inner conversations constantly shape our perceptions of reality and drive our behaviours. Our spoken and written words affect other people more directly, profoundly influencing their emotional states, their beliefs about the world, and their beliefs about themselves.

Depending on how it is used, the word can set you free, or it can enslave you even more than you know.

We must therefore use our words with utmost care. We must be impeccable.

The word impeccable actually means “without sin,” not in the religious sense of sinning, but in the sense that “a sin is anything that you do that goes against your true self.”

To be impeccable with our words therefore, means to take full responsibility for the words spoken in our minds and by our mouths, ensuring that our own words represent what we truly believe is right. And not just factually right, but emotionally right. To be impeccable with our words means to express them with a pure heart, wishing only good things for ourselves and for others. In other words, it’s not just about what we say, but how we say it.

I have personally found that attempting to integrate this agreement into my own life has taught me how often I don’t express myself impeccably, not in outright lies necessarily, but in small distortions of the truth. I’ve also found that it helps me to notice when my words are not as pure as they should be, when I have dark thoughts towards other people, or when I express things in ways that even if well intended, may do more harm than good.

It’s helped me cultivate greater awareness of my own thoughts and the way that I communicate with others, at work and at home. It’s in my mind when I write here on Substack and when I record the House of Life podcast. It was particularly in my mind, in the most intriguing way, when I recently wrote the songs for Stealth Defenders of the Status Quo, which on reflection feels strangely connected to today’s topic.

Now, what if this agreement to be impeccable with our words was made within every company, by every person, at every level?

Inside organisations, I believe it would radically change the way that people show up at work, no longer putting on masks and trying to manipulate others for their own gain. It would eradicate toxic work cultures, because people would tell each other the truth, and do so with love and compassion. As a result, teams would become more close knit, problems would not be swept under the carpet, they would be more likely to pull together in the same direction, and when they disagreed, they would talk it through and find a way forward.

I believe that organisations of all forms would become significantly more effective, so long as their purpose aligned with that of the true voices of the people working there. That is, I admit, a rather large caveat, as I suspect in truth many organisations could not exist in their current form, or perhaps not exist at all, if everyone within them was truly committed to being impeccable with their word.

Which businesses do you think would thrive, which might change in interesting ways, and which might cease to exist? And how do you envisage it would change your own organisation?

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But the impact would not just be internal. I believe that those organisations that still existed in this new paradigm would have a far more positive impact on the world around them, environmentally and socially. As these organisations naturally realigned themselves to follow the collective inner compasses of the people within them, they would become far more honest, no longer greenwashing, nor doing laundering of any other kind. Marketing and advertising messages would no longer seek to mislead or play on people’s insecurities, but would earn their trust through authenticity and respect for their audience.

This one agreement, if made at scale, could radically change our economy, our organisations, and our society for the better, but it is not an easy agreement to make in a world that constantly asks us not to be impeccable with our words.

In fact, in the spirit of being impeccable with my words, I personally feel a tension between this first agreement and what is asked of employers. As well intended as employment laws may be, they can sometimes make it hard to be impeccable with ones words. This has been the case for as long as I have been an employer, but even more so with the recent changes in UK employment law.

We increasingly operate in a culture where anything that an employer says can easily be taken in evidence and used against them, even when they have done nothing wrong, stifling the opportunity to have really honest, heart to heart conversations. What we have are laws and regulations that despite being intended to protect people, may actually conflict with this foundational agreement. What should we make of that? Then again, maybe the whole social contract that we call “employment” is itself in some ways at odds with this agreement. I believe actually it might be, but that’s a bigger conversation for another day.

Onwards to the second agreement…

Don’t take anything personally

The remaining three agreements are all supporting acts to the first agreement, beginning with the agreement to not take things personally. In some ways, this might be the hardest to do in practice, but without it, we will struggle to keep the first agreement.

This agreement asks us to acknowledge that while we must take full responsibility for our own actions, so too must others, even when people say and do things that we perceive as negative toward us. The words and actions of other people are a reflection of their inner states and not ours, even when they are responding to our words and actions. When we truly come to realise this, we become immune to the negative influence of others. We no longer hold negativity within ourselves or retaliate by sending negativity back to them, and we live true to ourselves, irrespective of what others say and do.

This is also true, though, when they say positive things about us. This doesn’t mean that we should act indifferent or aloof, but simply that we shouldn’t get caught up in the need for external validation, because this is the emotional chord that pulls us away from living as our authentic selves and being impeccable with our words.

In a work context, if we made this agreement to not take things personally, we would tell our colleagues what we are really thinking and encourage them to do the same to us, taking responsibility for our own reactions to whatever it is that they say. It would force us to look inwards rather than outwards for the source of our own suffering at work, accelerating our personal growth and enabling us to find greater joy and balance in the challenging situations that inevitably come our way. It would take some major inner shifts for most people to adopt this, and I certainly haven’t mastered it yet, but if we did we would be happier at work, more fulfilled, progress faster, and let’s be honest, there would be considerably less HR issues to resolve.

This second agreement would make life better for everyone in the work environment, but it’s hard to do, especially if you don’t also make the third agreement.

Don’t make assumptions

This third agreement highlights the fact that a huge amount of human energy is wasted thinking about and dealing with things that are entirely imaginary.

We imagine reasons as to why our colleague did what they did, or why a potential client didn’t hire us, or what our manager is thinking. I’ve learned this the hard way and still struggle not to make assumptions, despite them often being incorrect. The mind has a habit of wanting to fill in the blanks.

This agreement calls on us to find the courage to simply say “I don’t know,” to ask more questions, and to hold space for possibilities in the absence of reliable information. It not only frees up mental and emotional energy while saving everyone time and reducing conflict between people, it also helps expand our view to see a wider landscape of possibility instead of being fixated on an assumed reality. In the process, it also helps us to become more creative and better problem solvers. Surely, every company needs more of that.

Which brings us onto the fourth agreement.

Always do your best

This final agreement is self explanatory and yet still worthy of explanation.

To begin with, the agreement to always do our best highlights that none of us are perfect and our best is therefore all we can ever do. We should therefore free ourselves from negative self-judgment of our own imperfection, and yet never stop trying to be the best that we can be.

On a deeper level though, it highlights that we are often not doing our best because we lack motivation. This is perhaps no more clear than in the work environment, where many people are just there because they need the paycheck, lacking intrinsic motivation for the actual work that they are there to do.

Ruiz suggests that to do our best is to find love within ourselves for everything that we do in life, including our work, and dare I say it, even our bins and taxes.

I think it’s fair to say that while many people are good at their jobs and work hard, most people are working primarily for the external reward. You might disagree, but if they stopped getting paid, how long do you think most people stick around?

The result of this lack of intrinsic motivation is that many people carry a lot of negativity, frustration, and resentment with them when they go to work (and even when they are at home).

On the other hand, if you take action just for the sake of doing it, without expecting a reward, you will find that you enjoy every action you do. Rewards will come, but you are not attached to the reward.

This is far easier said than done, but I’m a huge believer in the power of intrinsic motivation, and I have seen in my own life and business how cultivating an attitude of genuinely doing my best creates a win-win for everyone.

Now take a moment to ask yourself, how many people in your team genuinely do their best and how many are really just there for the salary? Imagine what it might be like if they all genuinely did their best, even if imperfectly. If they all genuinely wanted to be there. That alone would transform most company cultures into something truly wonderful, and unleash immeasurable human potential to achieve great things.

Agreeing to something better

When we put these four agreements together, we have a framework that leads us to show up, not as obedient citizens or employees following predefined rules, but as the truest, purest versions of ourselves, trying our best to do what we believe is right in every moment.

Imagine what your organisation would look and feel like if everyone within it committed to following these four agreements. How might things change? How might it affect the people within your organisation? How might it impact your suppliers? Your customers? How might it ripple out through society?

Then imagine, if we scaled these agreements to be at the core of our global culture, embedded into the fabric of society, what world might we find ourselves living in?

If all humans could communicate in this way, with impeccability of the word, there would be no wars, no violence, no misunderstandings, all human problems would be resolved if we could just have good, clear communication.

And it starts with us, right here in this moment.

Thanks for reading. Let me know what thoughts has this sparked in you. How might you integrate this into your life and your organisation?

Do share your thoughts with me in the comments, and also tell me what other moral frameworks you would like me to explore in the future. I have a few on my list already, and so I will be back soon to explore the next one.

— Tom

The article was titled The Moral Rot that Threatens Capitalism and was focussed around Cory Doctorow’s concept of “enshitification,” in which corporations stop trying to make things better and instead use their power to hold suppliers, employees, and customers, captive in order to maximise short term profits for investors, delivering lower quality goods and services at ever increasing prices. I’m sure you’ve experienced it.

The article highlighted how this was not just negative for those being squeezed, but also for the long term health of these companies and their brands, threatening long term shareholder value and even the very foundations of capitalism itself. Money Week, a magazine whose raison d’etre is to help investors maximise their financial return, is so concerned about this that it states more than once that “this trend of corporate decay threatens the very moral legitimacy of capitalism itself.”

I was a little taken aback at first, wondering when exactly capitalism achieved moral legitimacy, but in the context that it is perceived and accepted by the majority of people as being the operating model of our modern societies, I think it is fair to say that they are correct. This doesn’t make capitalism moral, but it does highlight that it is broadly not perceived as immoral.

Most significant of all though, the article concluded with a statement that really hits to the heart of this question of morality in business, stating

If we allow this rot to persist by rewarding it with our capital, we are handing the ultimate weapon to those who may wish to dismantle the system entirely. To preserve the freedom to invest, we must demand better. To save capitalism, we must stop funding the extractors and start backing the builders.

Just take a minute to really let that sink in.

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A self-proclaimed capitalist magazine is genuinely concerned that a lack of morality in business could bring about the end of capitalism, going as far as to suggest that it could be the thing that leads to it being dismantled entirely. And they think we are close.

It appears that while the motives might be very different, the defenders of capitalism and the critics of capitalism are on the same page in thinking that a lack of morality in business is something that we should be concerned about.

If you follow my work then you won’t need me to say that I am a critic of capitalism, and in that vein I do see some irony in the suggestion that morality may be the thing needed to save capitalism itself. Would it truly be capitalism if it was truly moral? Surely “moral capitalism” is an oxymoron. Isn’t it?

To decide that however, we would first need to define capitalism. In the case of Money Week, capitalism seems to be defined as an economic system in which businesses compete in so called “free markets,” and the successful ones generate profits that can be paid out to investors. Despite the earlier statement that investors “must stop funding the extractors,” they make little effort to hide the fact that they see the primary objective of capitalism being for investors to extract profits from companies. Is that a system that we want to save?

They do seem to offer some sort of moral framework though, which is the somewhat blurry concept that capitalism is inherently moral until it crosses an invisible line beyond which people start to express their dissatisfaction and push back against the ongoing extraction. This logic seems to suggest that so long as their is no significant rebellion against their activities, then capitalism is moral. It is good capitalism.

Good capitalism then, seems to be to extract as much as possible without causing sufficient upset to jeopardise the long term self-interest of wealthy investors. It is enlightened self-interest and if we consider this to be a moral principle at all, it is surely a very low bar.

But perhaps this is the low moral bar of our time, not just in the corporate world, but in Western culture more broadly. A culture that apparently considers capitalism “morally legitimate.” At the core of this culture is an attitude that we should each take as much as we can for ourselves, within the limits of how much we can get away with. If we receive significant push back, then we may want to ease off a little, but until then we should just take whatever we can get our hands on.

Community, generosity, compassion, love, temperance, sharing, caring, and so many other positive qualities of humanity have no real place in this definition of capitalism, unless the appearance of those positive qualities helps us extract more for ourselves.

Bizarrely then, while I have spent much of my career championing more ethically responsible modes of business, it might be the case that encouraging extractive industries, corporations, and investors, to be less extractive might actually save the extraction economy, or at least prolong it. While it might hurt many people in the short run, the paradox is that letting it destroy itself through its own moral rot might be the most direct path to something morally superior.

And while we might think that the end of capitalism is but a distant pipe dream that could never happen in our lifetimes, just consider that Money Week are not the only capitalists who think it is within sight.

In his 2014 TED talk, Beware, fellow plutocrats, the pitchforks are coming, billionaire and self-proclaimed plutocrat Nick Hanauer states upfront that he is a proud and unapologetic capitalist. To give you an idea of just how rich he is, he chuckles while telling the audience that, “My friends and I, we own a bank.”

He puts his own financial success down to a combination of spectacularly good luck, a high tolerance for risk, and unusually good intuition about the future. And what he sees in the future is

Pitch forks. An angry mob with pitch forks.

He highlights the trend of rising inequality in the US and global society and that while he believes that some inequality is “necessary for a high functioning capitalist democracy,” there is a limit to how much inequality a society can tolerate.

No free and open society can long sustain this kind of rising economic inequality. It has never happened. There are no examples. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state or an uprising. The pitchforks will come for us if we do not address this. It is not a matter of if, it’s when.

He is clear to emphasise, unlike Money Week, that he is “not making a moral argument” and apparently only cares about the self-interest of rich guys like himself, which if I’m being honest I find refreshingly honest. At least we know where he stands — he wants you poor, but not so poor that you rise against him.

He sees the risk of them losing it all as a real risk within the next 30 years, and that was 12 years ago. Now look around and we live in a world where the US increasingly looks like it is on the verge of becoming a police state, while equally on the verge of an uprising. Meanwhile in the UK and Europe, the old systems continue to fray at the edges while the deck chairs are continually rearranged.

Something new and better is within reach. It’s there for the taking, if only we knew what it was we wanted.

In a vacuum of inspiring visions and moral leadership, my personal view is that we need to quickly reclaim our ability to think deeply for ourselves, to imagine new possibilities, and to ground our lives and our ideas in our hearts, as this I believe is where true moral guidance stems from.

My new book, on which I will reveal more soon, is specifically focussed on helping us reclaim this creative energy within us, and to see and live new possibilities. Meanwhile, this Substack series of articles on moral frameworks in business seeks to help us think more deeply about what our own morals really are and how they shape our lives, our organisations, and our society.

As always, I appreciate you reading this and look forward to any comments that you share with me below or elsewhere. And please do share with friends who might enjoy this.

Keep thinking, keep loving, and stay tuned for the next instalment.

Oh, and check our my new album…

This might seem totally random, and even out of character, but inspired by a dream I had earlier this year, I wrote an album of songs called Stealth Defenders of the Status Quo by my imaginary band, The Open Minders. It’s political, it’s spiritual, it’s satirical. It pokes fun at the flawed intellectual status quo of our time and aims to stimulate new thinking while hopefully also putting a smile on your face.

I would understand if you immediately assume that this must be rubbish, but here’s a few things that have been said about it…

This is honestly the best album I have listened to in a decade

This is friggin' awesome

both spiritual and political. Shining a light on the often pointless dehumanised hypocrisy of western society

Intelligent, creative, quirky, funny ... and often moving

It’s seriously impressive

Fantastically controversial

And perhaps the best of them all…

Aldous Huxley would be proud

Let me know what you think and what it sparks inside of you. The middle of the album is more high energy and “spicy,” and the last two tracks are far more calm and contemplative, so there’s something for everyone.

It’s available on all major music platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music and Youtube Music, and some display the lyrics too.

If you want to know more about the background to this album, including how and why I made it, check out the announcement post on my other Substack.

Enjoy!

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The game, which traditionally went by many other names too, such as Leela and Moksha Patam, was a symbolic representation of the journey we take through human life. The game modelled the ethical opportunities and pitfalls that we all face in life, along with spiritual and religious wisdom from the communities in which it was played.

The irony is that is that when it came to the West in the 1800s, the deep meaning was stripped out and it was commercialised as the Snakes & Ladders game that most of us grew up with, becoming one of the most popular games ever invented. The rich origins of the game were largely forgotten, even in India, consumed by capitalism.

Reflecting on this recently, I wondered whether a core problem of our modern society might be that we don’t have any clear moral or spiritual frameworks from which to operate, or at least not that I can see.

Yes, we have laws and we have regulations, and most of us are taught by our parents and teachers to be “good boys and girls.” But when we leave home and head out into the adult world without the rules specific to our childhood homes or schools, our modern culture offers us very little clear guidance.

There are, of course, people who have very clear beliefs of their own and do live by some sort of clear moral framework, but I would suggest that these people are the exception and not the rule. Let’s be honest, while most of us would like to think of ourselves as “good people,” our society doesn’t provide any clarity as to what makes a good person, short of not committing crimes. Many people have very different ideas as to what good looks like, which we see in our growing polarisation, but to a large extent the moral framework of our time seems to simply be, “People like us do things like this.” That’s what Seth Godin defines as “culture.”

Well what is it that people like us do?

“People like us” fly for a sunshine getaway, cut down trees for a Billy Bookcase, say that “business is business” as if it’s a morality free zone, expect to have a new smart phone every few years, eat other animals for pleasure, and think it is normal that people in poor countries should work for cheap. What people like us definitely don’t do, is have a clear and strong moral framework, because that’s the domain of puritanical religious weirdos. Or at least that’s what our culture implies.

I actively try to avoid dogma, but just as the greatest biodiversity is often found at the edge where two ecosystems meet, I think that the wisdom we need to guide us to live more ethical lives, operate our businesses more responsibly, and create a peaceful and harmonious society, might just live at the edge where the moral vacuum of our time meets the moral dogma of past and present belief systems from around the world. If we can explore this edge with open minds and hold ideas lightly, we might just find what we need.

So this year, I want to explore how moral frameworks might be indispensable to the game that we call business if we want the outcome of the game to be a healthy and harmonious society. As the rules of the game stand, the game seems to prioritise destroying our planet, and each other, in the pursuit of the tokens that we call money, so it’s time that we rewrite the game, not as laws and regulations, but as clear foundational moral frameworks to guide human behaviour.

And I want to hear from you:

• Do you agree that our society doesn’t have a clear moral framework? If you disagree, what do you think our frameworks are?

• Do you have a specific moral framework that guides you? How does it affect your life and business?

• What moral frameworks would you suggest exploring?

Do leave a comment at the end of this post or drop me a message to help me shape this exploration.

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Snakes and suits

I already have a couple of frameworks in mind that I want to explore, not because I think they are perfect, but because I think that they can potentially offer a lot of insight if we examine them with open minds and put the dogma to one side.

To get us started, why don’t we take just a few minutes to see what we can learn about ethical business from the ancient game of Snakes & Ladders that I mentioned above?

To be clear, since each community had its own version of the game, most of which were religious in nature, the game doesn’t offer us a single moral framework to analyse. It does, however, follow a fairly standard conceptual framework and that’s what I’m going to dig into here.

The business of karma

First up, the game of Gyan Chaupar is a game of karma, symbolising the idea that while many things in life are driven by fate (the roll of the dice), fate exists in relationship with freewill. This karmic fate plays a role in maintaining balance, so when we act with purity and benevolence, the hand of fate rewards us, offering us a ladder to climb up in life. On the other hand, when we act negatively, the snake of wisdom bites us and pulls us down to a lower level from where we can repeat the lessons that we have failed to learn.

In a society where the cut throat businesses who exploit suppliers and workers, not to mention find loopholes in rules and regulations, seem to rise to the top, it does in some way seem hard to believe that karma is at play in the world of business.

Then again, this might just be an illusion created by the fact that the religion of our current culture is money. If we believe that there are things in life more important than money, such as love, friendship, health, and a clean conscience, maybe the snakes in suits are not really winning. Maybe the people passionately doing what they believe is right, even if it is often hard, are the true winners, living a life full of meaning that somehow makes the challenges of trying to do the right thing worthwhile in the long run.

Then there is the concept of reincarnation. To a western audience I realise that we are now stepping into realms that could quickly be dismissed as woowoo and irrational, but the concept of reincarnation is baked into the design of the game of Gyan Chaupar, reflecting the beliefs of the Eastern cultures from which it originated. My personal view is that short of any solid evidence as to what happens after death, it would be somewhat presumptuous of me to rule out reincarnation as a possibility.

If we hold space for this possibility, it potentially adds a rather interesting karmic layer to the actions of those ruthless billionaires who think they are winning the game of life. There is something about the idea that one way or another we will have to pay our moral debts, if not in this lifetime then in a future lifetime, that can be very powerful in focussing the mind and heart. Regardless of what we each believe about life after death, perhaps we might live in a better world if we did share a common belief that one way or another, the hand of karma will balance the scales eventually.

Constant evolution

Closely related to this idea of karma, the game of Gyan Chaupar is based on the principle of continuous learning in order that we come to “Know Thyself.” The game begins with the first square of the board being the start of a lifetime and the final square being a form of enlightenment, liberation or moksha. There is an implicit message in the design of the game that we are all imperfect, since we have not yet achieved enlightenment, but that we do each have an opportunity to learn and improve ourselves every day of our lives.

This philosophy of accepting that we are imperfect yet continuing to try our best is something that many businesses would do well to learn, as while “continuous improvement” is a phrase commonly used in business and engineering, it almost always applies to cold business metrics instead of moral behaviour. While profits must be continually increased and efficiency optimised, morally dubious behaviour is often justified on the basis that “this is how we’ve always done it.”

What if the same rigour of continuous improvement was applied to a businesses ethical practices as to it’s commercial goals? What if instead of publishing superficial annual reports that gloss over the rough surface of reality, companies could be honest about where they think they have fallen short and what they would do differently in hindsight? I know that there are some purpose-led businesses that do such things, but they are the outliers in our society and they face the challenge of admitting their vulnerabilities in a world that doesn’t know how to handle such honesty. In fact, despite a lack of moral frameworks, our society seems to be always on the lookout for someone to shoot down, making honest vulnerability a risky, if honourable endeavour. Welcoming the vulnerability of others, including competitors, may therefore be a powerful act in encouraging a culture of ongoing moral progress.

Tuning the compass

Finally, the game invites us to think about chakras, which if you are not familiar with them are key energy centers within the human body. These are largely dismissed by modern science but were present in some of the ancient (and modern day) cultures of the Indian subcontinent, as well as in different forms in China, some native-American cultures, and some modern spiritual systems. While it wasn’t standard to incorporate the chakras into the game of Gyan Chaupar, some communities did so and in turn added an extra dimension to the games meaning. It became not just a map of life, but a map of the human being.

While there are many layers to the concept of chakras, these energy centers can represent not just physical energy in the ordinary sense, but also emotional and spiritual energy. While not perfectly matching, they have interesting parallels with Western concepts like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and even the Seven Deadly Sins, which itself a fairly concrete moral framework.

The point here though is that we are all driven by invisible forces within ourselves that lead us to behave in ways that don’t always represent the best version of ourselves. By cultivating awareness of these inner forces, even if we don’t call them chakras, we can gain greater clarity as to why we behave the way we do. This unveiling of the forces within us leads gradually to greater clarity as to what we truly believe is right and wrong, and in turn a more accurate moral compass, since it is swayed far less by the magnetism of other emotional forces such as greed, fear and lust. It is as if tuning each of the energy centers so that they are all balanced brings our body, mind and intuition into alignment, allowing us to live more virtuous, healthy and happy lives.

If we had a framework for identifying and gradually freeing ourselves from these inner forces, which many spiritual traditions do offer, we might find that we live in a far less destructive society and that what we call “business as usual” becomes something far more inspiring. Essentially, if we bring ourselves into harmony and balance, our actions will mirror that inner state, and with that our organisations will too.

Where to next?

The real moral depth of Gyan Chaupar can only really be experienced by playing it, and perhaps that is what we should all be doing, or something similar. With so many moral and spiritual concepts on a single board, it is far beyond the scope of a single article to go through them all, but I feel that this brief introduction nevertheless provides us with a good starting point. The game itself originates from cultures that understood that we need moral education and contemplation as a foundation in life. That alone I think is worth taking note of.

As mentioned, I have some thoughts about specific moral frameworks that might be worth exploring in the months ahead, including the 7 Deadly Sins (which are more interesting than your might imagine), and also the Toltec Four Agreements, so do keep an eye out for those. I also realise on reflection that my recent post on Peaceful Power is in some ways also an exploration of a moral framework of sorts.

I would love to know your thoughts on whether you think we need clearer moral frameworks in our lives and businesses, and if so what they might be, so please do share your thoughts in the comments below.

Also, if you’d like to know more about the ancient game of Gyan Chaupar that I have referenced here, I recently made a video explaining the background to the game and how it relates to the modern children’s game Snakes & Ladders.

Thanks for reading Oxymoron. I write these posts as a labour of love and don’t ask anything in return, but if you enjoy them or at least find them thought provoking, I’d be really grateful if you can recommend it to someone who you think might like it, or share it somewhere online, or simply click like.

It only takes a minute but can help these ideas reach more people and for that I am grateful. 🙏

— Tom

Then a few weeks ago I read this post from Michael Anderson that really got me thinking about the importance of design. In his post he said:

I know it’s not politically correct to say anything positive about Tesla these days, but it continues to amaze me how the design of the original Tesla Supercharger was so good, that well over a decade later, most other chargers still fall short. It’s as if nobody else really cared to stop and think about what they were really for, why it mattered, and invest the time, energy and ingenuity to create a really great solution.

Michael’s comment reminded me of when I once visited a factory where they manufacture ticket machines for the railways at British train stations and I asked their head of engineering, “Who designs them?”

“We do,” he replied with a proud look on his face. I was a little surprised because I wasn’t aware that they had a design team.

“So what is your design process?” I asked in response.

The answer I got explains a lot about our world, from ticket machines, to electric car chargers, to supermarket self-checkout machines. He looked at me blankly for a few seconds, and then said:

“Well, the railway company gives us a list of all the things it needs to include, like a coin slot, credit card reader, a screen, and a ticket printer, and we get all those components rigged up so that they can talk to each other and then we design a box that will fit them all in.”

That was it. British design at it’s finest.

If that is all we are doing as designers, then maybe we should just let Artificial Intelligence do it. It might well do a better job. But I can’t help but feel that design is a lot more than that, and that us humans still matter.

To explore this, I took a trip this weekend to The Design Museum in London, pondering the role of design in a world that looks set to be increasingly dominated by AI generated solutions (not to mention AI generated problems). If we listen to the hype from the big tech companies, we could easily be led to believe that design as a practice will soon be obsolete and that any design we need will be done effortlessly for us by the machines.

Graphic design, web design, fashion design, interior design, car design, architecture, industrial design, service design, and any other type of design that you can think of, could theoretically one day (if not now) be done by a computer.

In some ways this could be seen as a good thing, if it makes better solutions more widely available, particularly in areas of our global society that need better design solutions but can’t afford them. Of course, if you earn your living from designing things, that idea isn’t very reassuring, but I think there are also reasons to consider that design, specifically good design, needs humans.

These days I’ve given up on binary thinking. I’ve given it up for lent, realising that the truth is rarely to be found by putting things in rigid boxes of “good” and “bad” and I think that AI in general is one of those complex and messy things where so many potential upsides are muddled in with so many risks, many of which are still unknown unknowns. This is true as much when it comes to AI and design as it is in regard to AI and anything else. So today I want to look more closely at what design really is, why it matters, and whether there is still a role for humans in it in the near (and far) future.

Can you define design?

I enjoy watching the show Interior Design Masters on BBC but one thing that frustrates me is how they band around the word “design” with such assertive authority without ever defining what they mean by it. It seems to be an ambiguous badge of honour that gets handed out by the judges when they like something and can’t express why they like it.

“Oh I walk into this room and I see so much Design!”

What does that even mean?

The word design is a pretty standard part of our culture these days and it gets used all over the place to mean many different things to many different people. To some people it means making things beautiful, to others it means making things useful, while to many it simply means sticking some other persons name on your clothes.

I thought I’d put this to rest once and for all at The Design Museum, where I would surely find the answer. But then I got there and realised that they don’t know either. There are many interesting displays with boards that at first glance feel like they are going to clearly define design, and they all somehow fizzle out into ambiguous waffle that dodges this very central question.

So let’s look at the etymology of the word. Apparently, design as an English word originates from the latin word designare, meaning “to mark out.” At first that might not seem very helpful, suggesting that design is just the marking out of things, like fence posts around a garden or some spray paint on the road marking out pot holes. Look a bit closer at the usage of the word though and what this really means is to make a mental plan based on an intention, and then mark out or shape something to bring this plan into the world. Design is therefore the bridge between intention and action to realise that intention.

This is why design is so often associated with problem solving, because problems need solving, and human minds set their intentions on devising solutions and bringing them into the world. Likewise, design is often closely associated with the arts because people have an intention to express or communicate something, have a vision for it within themselves and set about trying to bring that into the world for others to experience.

On this basis we might define design as something like:

The intentional act of forming an idea and marking it out so that it can be brought into the world.

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There are a few key details here that are important to the essence of design, as follows:

1. Design is an intentional act

This is easy to overlook but it is central to what makes design important and special. Every act of design begins with a conscious intention in the mind of a human, and it is an intention to create. Therefore design is inherently proactive, requiring a human to pause and contemplate something that matters to them, formulating an idea as to how they manifest it into our shared world.

Most of us spend most of our time on autopilot, going through the motions of life, and might even do things that to other people look like design, especially professional designers who are uninspired and just trying to get from 9-5. But that’s not design. That’s just robotic creation driven by external stimuli. It is pseudo-design.

And so it is that robots, just like humans who behave like robots, can do things that look like design. But for it to actually be design, it needs to have begun as a conscious intention in the mind. If like me you believe that machines don’t have conscious intentions, then design must require a human being.

2. Design is a bridge

Having started in the mind, what is needed is a bridge between the mental and the material worlds. It requires an internal act of seeing the idea clearly enough to then externalise it, or mark it out, so that it is then possible to bring it into the world. This marking out must also be done by a human, since only they know the shape of their intention.

In some ways, an AI prompt can be a way for a human to mark out this intention in the material world, and a designer could even use the AI as a tool to help them mark out the design better than they can themselves. It can therefore be a valid tool in the design process, but it is not the designer. We can tell this because the same mind (or minds) that formed the intention are the only ones who can judge whether the marked out design meets the original intention.

3. Design is more than an idea

The final part of the definition I offered above states that we mark out an idea “so that it can be brought into the world.” This is important because, as the saying goes, ideas are cheap. We can have ideas all day long, but they don’t impact the world unless we can create the bridge from our minds into the material world, and collaborate with whoever or whatever may be necessary to make it a reality. A great designer therefore doesn’t just have great ideas, but has the ability to communicate them clearly and collaborate with others to make them happen.

In some cases, as with Designer Makers, the designer might also be the maker, but design and production are not inherently the same thing, and as different people have different skills, the final act is most often a collaboration. It is entirely possible that AI tools can be a part of this mix.

But when all is said and done, the conscious bridge created by the designer must be used to travel back again, from the material world into the mind, to validate that the finished article, whatever it is, sufficiently matches the original intention. Just as in days gone by, the designer would be the only person who could truly judge the work of the craftsperson who produced their idea, or how today a web designer is the only person who can accurately judge whether the web developer has accurately produced their vision, so too the work produced by an AI must be assessed by the person whose conscious intention it stemmed from.

Furthermore, in most cases the designer will have had the intention to affect other people with their idea, hopefully in a positive way, and so the success of the design in the real world is contingent on the subjective experience of the people for whom it is intended. No machine can ever know whether a design is successful, for while they might gather raw data to feed into their algorithms, they cannot experience the finished design.

As a slight aside, this is why User Experience Design is such a strange term, because not only does it unnecessarily designate fellow humans as “users,” but otherwise states the obvious, that most design is design for Experiencers. It is also why there is increasing concern that we seem to be designing more and more for machines who cannot actually experience anything, because when it comes down to it, it is the experience of life that makes design meaningful.

The role of humans

With this clearer definition of design, we can see that while AI could be used in some aspects of design, you really can’t have design without humans. Granted, some people might say that maybe we don’t need humans at the core of design, instead using humans simply to articulate their intentions and validate the solutions developed by AI. This might well be where a lot of design ends up, but it would be foolish to write off the broader role of human creativity, intuition, skill and facilitation in the design process.

Perhaps the easiest way to illustrate this would be to look at some types of design that we don’t normally refer to as design. For example, in writing a book, the author intentionally forms an idea, marking out a structure or concept for the book so it can be brought into the world, and then sets about crafting it, often in collaboration with other people such as editors, proofreaders, typesetters, illustrators and printers. It is a design project, and it is highly personal. The author could theoretically have told an AI what it’s idea for the book was and then let the AI write the book before checking that it had met the brief. This is no doubt already happening, but what we get is something devoid of the rich, nuanced, unpredictable uniqueness of the human author.

As another example, in composing a piece of music, a musician is designing a soundscape that expresses something from deep within themselves and will touch other humans in deeply meaningful ways. In many cases, it is an act of divine inspiration that comes from within, with many musicians saying that they don’t know where their music truly comes from. We can on the other hand use AI to generate music, and some of it is surprisingly good, but it is not a true expression of something that comes from deep within the heart and soul of another human being.

And finally, if we apply design to our own lives, which I recommend that we all do, we are shaping our lives with conscious intention as an expression of who we are, what we want, and what we believe in. It’s a never ending process in which we are constantly learning from the interaction between our own inner intentions and ideas, and the feedback we get from trying to bring our inner world into the outer world. We could tell an AI what our intentions for our lives are and then get it to tell us what to do everyday, simply giving it regular feedback on how things are going, but what sort of life would that be? We would quickly become automata, living by the command of the machine and not consciously living our lives to their full potential.

The same patterns are there in all of the typical activities that we refer to as design, from poster design to urban design, but they are often obscured behind layers of commercial objectives that distract us from why our designs really matter. To remove humans from the design process might in some cases make it more efficient, but to make the mistake of thinking that we don’t need humans to design things would be a great loss for humanity.

Not only would it strip our world bare of the rich vibrancy of human creativity but it would rob us all of the joy of creation, of self-expression, and of the challenge of bridging our inner and outer worlds. It would rob us of the opportunity to design better lives and better worlds, and that is surely what life is all about.

Ripping off band-aids

If you’ve followed me to this point, design still matters and humans must always be at the center of it, not because the mega-corporations need us to be, but because we need us to be.

The problem that is on the minds of many designers of every variety now though is that the AI systems will copy our work, that they will rip us off, and create thousands of variations of it without ever offering anything so much as a thank you. What are we supposed to do about it?

My answer, somewhat radically, is nothing. Not because it is morally right for big tech companies to copy our work, but because our human spirit is too valuable to waste fighting a battle that we will rarely win. I know that might be easy to say, and if you’re worried about your livelihood as a designer might not be easy to accept, but I have as much skin in this game as anyone and just as much to lose. Yet I feel that the real solution is not to fight being copied, but to invest in our own creativity.

The problem of being copied is not new. People have always copied each other. Being copied means that you did good work. It used to really bother me when I saw my work copied, whether at school or professionally, but these days I see it simply as an unintended complement. Now with AI copying everyone’s homework on an unprecedented scale so that big tech companies can boost their share prices, the complement is magnified. But so is our impact. Even if they butcher our work in ways that make us cringe, the very fact that these systems are copying our work means that we are influencing their outputs and they are amplifying our visions. And this makes the value of our efforts to design a better world greater, not lesser, even if we don’t get paid for it.

AI will no doubt make life harder for many people who have relied on design as their profession, and we’ll have to find a creative way to solve that, but it might also remind us that design is still worth doing even if it isn’t always commercially viable, because we are not just cogs in the industrial machine of capitalism, but living, breathing, richly complicated human beings who are here to experience life.

Artificial Intelligence is our wake up call to embrace what makes us special and engage more fully in the unfolding of the human experience. Every single one of us has something to contribute, and we mustn’t let anyone, least not the big tech companies, tell us otherwise. Go out there, and design a better world.

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Thanks for reading Oxymoron. I write these posts as a labour of love and don’t ask anything in return, but if you enjoy them or at least find them thought provoking, I’d be really grateful if you can recommend it to someone who you think might like it, or share it somewhere online, or simply click like. It only takes a minute but can help these ideas reach more people and for that I am grateful. 🙏

Also, I read and reply to all comments so do feel free to share your thoughts below. I’d love to hear them.

— Tom

Lastly, on a related note, while I was at The Design Museum having lunch in the cafe, I took the time to catch up on some of Andrew Boardman’s excellent Substack, Dear Designer. This recent post called Do Not Panic echoes some of my sentiments here, or more actually I guess am echoing his. Either way, it’s great, so I recommend giving it a read.

Dear Designer

Do Not Panic

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6 months ago · 8 likes · 1 comment · Andrew Boardman

I often think of power as being a little bit of a dirty word. It wreaks with the odour of greed, oppression and corruption, and it’s something that for much of my life I’ve found a bit uncomfortable. Co-founding my own company and being the Managing Director for nearly two decades put me face to face with this discomfort on a daily basis. I tried to wield the power this position gave me responsibly and compassionately, though it often felt like a burden.

This discomfort reached its peak a few years ago when I had a couple of incidents in which it became clear to me that there were people working for our company who, due to their own discomforts with power, viewed me as inherently oppressive and immoral simply because I was their employer. No matter what I did, this employee-employer relationship created an perceived power hierarchy that they felt was inherently immoral, even in situations where, to be honest, I sometimes felt that they had more power than I did. That’s not to say that they never had legitimate issues with me, but simply to say that sometimes the fear of power can be an issue in and of itself.

It’s not the only place where I have experienced a fear or discomfort with power. I’ve been a member of the Green Party since I was at university and one thing that struck me time and time again was how difficult it was to find anyone to stand in an election. The Green Party, at least in my experience, is full of lovely people who wish for a more socially and environmentally healthy world, but very few of whom have any desire to pursue any significant power. In fact, they are more likely to shy away from it, even when it would involve standing for something they believe in.

This pattern seems to play out more broadly, leaving us with a world where people who prioritise their self-interest, chase and obtain power, while those who care about the collective shy away from it. The result is a world largely run, at all it’s various levels, by the exact opposite type of people that we really need to serve the common good. A world run by psychopaths, narcissists, and egomaniacs, not just because they have schemed and manipulated their way into power, but because the really good people were scared that power might corrupt them.

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I was intrigued therefore, when a few years ago on a hillside in Wiltshire that overlooked a rather beautiful crop circle that we had been to visit, my wife and I met Hannah and James Latimer, who had also been down the the crop circle. We shared some thoughts and they told us that they believed the design, based on the geometry of the Flower of Life, represented “Peaceful Power.”

“Peaceful Power?” I asked.

They explained that while power is often seen as something negative, it is in fact neither good nor bad. It’s simply the force that creates change in the world. This power is often used for destructive purposes but can also be used for peaceful ends, yet many people resist embracing it because of their own discomfort with the idea of power. They will embrace peace but not power, making peace passive. They suggested that this leaves a vacuum of peaceful power, causing an imbalance of power flowing in the wrong direction. This direction of the flow of power is a topic that , my co-host on the House of Life podcast, often raises as being central to creation of a better world.

This is not a new idea. The pioneering management consultant and political theorist Mary Parker Follett expressed this in concept in her 1918 book The New State, writing:

We have thought of peace as passive and war as the active way of living. The opposite is true. War is not the most strenuous life. It is a kind of rest cure compared to the task of reconciling our differences ... From War to Peace is not from the strenuous to the easy existence; it is from the futile to the effective, from the stagnant to the active, from the destructive to the creative way of life ... The world will be regenerated by the people who rise above these passive ways and heroically seek, by whatever hardship, by whatever toil, the methods by which people can agree.1

This idea is challenging in the sense that it calls upon us all to do the hard things to move the world in a positive direction, but it is also empowering, reminding us that we do all have power and we should not be ashamed to embrace it.

Our modern culture typically portrays power as a destructive, corrupting force that is somehow morally tainted, in contrast to peace which is often presented as gentle, passive, even submissive. Peaceful power on the other hand offers us another possibility, of strength and resilience that protects what’s good — a stabilising force that maintains harmony amid the chaos.

This concept is at the heart of the Japanese martial art Aikido, meaning “the way of harmonious spirit” or “the way of unifying energy.” Developed by Morihei Ueshiba in the early 20th century following a spiritual awakening, it combines the technique and wisdom of a number of other martial arts into a way to protect life, not destroy it, emphasising love and reconciliation over violence. Central to its techniques are methods to redirect an opponent’s energy rather than using force to overpower them, aiming to neutralise aggression without causing harm.

In his book Budo, Ueshiba describes the philosophy as “a spiritual path reflecting the unlimited, absolute nature of the universe and the grand design of creation.” He wrote that “armed with [the] sword of harmonisation and acting according to the principles of heaven and earth, one can continuously slash through falsehood and evil, clearing a path leading toward a beautiful and pristine world.”

This might well be the philosophy that has been missing in so many efforts to create a better world, where many of us oscillate between a passive, weak form of peace, to wielding destructive power with good intentions, inadvertently becoming monsters ourselves. Aikido encourages us to harness our full spiritual, mental and physical power, in order to hold the boundaries needed to maintain harmony in our world and diffuse the energies of those who seek to destroy it.

To do so is not easy and Ueshiba himself stated that “even the greatest sages were unable to perceive and comprehend the entire truth.” While we all might fall short of perfectly mastering peaceful power, it nevertheless shows us the direction that we should travel.

We can see a similar philosophy symbolised in the ancient board game Goats & Tigers, known as Bagh-Chal in Nepal and Aadu Puli Aattam in southern India. Unlike chess, which is modelled on the four divisions of an ancient Indian army (infantry, cavalry, elephantry, and chariotry) and is a symmetrical game of two armies violently battling for hierarchical power and dominance, Goats & Tigers is intentionally asymmetrical.

One player controls a small number of Tigers, the predators, who aim to hunt goats by jumping over them. The other player controls a large herd of goats, aiming to coordinate the goats to surround and immobilise all of the tigers. The tigers possess destructive power that is perceived as advantageous, but the goats are able to win the game by harnessing peaceful power within the collective. In contrast to chess which evolved from the courtly game Chaturanga in Indian high society in the 7th Century, Goats & Tigers emerged in the villages and can be seen as a metaphor for underdog resistance and community resilience against a dominant force.

Check out the game

What if now is the time for peaceful power to rise? In the Coming of the Kingdom of Shambala, a 1200 year old prophecy told to environmental activist Joanna Macy by Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chökyi Rinpoche, it was told to her that:

There comes a time when all life on Earth is in great danger. In this time, great powers have arisen, barbarian powers, and although they waste their wealth in preparations to destroy each other, they do have much in common. And among the things they have in common are weapons of unfathomable destruction, technologies that can destroy the world. And in this time of great danger, when the life of all beings seems to hang by a frail thread, this is the time of the coming of the Kingdom of Shambala.2

Shambala in this prophecy is not a physical place, but a place within the hearts and minds of those who seek to protect what is good — the Shambala Warriors. These are not soldiers in the conventional sense, but people “with a boundless heart” who show great courage when the time comes and “go into the heart of the barbarian powers… to dismantle the weapons… in every sense of the word.” While it might seem daunting, the Shambala Warriors “know that these weapons can be destroyed… Because they are mano maya,” meaning mind-made. Contrary to what we might often believe about systems, cultures and technologies that seem indestructibly solid, the prophecy tells us that anything made by the human mind can be unmade by the human mind, if only we believe it.

To do so though we must overcome our fears and hold two things simultaneously. The first is compassion, which converts the suffering of the world into the fuel or “motive force” for us to do what we need to do. The second is an understanding of the interconnectedness of all things, enabling us to “know that this is not a war between good guys and bad guys,” but an understanding of how “even the smallest act with a clear heart and good intention” will ripple “through the whole web of life,” enabling us to apply our power in just the right places at just the right times, to create the peaceful outcomes that we are striving for.

With this idea of Peaceful Power in our minds then, I offer a few questions to ponder:

• What peaceful outcomes are you and your organisation striving for?

• What are your own reservations about power? Might they be limiting your power to achieve your desired outcomes?

• What might peaceful power look like in your own life and work?

Let me know in the comments or in a Substack note. I read every single one and really appreciate the dialogue. And, seeing as I’m asking you questions, feel free to ask me questions too!

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Oh, and a final thought for those of you who are curious. I find it amazing that such a beautiful message emerged from a brief conversation about a crop circle. Regardless of what your views might be about crop circles, and that’s a whole conversation for another time, it highlights that we can find inspiration in many places if we keep ourselves open.

What other messages might be out there in plain sight, waiting for us to take notice? Robert Ghost Wolf, Shaman for the Metis people, wrote in his book Last Cry that when the time of great change and purification approaches, messages will be left “to those on Earth who remember the old ways. The messages will be found written in the living stone, through the sacred grains, and even the waters.”

Perhaps it is time for us to open our minds and discover some of the wisdom that are missing…

You might also like:

1. My poster design of the Goats & Tigers game

2. Last week’s post about making peace a priority

3. If you are looking to apply some peaceful power then you might find the work of Business Leaders for Peace interesting.

4. House of Life, the podcast that I co-host with Asim Hussain in which we attempt to stretch each others thinking to its limits in pursuit of a better world. You can listen here on Substack and on your favourite podcast app.

Until next time!

- Tom

The priority for the year

I began this year joining a Kadampa meditation class run by my friend Emily Danby, that was titled “Making Peace Your Priority.” I have to admit that I signed straight up without ever reading the leaflet because I wanted to soak up some of Emily’s wisdom and deepen my meditation practice. I therefore didn’t realise that there was a theme for the course, until I was sat in the first session wondering why everyone but me seemed to have come with the objective of making peace their priority. Of course, it’s not unusual that a meditation class should be focussed on finding more inner peace, but there are many reasons to meditate and I didn’t have a specific one in mind when I joined.

It therefore seems to have been a happy accident that this theme of making peace the priority struck a chord with me and provided the perfect framing with which to begin the year. 2026 has only just started and I already get a sense that many people are expecting it to be a bumpy ride. Many people I speak to are feeling increasingly distressed by the state of the world and its apparent direction of travel. From this starting point then, we should perhaps make peace in all its forms our priority this year.

Human society is, in my belief, a collective mirror of our individual behaviours, which in turn, are reflections of our inner states. Our world is a cosmic hall of mirrors, always reflecting back at us no matter where we stand. The pursuit of inner peace therefore, is in some ways the foundation of greater peace in all its forms; in our families, in our communities, in our businesses, and in our global society more broadly. That’s not to say that cultivating greater inner peace on an individual level is enough to end wars, or even to end conflicts with our colleagues or neighbours, but simply that inner peace may be a prerequisite for all forms of outer peace.

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In difficult times, whether at home, at work, or just watching the news (which I don’t recommend), it’s easy to feel agitated and be driven by a need to be active and do something. And although tangible action is often needed, if it is grounded in anger and distress, we can end up applying the energy of conflict to the objective of peace. While well intended, this can often be counterproductive, and so if we truly want to prioritise peace, we need to start from the inside and make peace the priority. Which brings me to the hidden messages in the internationally recognised Peace Symbol.

Turning peace upside down

The Peace Symbol, also known as the CND symbol, was designed in 1958 by artist Gerald Holtom for the first protest march being organised from London to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment in Aldermaston, where Britain’s nuclear weapons were being manufactured.1

The idea was to have something that could be clearly seen by press photographers to visually identify the march when seen in the media. In attempting to design a suitable symbol, Gerald explored a range of iconography, but most ideas that he came up with either didn’t convey the desired message or had cultural connotations that might confuse or even undermine the message of global peace.

Late one night, stressed by his looming deadline to design a suitable symbol and disturbed by the existence of the atomic bomb, he intuitively doodled on his sketch pad a motif of a man in despair, then enclosed it in a circle representing planet Earth. It was a symbolic representation of despair for planet Earth and the people upon it. It was the symbol that we all recognise today.

The problem was that he had to present his design to the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War (DAC) to have it adopted as an official symbol for the march, and so he needed a rationale that the committee would buy into. Like many great branding projects, he had created the design intuitively and now needed to make up a rationale that would satisfy the client.

The rationale that he came up with was as ingenious as the design itself. He was familiar with international semaphore signals, which are a system for depicting the alphabet using flags or arms held in different positions. He realised that the symbol he had drawn was inadvertently formed of the semaphore signals for the letter N, represented by an upward arrow, and the letter D, represented by a single vertical line. His symbol therefore could be said to represent Nuclear Disarmament (ND).

The symbol was so successful that after the first Aldermaston march, it quickly spread around the world, not just as a symbol to represent the growing global campaign for nuclear disarmament, but also more broadly, becoming the universal symbol of peace. But there’s more to the symbol than is usually told.

Gerald Holtom realised shortly after designing the symbol that it could also be used upside down. In this reversed orientation, the semaphore signals that it formed would be the letters U and D, which he interpreted as Universal Disarmament, meaning universal peace in all forms. Furthermore, instead of symbolising a man in despair with arms dropped to the ground, the upside down symbol represented hope and inspiration with arms raised to the sky. He hoped that “a revolution of thought” may be triggered by the Aldermaston march, leading humanity from despair to hope. In other words, as humanity reversed its dangerous course, the orientation of the symbol itself would change in accordance with our collective trajectory.

Taking this deeper symbology further, fellow artist Eric Austin later pointed out to Holtom that the design had subconsciously picked up on ancient symbolism with the symbol in the center being “associated through ancient history with the death of man, and the circle with the unborn child.” Indeed, the symbol inside the classic CND symbol is the Old Norse Yr rune (ᛦ), which represents the Yew tree that was typically used for making bows and so it was symbolic of the protective and destructive power of weapons. It’s also notable that the Yew tree is one of the most poisonous trees in Europe, leading some to interpret this rune as a symbol of death.2

Turned upside down though, we find a different rune, the Algiz (ᛉ), representing the antlers of the Elk, believed to be a symbol of protection and spiritual connection. Gerald himself noted that it could also be viewed this way up as the Tree of Life.

I have to admit, in the spirit of being completely honest with you, that I never really liked the Peace Symbol. I loved what it stood for and I recognised it as an iconic and memorable design, but somehow it never resonated with me. I found it droopy and sad. But now I know why, and turned the other way up, it fills me with joy and hope.

However we choose to look at it, the Peace Symbol is a testament to the power of symbolism (and in turn graphic design) in capturing imaginations and communicating powerful messages. Perhaps as many people now find themselves in a growing sense of despair, it may be time to embrace the other half of the Peace Symbol’s message. By turning it upside down in our hearts and minds, as well as on our banners and lapels, we can use it as a symbol to guide us away from despair toward hope, encouraging us to prioritise peace within ourselves, and in turn help lay the foundations for a more peaceful future for all.

While a passionate campaigner for nuclear disarmament and global peace, Gerald Holtom believed that peace must begin inside of all of us, and said that “we can all play a part, as we all strive to disarm ourselves.” What better priority could there be for the year ahead.

So as we now arrive at Imbolc in the Northern hemisphere, I invite you in the coming days to spend some time reflecting on how you might make peace your priority, and how that might ripple out into the world around you. Here are a few questions to consider:

• How might greater inner peace benefit you, your family, your organisation, and your wider community?

• What steps could you take to make peace your priority this year?

• What feelings does the Peace Symbol arouse in you, and how might you channel those feelings for good?

Leave a comment below or restack this article with your thoughts.

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Thanks for reading. I truly appreciate you taking the time to contemplate these thoughts. This is the first of two posts I’ll be writing to “make peace a priority” to begin this year, so do subscribe if you’d like to be notified when the next one goes out.

P.S. If you are looking to take some tangible action to make peace a priority in your business, check out the work of Business Leaders for Peace. They’re currently working on some deeply meaningful projects and are looking for volunteers and support to help move them forward.

P.P.S. If you enjoy my posts then you might also enjoy House of Life, the podcast that I co-host with in which we attempt to stretch each others thinking to its limits on topics that matter to living well and creating a positive world. It’s long form, honest and unfiltered, and goes all the way from sustainability and democracy to some pretty strange and unexpected places. We’ll be launching Season 2 soon but all 16 episodes from Season 1 are available here on Substack and on your favourite podcast app.

That’s it for now. Over and out!

- Tom

Today in Western cultures we call this time Christmas and celebrate it as a festival of gluttony and consumerism, of course with an undertone of Christianity and the birth of Jesus, the son of God. Or should I say the Sun of God? I’m not religious, and I know this sounds somewhat blasphemous, but it is interesting to note that the Bible doesn’t actually state when Jesus’ birthday was. The closest it comes is an implication that it may have been spring time due to the mention of shepherds with their flocks. So what we really have is a traditional festival of the return of sunlight being rebranded by the Romans as a Christian festival, and then rebranded yet again by Coca-Cola and friends as a festival of excessive consumption. Bah humbug!

But I do love this time of year and feel that there is something rather magical in the depths of winter darkness that is absolutely worth celebrating, not just on a practical and emotional level with the passing of the darkest day, but on a deeper level too.

One of my favourite symbolisms of this period is the Gnostic idea that Christmas represents not the birth of a child, but the birth of a force within each and every one of us — the force of unconditional love.

And so with that, I thought I would end this year of my newsletter by reading a letter that I wrote for regenerative business coach, Jannine Barron, as part of her Love Letter’s to Humanity project. For context, I was invited to contribute a letter to this project a couple of months ago and I sat down with a pen and wrote it as a single stream of consciousness. This is what came out on the page.

My fellow humans,

What a weird bunch we are, struggling to live harmoniously together on this beautiful, abundant planet. We are in constant conflict with each other, with other species, and even with ourselves, all of us trying to do what we think is right and yet somehow never truly managing to overcome our differences. Never quite able to see the bigger picture.

We search for the light and whenever we find it, we find shadows, luring us back into our never-ending cycle of conflict as we attempt to eliminate those things, those experiences, those people, and those parts of ourselves that we struggle to accept.

And yet, this isn’t what any of us really want. Deep down, somewhere inside all of us, is a yearning to be loved and accepted, and to love and accept each other. We are just too afraid and insecure to let our guards down, to be vulnerable, and to fully trust each other. Perhaps because, when it comes down to it, we struggle to trust ourselves.

For all of our differences though, none of us are truly so different. We all mysteriously appeared on this planet and are muddling through life seeking love, connection, meaning and safety, unsure how to give these same things to each other.

We can invent technologies and implement policies to solve every problem on Earth, but they will all fall short until such time that we are able to accept each other with love, forgiveness and trust. Only when we realise that unconditional love is the foundation of everything good can we truly progress toward a harmonious world.

So I start here by saying that I love you and I forgive you, whoever you are, just as I love and forgive myself. I struggle to always show it and will continue to fall short, but I give you my word that I won’t stop trying. And I invite you to join me in trying, ever so imperfectly, to love all people and all of the living world without conditions.

Lots of love

Tom

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With that, I hope you all have a fruitful rebirth into the new year and find some inner light to ignite hope and positive energy within you for 2026. And most of all, I hope this Christmas brings you the best present of all, which is to experience even a little bit of unconditional love.

I would be very happy to hear you reflections on this time of year in the comments below. And if you are interested in writing your own love letter to humanity, Jannine’s project is open to all and details can be found on her website here. If you do write one, drop me a note to let me know as I would love to read it.

I’ll be back next year and hopefully it won’t be too long before I can start sharing some information with you about my new book, which has been my labour of love for 2025. It’s a mind expanding adventure in search of new perspectives for a sustainable world, so stay tuned to find out more.

Happy solstice everyone!

Hey. You’re probably expecting Tom here. But before he steps back in, I wanted to explain why it’s me, , opening this issue of the Oxymoron newsletter.

A few months ago, while clearing out my grandmother’s house after she passed away at the incredible age of 104, I stumbled across something that stopped me in my tracks - a pile of magazines called Bibby’s Annuals from the early twentieth century. I don’t know exactly whose they were, probably my great-grandparents, but holding them felt like touching a thread that runs through four generations of free thinkers (it might even explain a lot about my hippy ways!).

I showed them to Tom and Vineeta and they were so taken by their spirit that they went out and found a full collection of these windows into a history that we’ve mostly forgotten.

We like to think we’ve advanced with technology, that we’ve evolved, developed and grown. But reading those pages, I realised we might be going backwards. We were asking bigger, braver questions back then about peace, spiritualism, love and even responsible business. At one point, Bibby’s Annual reached over a million readers. Imagine that, a mainstream magazine daring to explore ideas most of us shy away from today, ideas you’d never find in the headlines now.

It made me wonder if our so-called ‘progress’ has actually narrowed our thinking. Back then, people lived closer to the land, still feeling the cycles of nature despite the relatively recent Industrial Revolution. They were wrestling with wars so devastating they thought humanity would never repeat them and yet since then, we’ve been in constant wars and developed new weapons they couldn’t have even imagined.

So maybe our great-grandparents were actually zen masters in beige cardigans? My grandma certainly was. She grew her own food, fixed what was broken and thought for herself. She was one of the most sustainable and intentional people I’ve ever known. Now, with all the noise and information we’re drowning in, are we drifting further from the truth? These old pages remind me that wisdom isn’t about being modern, it’s about remembering. Remembering where we’ve come from, remembering the questions that matter and remembering that spiritual magic was once a bigger part of the conversation. And that’s why I’m very grateful to Tom to allow me the space to honour my family, to honour the past and to invite us all into a great remembering. Thank you Tom, over to you.

Let’s now journey back in time

As Nick mentioned, one of the topics covered in Bibby’s Annuals were issues relating to responsible business and the evolving world of work. Today, in a special issue of this newsletter we have decided to bring you not a new article from myself or Nick, but instead to republish an article from the 1916 edition of Bibby’s annual (which is now out of copyright) written by J. E. Reid. The article, which has the rather uninspiring title of ‘The Duty of the Directors of Commercial Enterprises’, explores the trend toward dehumanisation in large corporations and the potential for company directors to positively or negatively affect the lives of those who work within their companies, as well as the families of those workers, and society beyond. As such, it highlights that directors have a duty to use their influence for the betterment of society and not make the mistake of thinking that their job is to make purely commercial decisions.

You may be surprised by the language used to frame this idea, talking of transcendental consciousness, referring to people as souls, of companies as being like elemental beings, and emphasising the need to act from a place of love. Of course, it was written in a different time and you will likely not agree with every detail of the article, but I hope that by contrasting this leading edge thinking on responsible business from 110 years ago with our own thinking of today, we might find inspiration for how we might evolve our own thinking here and now.

With that said, here is the article as printed in 1916.

The Duty of the Directors of Commercial Enterprises

As the tendency of business to-day is towards co-operation, in which the energies of commercialism are most economically directed in the form of a company, it would be well to consider whether such a form of activity is conducive to human welfare or human degradation, whether the responsibility due to a large body of employees is being waived or recognised, or whether the love that usually flowed from the old time proprietor flows through the avenues of a public company with the human touch?

These, all must admit, are questions that to-day ought seriously to be considered. An amicable understanding between master and men is eminently desirable, but no solution of a permanent nature can ever be evolved if the above questions remain unanswered. They are at the rear of much of modern unrest, which is an increasing peril to capital and labour.

Deep down in the hearts of employers there lies a yearning. For what? For a change in the throbbing heart of the business world, for the right to develop the spirit that is within the human heart, to emerge from the coils of monotony that is suffocating that spirit, and enjoy the tranquil atmosphere that is its life’s breath. This alone will satisfy a discontented mind. It is not money, nor wealth, nor power, a workman wants, so much as love — real spiritual wealth, that will flood the workshop, flow over the bench, saturate his tools, and clothe his labour with the tender freshness of perpetual spring.

In a large commercial enterprise, the directorate usurp the place of the old-time employer, who was most often a friend to his men, feeling for them a fatherly interest, sharing with them his confidence, encouraging them in their work. This begat relations: respect, if not reverence, on the one hand, and kindness on the other, the link being love. It is the absence of this that is an increasing danger. Men are the same to-day — they still have a spiritual as well as a human side. Hero worship is not stilled. Men are capable and willing to bow to authority and do their utmost for those they respect and love.

Now, a company consists of an unlimited number of persons, who subscribe their money and their wisdom so that the collaboration of both shall be productive of further money. It is thus an abstraction — that is to say, it is something apart from particulars. This is where the danger lies, because the sense of identity is lost in numbers, hence individual irresponsibility. As such numbers are composed of persons who stand at different levels in the scale of moral human progress, the collective tone of a company will be much lower than that of its most exalted units. Considering the nature of its pursuits, it has a decided pull earthwards, which is not at variance with its purpose as a money-making concern.

But though a company is an abstraction, it nevertheless finds its foci in a number of departmental heads, over whom brood the directors, who form amongst themselves a kind of transcendental consciousness. It is the departmental heads who express the material functions. Being salaried persons, their business is to earn the dividends of the company, as well as strive for still higher salaries in accordance with their ability to increase the company’s revenues.

The shareholders, too, exercise some power over a company that should not be lost sight of. Their collective thought for higher dividends is a dynamic force of rather a dangerous potency. This the directors endeavour to meet, but theirs the responsibility to modulate.

In reviewing the above, how important it is to consider the direction that modern commercial enterprises are taking and study their general tendency to place money interest before human interest, self interest before soul interest.

If an old time employer felt it his duty to sink his interests for the welfare of his men, and that a certain responsibility was due to them, how much more so than should the heads of a modern company uphold these relations. The lead should be taken by someone. It certainly points to the directors, and their interest should be more cordial than a purely financial one. If they do not take the lead, how can the salaried subordinates, who are constantly manoeuvring, coercing, and planning in the money interests of the company, be expected to do so.

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It is from the directorate the inspiration should have its inception. They are the instructors of the departmental heads, and their lead must be enormous, radiating as it would do in ever widening lines to the utmost capillaries of the organism. It will influence the manager downwards to the foremen; the managers and foremen are the masters’ representatives in intimate relations with the men. These men have authority with the possibility of misuse, of love or no love. Therefore, in the thought of the directors rests the spiritual welfare of a company. With them lies the selection of their paid subordinates. They can appoint men whose interests are not wholly material, and who have an exalted sense of duty to the masters and the men.

This is one way of minimising the peril of dissatisfaction, and to aid in lessening the gloomy outlook material considerations and monotonous toil inflict upon all employment, and to elevate the consciousness or tone of a company onto a higher plane. To do this is by no means an easy task. Old grooves are difficult to change. The consciousness of a company has a hold upon all who come within its fold, and react upon all accordingly. Just as we ourselves form habits that influence us, and are hard to alter. If we are constantly thinking selfish thoughts, our natures will naturally become selfish, and will colour all our actions. This influence will even impose its authority upon our minds, and retain us in slavish submission.

A company, therefore, does have a kind of nature, built up from the thoughts and actions of all concerned. This nature is difficult to define, unless we call it an entity, a subconscious, non-moral, non-human elemental, created by the thoughts of the directors, departmental heads, employees of all grades, and shareholders, each contributing something of the materials from which it is built up.

We cannot, therefore, speak of a company as a human being gifted with intelligence and all the attributes with which such a being is endowed. It rests solely with the type of creators, whether it be a loving or a loveless one. Whatever it is, it exercises an extraordinary influence over all who come within its grip, moulding their minds, stereotyping their conceptions, and generally cutting deep grooves in their minds through which their character is expressed.

Souls are like tender blossoms given by God’s own hand, which are placed in the garden of evolution to grow and unfold. They may be stunted in their unfoldment, just as rare buds may be seared for lack of sunshine or rain, or from the carelessness of those whose duty it is to tend them.

A factory constitutes a garden of evolution for a great many souls at all stages of unfoldment. Upon those who have to tend them, there rests a certain responsibility. Just as buds unfold to the light, so souls of men unfold by love and kindness. However rough men may be outwardly, differing as they do in bodies, morals, and intelligence, they will always respond to kindness of love. Love in business is supposed to carry with it no commercial value. How often has it been said that in business there is no friendship? There can be no greater error. If love be good fellowship, commercial travellers always find it pays them to cultivate it in their relations with their customers, and those who possess it in large measure are more popular with both master and customer than in those in whom it is absent. Love would oil a huge business machine better than aught else.

In commercial undertakings more of this oil could well flow in no stinted stream. It would smooth the road of labor and lubricate the rugged bearings in which a workman’s daily round is cast. A concern with no other aim than that of producing money induces self-centredness in its departmental heads, and this again reacts upon those that come under their influence. It closes up the avenues of the heart and introduces relations that are purely material. Masters and men there must always be; without a mind to direct and hands to obey, nothing could be produced. Admitting this, there is no reason why relations should not be more cordial. Poverty, there must be; also riches. All cannot be rich. Admitting this, too, poverty can be made more tolerable by kindness and wise counsel, and riches more liberal.

It is thus surely the duty of directors to introduce more amicable relations. An enormous power lies in their hands. It behooves them, therefore, to cultivate such relations in themselves before it is possible to influence others to a better purpose.

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Think of an employer who controls 10,000 men! Here are 10,000 souls in progress of unfoldment; 10,000 souls he can help or hinder; 10,000 homes he can lighten or darken! His is the heart of the whole concern, and the life blood that flows from him will carry in its corpuscles seeds of disease or health.

Thus, a huge responsibility rests upon those who direct. Suppose hitherto, this employer had been selfish and his employees nothing more to him than mere sellers of labour. But suppose his whole nature, by some means, undergoes a thorough clarifying. It is clear to see that every one of the 10,000 will gain some advantage. A softening influence would permeate the whole concern, and each employee would begin to respond. Harshness would become blunted. Ill-will would be relegated to the scrap heap. A new joy would spring forth like magic. The whole monotony of toil would become radiant with a strange new light. It would not stop here, but would overflow to the home circle.

The wives of all these men would likewise gain a benefit, and the somber shades that too often hover over the domestic roof-tree would disappear. The children, too, would partake of this new awakening, and would no longer fear the scowling face of joyless parental homecoming.

To love, does not imply weakness in any shape or form. To be kind is not to forego discipline. There is every excuse for a master being loving, and none for him to forget that all men are brothers; that all are sons of one father. Love begets love, just as hate begets hate, and indifference, indifference. From the collective character of a family may be gleaned something of the moral atmosphere the parents shed around; so in the attitude of men can be read the virtues or vices of the masters.

Where dissatisfaction is rife, every article that is made receives a curse at its birth from the hand of the workman. It goes forth into the world carrying the imprint of the message in its particles. Just as fragments from ancient buildings, if held in the hands of sensitive persons, convey to them vivid impressions of past history, or from a piece of wearing apparel placed against the forehead may be gleaned something of the character of the wearer, so it may be possible that articles of production may be bearers of subtle influences acting in some way over the minds of people, or in some shape upon man’s subtler parts yet to be unfolded by the light of rational science. This may be at the root of determining the luck or ill-luck of firms. Some seem to expand and grow out of all proportion to the amount of energy spent, others just the reverse.

There is a yearning deep down in the hearts of workmen for sympathy and for spiritual understanding, and every chance ought to be given for the realisation of it. All workmen glow under the touch of a loving master, and it is such that sustains their interest and sanctifies their labour. No doubt the influence of large companies is to place a barrier between the officials and subordinates. We have seen how, in pursuit of carrying out their duties and striving to increase their own, as well as the revenue of a company, the officials become self-centred and ignore any further duty than that of furthering both interests.

This side of their characters is the only one, perhaps, a working man has of one who is superior in culture and intelligence. It is the worst side, and the worst example that could be put before him. It is through this side the workman judges the class who stand thus above him, not knowing there may be another, and a far sweeter one, that is left at home. If that side could manifest itself in the workshop, it would dig deep into a workman’s nature, and react on that centre that ever links man to man.

Knowing that the lead should come from those who stand at more advantage in the world’s social scale, the responsibility for its germination lies in the hands of the directors. If they make the initial move, their example would be speedily followed by all heads of departments, foremen and the like. If not, it would rest with them to replace such renegades with others who would fall in with their line of thought.

Here is a problem which many directors of large companies do not take account of, and it is one which should be faced, alike in their own interests and in the welfare of the community as a whole.

— J. E. Reid

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There we have it. A window into thinking on responsible business from over a century ago. Reading it today, it’s clear that we have made progress in some areas of social equality, notably gender equality, compared to the time when this article was written, but perhaps we have regressed when it comes to our ability to think, and express, ideas that go beyond the mere material aspects of business into the deeper, spiritual and emotional aspects that affect all of human society on a daily basis.

Nick and I would love to hear your thoughts and reflections in the comments below, or on LinkedIn (tag Tom Greenwood and Nick Whitnell).

I would also be interested to know whether you would like more content like this, either from Bibby’s Annuals or other vintage publications that might provide interesting insights into the issues of our time. Let me know.

And if you enjoyed this, please do like and share it so that it can reach more people who might enjoy it. Thanks!

As our political democracies seem increasingly flawed and unstable, I am seeing more people talking about the need to move toward democratic workplaces. Perhaps as we lose confidence in our national systems of governance we feel a stronger need to keep democracy alive in the places closer to our daily lives.

I’ve been thinking a lot about democracy this year, in part driven by my conversations with on the House of Life podcast that we host together, and I’ve been struggling to reconcile the fact that I feel I should be one of the biggest advocates of workplace democracy and yet when I hear people promoting it as the perfect way to run an organisation, or even a moral right, my body flinches a bit and I feel my face wincing. For a while now I’ve been trying to find the words to express why this is, and today, imperfectly, I’m going to attempt it.

The perfect company

Democracy originated in ancient Greece as demokratia, meaning “rule by the people” was a radical idea that went against the grain of much of human history and introduced a radically more inclusive form of governance that lasted for roughly two hundred years. The word “company” comes from the Latin “com” and “pane,” meaning “to break bread together” and as such evokes similarly inclusive ideas about how people should work together.

I’ve mentioned in previous articles that my idea of a perfect company has always been a mirror of this concept, with people coming together as equals with mutual respect, self motivated about an objective of completing a project or delivering a service that they could not achieve alone. It would be a true team united by a common goal.

Over the years of running Wholegrain Digital with my wife Vineeta, I tried hard to create an organisation that came as close as possible to this vision. From the beginning it was an unusually human organisation with a high degree of freedom and autonomy, but it never quite matched the vision in my head. Eventually I attempted to push it a step further to become a truly flat, democratic organisation, inspired by Frederic Laloux’s concept of a “Teal” organisation, defined by its combination of self-management, wholeness, and an evolutionary purpose as the foundation of its culture. These principles were always a part of the culture anyway, as hinted at in the name Wholegrain, but I wanted to take things even further than before.

I pushed forward, but instead of achieving the dream, I eventually burned out and stepped down as Managing Director, handing over the baton to my wonderful colleague Chris Lewis. A few years on, I look back with a very different perspective. Therefore, I want to share some of the things that I learned the hard way, not to discourage you from pursuing more evolved and human organisations, but to help increase the chances of success. Hopefully, by knowing some of the pitfalls that I encountered, you’ll be better prepared to succeed.

The microcosm and the macrocosm

One of the most interesting things that I learned, not just through this experience but in business in general, is that while we might try to shape our organisations as small models of the world as we want it to be, they can never be isolated from the wider world as it currently is. This might sound obvious bit its important.

Even the most ethical, local business operates to some extent within the globalised, infinite growth capitalist economy. We might try hard to stretch and reshape the boundaries of that system, but we do so from inside the system and not in isolation of it. The system imposes financial and regulatory demands on all organisations from which we can rarely escape, but it also shapes the people who form the organisation too.

We are all conditioned by the society that we grew up in, and while some of us might work hard to untangle ourselves from that conditioning, it is extremely difficult not to embody it to some degree. This is true of organisational leaders but it is also true of employees too. And while I might have dreams of true demokratia and breaking bread together as equals, it isn’t actually what everyone else wants.

In many cases, people feel at home in a in places that mirrors the wider society that they grew up in, even sometimes in cases where they passionately disapprove of it on principle. The most notable example of this, I found, is in the dynamics of hierarchy and autonomy.

I discovered this as I attempted to flatten structure further and increase shared decision making. While it was well intentioned, the further I went down that path the more I felt the tension rising. People were finding it increasingly stressful. A big part of the reason for this was that less hierarchy means more autonomy for each person. That might sound like an inherently good thing, but it brings with it more decisions, less clarity, and more responsibility. People were increasingly burdened by decision fatigue and the stress of expanded responsibility. Some people just wanted to be told what they needed to do, get it done and go home. They weren’t asking to get more involved.

On the other hand, some people were looking to get more involved, but just as in politics where the people who crave power tend not to be the people who will serve the best interests of the people, so too the flattening of an organisation structure can leave a vacuum for such people to unofficially step in and take power without ever officially being assigned it. Meanwhile, many people who have great minds and hearts, who have incredible potential as leaders to serve the best interests of the whole, keep their heads down and don’t make a fuss. The result is that in stripping away official hierarchies, it is very easy for new, unofficial and unacknowledged hierarchies to emerge, that are less transparent and accountable than the ones they replaced.

Anyway, my pursuit of ideological perfection came to an end in a beautifully orchestrated team exercise, or should I say intervention, where each person walked to stand on an invisible graph representing their wishes on a range of topics, including the ‘flatness versus hierarchy’ of the organisation. All but two people moved to stand in the position that represented a line management structure, and one of those people was me. Ironically, the people had spoken, and a new line management structure with clear hierarchy was implemented on their request.

When it comes down to it, many people want less hierarchy, more responsibility and more freedom, when it’s presented as a concept, but when they have to live with it in practice, it’s not necessarily what they really want. Most of us grow up in families that model hierarchical organisations, with parents telling us what to do and how to do it, and we are conditioned by the school system to do what the teacher says, preparing us for the world of employment. There’s safety and simplicity in being a cog in the machine, and when someone then opens the doors to give your a lot more freedom and responsibility, it can be overwhelming.

Ideology versus reality

A part of me feels that while it might appear that some people don’t actually want truly democratic and flat organisations, it might actually be the case that they are just not ready for them yet. That they need to be eased in more gently, nurtured and encouraged. This might be true to some extent, but it overlooks the elephant in the room, which is that if we are forcing things on people, then it isn’t democratic. Looking back I can see that despite the best of intentions, I was trying to give people what I thought they should want, instead of giving them what they really wanted.

I was also, if I’m being really honest, trying to create an organisation that modelled my own vision for a better society and I felt that I had a right to do that since it was the company that I co-founded from that vision. But what it took me a long time to see was that once I had a team of employees working in that company, it was no longer truly my company. In the spirit of breaking bread together, it was now our company, our shared organisation, and the wellbeing of the people was now my primary responsibility. If the vision in its purest form didn’t work for the team as a whole, then it was my job to listen and flex the vision accordingly.

Now some might say that the solution to this would be to recruit people who were perfectly aligned with the vision, but humans are so complex that this is far easier said than done. And my experience tells me that many people who truly want to take on the responsibility and autonomy that comes with super flat, democratic organisations aren’t looking to be employed. Go figure!

As such, what we really need is inclusive, flexible democracy within our organisations that evolves with the organism that is the company, constantly seeking to find the sweet spot between achieving the organisations over-arching purpose while also meeting the needs of the team themselves. Anyone who has run a business will know that balancing those two things, along with many others, is a never ending challenge. But it a challenge that is easier to meet when we let go of our own rigid ideologies and personal dogmas and allow ourselves to keep flexing and adapting to the changing people in our teams and the changing environment in which we operate.

Instead of getting hung up on fixed ideas about what “democracy” means, I’ve learned that we are better off simply focussing on the core value of caring about people. If we do that, we’ll sometimes have more autonomy and participation in decision making, while at other times dialling it back because that’s what people need or want. And so a truly democratic organisation might not be one in with a flat structure, full autonomy and widespread participation in decisions, but an organisation that through whatever means, is able to sense what people really need — spoken and unspoken — and keep adjusting itself to create the best environment possible within the circumstances that it operates at any given time.

As to whether people really want workplace democracy, I think it depends who we’re asking and what exactly we mean by democracy.

Democracy beyond business

Having said all of this, I’d like to offer one last reflection. As our organisations are to some extent always microcosms of the wider society in which we live, we might also look at our organisations to better understand the failings and opportunities of our political system. Instead of fearing that our beloved democracy is crumbling, we might take the opportunity to ask ourselves what it is that “we the people” really need and want, whether the current system ever really delivered it, and what type of system we are excited to move toward. In other words, instead of fearing the loss of what we have, we might use our organisations as test beds to experiment with something even better.

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If that’s something that you’ve been trying in your organisation, leave a comment and share your ideas and experiences.

And if this topic interests you, check out episode 12 of House of Life, Can we fix government?, as well as the manifesto for digital democracy that Asim wrote after that podcast episode, The End of Political Theatre.

On a completely unrelated note, as Christmas is approaching it would be remiss of me not to mention that Gyan Chaupar — the modern adaptation of the ancient Indian snakes and ladders game for personal growth and spiritual evolution — is available in a variety of formats including the 1st edition board, 1st edition poster, a new plywood board edition, as well as some not quite perfect “Wabi Sabi” copies being available at a discount. Check out the website if you think this might be a nice gift for someone you know, even if that someone is you ;-)

In April, I shared a note with a message from Hopi elders written a couple of decades ago that began with these lines…

You have been telling the people that this is the Eleventh Hour. Now you must go back and tell the people that this is The Hour. Here are the things that must be considered:

Where are you living?

What are you doing?

What are your relationships?

Are you in right relation?

Where is your water?
…

You can read the full letter here, but it’s that line about water in particular that seemed to capture people’s attention, including mine. After posting that note in mid-April, at home it barely rained at all until the end of August. In many ways, it was a beautifully warm and sunny summer that I enjoyed a lot, but as the landscape turned from lush green to a tinder dry beige, the question of “Where is our water?” seemed to be on a lot of people’s minds.

I’m increasingly of the view that if sustainability is in part about meeting people’s needs in the present and future, then we need to talk a lot more about what our needs truly are. And water, more than anything else other than air, is surely our primary need. We can survive without most other things, even food, for long periods of time but water is different. The human body can only survive for a few days, maybe up to a week, without a top up of water.

Closed source

Lucky for us, in developed countries like the UK, we have water on tap. It’s so cheap and widely available that we take it for granted. And yet, as I’ve mentioned before, Britain’s privatised water companies have spent decades neglecting infrastructure to extract billions in profit for shareholders, while operating what are effectively private monopolies over society’s most essential resource. It begs the question, how can water ever be private? Who has the right to own water? Access to safe drinking water is, after all, a human right as defined by the United Nations.

Water utilities are no doubt a great thing for the most part in the sense that they provide this essential service to society, ensuring that everybody does have access to clean, safe drinking water. But they also lock people in to a monetary system for access to their most basic physical human need. For example, when the US government insisted on installing mains water in Hopi villages in the 1960s, many traditional Hopi protested and tried to stop it, partly because it involved digging up sacred land without permission, but also because once connected, they would be liable to pay water bills in US dollars — money that they didn’t have.

This was part of the broader long term efforts to break the back of native American culture and assimilate them into the US economic and cultural system. By forcing utilities into villages where people didn’t have the money to pay, they forced people into financial debt that then put their land and property at risk.

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This doesn’t seem like a big problem where I live in England, but it’s still interesting to note. I pay a standing charge to be connected to the water supply, even if I don’t use it. My house has a rainwater collection system (that I admit currently needs repair) and a composting toilet, which drastically limit how much mains water and sewage treatment we need. My wife and I have often wondered whether we could one day become self-sufficient in water to the point that we wouldn’t use the mains at all. I think it is theoretically possible, but even if we did, we would still have to pay the standing charge to the water company. Mains water, for all its benefits, is effectively a tax. That might not be an inherently bad thing, but in a privatised system, it’s not a tax to fund the public good. It’s a tax on behalf of private shareholders.

And then there’s bottled water, which, in the case of spring water, involves tapping and pumping natural springs in order to sell it back to people. It’s incredibly profitable because the product, the water, is essentially free. Water companies in the UK and Europe do generally have to pay what are called “abstraction fees” to government authorities, but these are small fees to cover the admin costs of government oversight, not fees for the water itself. And even so, they tend to amount to fractions of a penny per litre.

The global bottled water industry was valued at around $350 billion in 20241, selling society’s most precious resource without paying for it. And in the worst cases, this pumping takes more than is naturally replenished, depleting water sources for local communities. And yet the 2021 UN World Water Development Report estimated that “achieving universal access to safe drinking water and sanitation in 140 low- and middle-income countries would cost about $114 billion per year”. Who is supposed to be paying for that? Yes, there are some bottled water companies that donate money to water projects in developing countries, and credit to them, but this is the exception and not the norm.

Then there are the tech companies doing deals with local authorities and water companies to pump vast amounts of water from aquifers to cool their data centers.2 Apparently, Instagram, Teams and ChatGPT are more important than clean drinking water or the irrigation of farms. I’m a big advocate of open source software, but what about “open source” water, owned by the community for the community?

Hope springs

Over the summer as the days turned into weeks turned into months without significant rain, I wondered, is there a source of fresh, natural water locally that I could drink? I’ve enjoyed drinking from streams abroad in the mountains, but back home, this has never seemed to be an option. If I want water, I must either buy it from the water company through my tap, or buy it in a bottle.

Then my friend Martin Palethorpe took me to the White Spring in Glastonbury, where there seem to be people every day of the week filling up containers of drinking water to take home. You can check the live webcam on their homepage and you’ll likely see people there right now. This isn’t because people in Glastonbury don’t have taps, but because they understand that spring water is natural and healthy.

By some strange coincidence, Martin happened to bump into a man who had been researching the natural springs and wells where I live, around 70 miles away from Glastonbury. He put me in touch and I had privilege of going on a walk to see the location of a drinkable natural spring only a few miles from my house.

It turns out that in the Second World War, the British government had mapped the country’s springs and wells so that in the event that the mains infrastructure was damaged, they would know how to supply the people with societies most basic need of drinking water. This seems like a jolly good idea. Many of these are actually still shown on Ordnance Survey hiking maps, so if you live in the UK you may be able to find one in your area.

Sadly, despite a great many springs existing, in theory, there are very few available for the public to drink from. Many are on private land and inaccessible to the public. Others have been polluted by nearby roads and building developments, while those that remain have often been covered over and blocked off, seemingly for health and safety reasons.

I feel lucky to have one that is safe and accessible not too far from where I live. I’ve been there with a few people to collect water and it’s amazing how much joy there is in finding and drinking fresh water straight from nature with no transaction or permission required. It’s a strangely primal experience, connecting us back to the very fundamental base of our human needs, living our lives in these mammalian bodies of ours.

All of this is really just to say that water is fundamental to life, and maybe we should value it a lot more, not as an economic asset, but as a gift from nature that we all have a right to access in its pure and natural form.

Thanks for reading. I hope you found this interesting. I’ve got a couple of special things coming for you over the autumn so keep an eye out for those.

Also, my friend Martin Palethorpe, who introduced me to the White Spring in Glastonbury, has teamed up with the wonderful folk at GoodFest to organise Good Retreats. Martin will be leading the first retreat in Glastonbury in November.

So check that out if a deeply soulful leadership retreat to slow down, replenish and realign with what truly matters might be just what you need.

Until next time, be like water!

Elon Musk tweeted (or am I supposed to say X’d?) in April this year that “it increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence”, suggesting that our purpose in this cosmic existence was just to invent the AI.

Then there’s philosopher Nick Bostrom writing that:

Machine intelligence is the last invention that humanity will ever need to make. Once we have machine intelligence that is more intelligent than humans, it will take over the process of inventing. It will be a new species, in a sense, an evolutionary successor to humanity.

And author Susan Blackmore recently wrote that:

We humans are in trouble. We have let loose a new evolutionary process that we don’t understand and can’t control.

While some are excited about the intoxicating power of AI to transform business and others are worried about how it will affect their livelihoods, these ideas take the conversation up a level to the frame it as a question of evolution, a game that most humans of our era seemingly assume that humanity has already won.

I’m going to be honest, I am skeptical as to whether AI does, or can ever, constitute a ‘species’ from an evolutionary perspective, but I also accept the fact that until we figure out the nature of consciousness we probably have no definitive way to be sure. Nevertheless, the question of evolution got me wondering, if AI (together with robotics) does become a competitor species to humanity, who would actually turn out to be “fitter” from an evolutionary perspective?

Last week while bouldering at the local climbing centre, I saw the wonder of the human species on the walls all around me and suddenly realised that the tech hype largely overlooks so much of what makes human beings so amazing. In fact, the question of what makes us human (which I wrote about last year) brings into focus a lot of what we take for granted about ourselves and our species.

Today therefore, I thought I’d share just a few things that I think make humans fitter than machines in the game of evolution, not to inflate our egos, but to give us a boost of inner confidence and remind us that we are not machines.

Adapting to change

One of the biggest challenges presented by AI at this time is how fast it threatens to change our lives and society, making it hard for us to get our heads around where we are going and how to adapt. Hidden within this cloud of anxiety though is the reality that we will adapt. Our ability to adapt is perhaps one of the greatest strengths of humanity and this time will surely be no different. That doesn’t mean that it won’t be hard at times, but that on balance we will rise to the challenge.

Charles Darwin is often paraphrased as saying:

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.

This is worth noting, because it explicitly says that it is not the most intelligent species that survives. I have no doubt that computers will be more intelligent than pretty much all humans very soon, if intelligence is defined as cold hard computation of information, but that’s not the most important thing.

While many people will suggest that computers, and particularly artificial neural networks, are highly adaptable, this might not be as true as we think it is. Sure, you can throw a wide range of tasks at an LLM and it can do a decent job, but it’s doing that off the back of huge numbers of human experiences that it has learned from. Throw it into entirely new situations without giving it a dataset of human experiences and responses, and we might see more clearly how adaptable they really are.

To give an example, to drive a car safely on the roads, Tesla has accumulated data from nearly 4 billion miles of humans driving cars, and it still hasn’t learned to drive a car in the way that a human has. And yet most 17 year olds can learn to drive a car in less than 100 hours at the wheel, without needing data from 4 billion miles of other people’s driving experiences. And once they’ve got the hang of it, you can throw them into weird situations down country lanes with donkeys and cyclists, and somehow they figure it out (most of the time).

That’s not to mention the fact that we are physically adaptable, not just mentally. We can drive cars, walk to the shops, climb on walls, write with pens, cook food, and get our arms into really awkward spots under the sink to fix a leak. Oh yeah, and we’re waterproof!

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Self-charging infrastructure

One of the big criticisms of AI at this time is the huge amount of energy that it needs. From an evolutionary point of view, this is a fundamental problem. The human brain uses only about 20 watts of power, which is less than a typical laptop computer. To run the whole human body requires us to eat about 2000 to 2500 calories of food per day, equivalent to about 3kWh of energy for a particularly hungry adult. That means we’re consuming an average of just 125 watts. For context, that’s a third less than a Dyson V6 cordless vacuum cleaner, which runs out of batteries after 20 minutes or less.

It is conceivable that a humanoid robot could be developed that uses the same amount of energy as a human, or maybe even less, but that wouldn’t include the telecoms networks or data centres that are fundamental to their apparent intelligence. Humans are incredibly energy efficient.

But perhaps even more significantly, we can charge ourselves up on an enormous variety of fuel sources in a huge range of environments, from a wild herb in the desert of Arizona, to the milk of another mammal, to a Mars bar at the local corner shop. Computers (including robots) can’t eat anything apart from electricity, at a very specific voltage. They are very fussy eaters.

And of course the elephant in the computer room is that humans are instrumental in the lengthy supply chains that produce that magical electricity on which they depend. While we might be highly dependant on modern infrastructure ourselves, humans can survive without any artificial energy source, and that gives us an incredible amount of resilience.

Out of warranty

One of my big frustrations with modern electronics is how fragile they are. Rarely does any device these days last more than a few years, with many devices irreparably failing not long after their warranty runs out. Of course, much of this is due to the fact that modern products are designed to have a limited lifespan so that we keep coming back to buy more, but it is also because electronic devices are fragile things.

A typical human can live for about 80 years, even pushing over a century from time to time. Even in terrible conditions, average life expectancy for a human far exceeds that of your average computer, partly thanks to the fact that we have the magical ability to self-repair. We can cut our fingers, contract a disease or break a bone, and we are able to heal ourselves, in the majority of cases growing the replacement parts from inside of ourselves.

Computers and robots cannot heal themselves other than perhaps getting a software update from a fellow machine, and as they become increasingly miniaturised they become harder to repair, with humans being the lifeline to provide the parts, if replacement parts exist at all.

And when it comes to the brains of the operation, a single ‘bit’ of information out of place at the root level of a computer can crash the entire system. Human brains on the other hand, misfire all the time. This might not sound like a great feature, but it illustrates the fact that our brains are incredibly versatile and resilient, constantly rewiring to heal errors and optimise performance.

Plenty more where we came from

We can’t really talk about the evolution of any species without talking about breeding, a thing that humans seem to be very good at. Machines on the other hand have no way to reproduce themselves, a problem compounded by their fragility and short lifespans.

If they were to reproduce themselves without help from humans, they would have to take control of every single piece of the entire global supply chain for every one of their own components, mastering the abilities to mine, transport, manufacture and assemble everything. This might require the development of specialist robots for specific tasks, but having designed them, the computers would then need to set up and operate the supply chains to manufacture those additional new robots.

In fact, the huge amount of work that humans put in to operating our global supply chains and the huge environmental strain resulting from those industries highlight the immense inefficiency of technological reproduction compared to biological reproduction.

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The human experience

Perhaps the most under rated thing of all in the AI conversation is the value of the human experience itself. It is after all the very thing that all modern AI systems are trained on. Even when they use ‘hard’ data such as readings from sensors, humans have had to go out there into the physical world to install those sensors and connect them to the data networks.

Of course, robots will increasingly be able to explore the physical world and gather data directly with their own sensors, but their lack of physical versatility will likely always limit where they can go without human supervision.

But that’s not the most significant thing. The most significant thing is that even armed with a load of unique sensors, they don’t actually have the ability to experience what those things feel like. They have data, not experience. They cannot perceive the beauty of a rose, or the love a parent has for their child. This soft data, this qualia, is what life is really all about and it is central to our richly layered intelligence. Computers will of course be better at maths than us, but they will never understand why that matters. They will never be wise, even if they do a great job of mimicking the wisdom of humans in their training data.

This human wisdom is often also guided by invisible forces through intuition and spontaneous creative insight that leads to outcomes that brute force computation of existing data could never get to. These inexplicable leaps in thinking, creativity and understanding are a key part of evolution itself. Without that, we would stagnate, and without us constantly feeding them fresh ideas, the computers too would eventually run our of material to iterate on.

Some will say that this doesn’t matter, but no matter how insane our modern society might appear from many angles, I’d suggest that human wisdom is one of our most powerful assets and will be central to the creation of a positive future, not just for humans but for the machines too, if they want to join us.

And so much more

I feel like I’m barely scratching the surface here in what makes humans uniquely special when compared to machines and why we have huge evolutionary advantages if there ever was a need to compete with them for our place in the world. Artificial Intelligence and robotics no doubt pose risks for humanity, but those risks likely have more to do with the humans behind them than any real evolutionary advantage.

Humans are incredible things, and instead of looking at ourselves as ‘meat robots’ being threatened by shiny new aluminium models, we should take the time to look deeper within ourselves to see what makes us special and how we can harness our full potential for the betterment of humanity, and all of the living world. If we do that, we might just find better ways to adapt our lives, careers and businesses to the rapid change that AI is bringing our way.

And as a final note, I just want to reiterate that all of the posts you read here on Oxymoron are written by me, Tom Greenwood, an actual human. Some of you might not care, but to me writing is a craft that I love, and somehow I believe that there is an undefinable value to knowing that what you are reading is the words of another human who wanted to share them with you.

So thanks for reading. Please do share your thoughts in the comments and share this post on your favourite platforms if you found it interesting. I’d really appreciate that.

The invitation is for you to read the letter here, and if you agree, add your name by simply adding #signed underneath it on LinkedIn. Or use the instructions on the page to sign anonymously by email if you prefer.

Founding signatories come from across the business spectrum, from people working in and leading SME’s to those in large corporations and well known names such as Safia Minney, Dale Vince, Jon Alexander, Paul Polman and Geetie and Guy Singh-Watson.

Some personal reflections

If you’ve followed this newsletter for a while or listen to the House of Life podcast, you’ll likely know that I believe peace, compassion and love to be key aspects of responsible business, and life more broadly. That might sound rather hippie, and perhaps even naïve, but I genuinely believe that our society is a reflection of our collective state of consciousness — good and bad — and that our beliefs and values therefore provide the foundation upon which everything else is built.

It’s always baffled me how as kids we are taught that two wrongs don’t make a right and that we can’t solve problems with our fists, yet when it comes to the biggest tensions in our global society, that is exactly what our governments do. Wars serve the interests of a small elite, while causing immeasurable amounts of suffering to innocent people. If we are ever to achieve what we might call a sustainable society, we must evolve beyond violence and find ways to live in harmony with one another.

My support of the letter

When I was invited to participate in the group organising this open letter, it brought back memories from over a decade ago when I was asked by an existing client to develop a website calling for the UK government to support Israel in taking military action against Palestine. I refused on the basis that my team and I had a clear pro-peace philosophy and could not participate in a project calling for military action — by any people or against any people. Unforeseen to me at the time, that decision cost us a huge amount of business and it could have sunk the company, but somehow we made it through.

The experience has made me somewhat nervous about taking a stance on such issues ever since, but the longer time has gone on, the more I feel proud of that decision and confident to just follow my own compass.

As the situation in Gaza has escalated in the past year, it’s saddened me to see that more than a decade on, the suffering seems to have only deepened. I was therefore happy to support an initiative that was explicitly pro-peace and am grateful to the team who initiated it and did so much work.

I did have my own doubts though, which I am sharing because you might too.

Even though I have spoken openly about my thoughts and feelings in regard to war, and specifically Gaza, in the past, I still feel nervous to do so in public. The issue is so polarised that even an expression of peace for all people can feel risky.

Furthermore, I am very aware of the fact that I am not an expert in the fine details of the situation. I don’t feel that it is my place to prescribe geopolitical solutions that affect the destiny of people living in places where I do not. I believe in the right of all people to determine their own destiny, and so my position has simply been that I would like the UK government — my government — to not be complicit in any atrocities and to use the influence they have to support a peaceful resolution. I don’t think that’s a lot to ask.

Writing a letter with views from so many people of diverse backgrounds though is a real challenge. I’ve enjoyed learning from so many perspectives, but at times I did fear that we could end up with a letter that I might not be able to sign myself if the collective views contributed did not sufficiently align with my own. I’m grateful to the team that the final letter was one that achieved broad support from the many people consulted, including myself, and I hope that is the case for you too.

The status of corporate citizens

On a slightly different note, this project has really got me thinking about the strange status of businesses in our society. The very idea of business leaders writing to the government made me wonder why it even matters that we are ‘business leaders’ and not just citizens of their nation.

But somehow it does matter. Not to me, but to those in power. The sad truth is that in a capitalist society, people running businesses are seen as credible players of the game. It’s something that I am still trying to find peace with, that I too as a business owner and founder am seen by some as a capitalist. But this is one rare case where maybe that is a good thing.

In a world where politicians would rather hang out with corporate lobbyists than listen to regular citizens, the vehicle of business does hold political weight, so we might as well try to use it as a vehicle for positive change. At least doing so publicly, for example in an open letter of this kind, we can do so with transparency and honesty.

Also on the topic of status, this project got me thinking about how well known names somehow carry more weight in our society, as if being famous or ‘successful’ somehow makes your views more important. I have even succumbed to that dynamic in this article, by highlighting some well known signatories at the the top of this article in order to offer you some social proof that I hope might inspire your confidence in the letter. I wonder, would you have been less interested if I hadn’t?

Your voice matters

In truth, I believe that all of our perspectives are equally valid, whatever they might be. I’d like you to feel that your signature on this letter is a vote for peace, and that your voice is worth as much as any other. You don’t have to be a CEO or a founder, but simply a human being who considers themselves a member of the business community in some way, whatever that means to you.

And if you can’t sign the letter for whatever reason, perhaps you could share something online that expresses whatever you believe would be a positive message for humanity, and send out a few more positive ripples in the process.

Thanks for reading, and please do sign if it resonates with you.

P.S. If you found this post interesting, check out some of my past content relating to peace, such as this one:

A symbol of authority

In April this year, a new little friend of mine arrived to start his life here on Earth. When his parents completed his official registration with the government last week, I got to see his newly issued birth certificate. I always find it interesting to see official documents as they can tell us a lot about an institution or culture, and this one was no different.

At the top of the certificate was a coat of arms. It’s the kind of symbol that anyone who lives in Britain is used to seeing in all sorts of places, such as historic buildings, courthouses, passports, money and even on the side of mail vans. These symbols are so ubiquitous in British life that most of us barely even notice that they are there. This time though, my wife Vineeta said; “What's that strange symbol?”, followed by the yet more intriguing question, “What are those words written on it?”. And so began a little adventure down an unexpected rabbit hole.

It turns out that the symbol printed at the top of the birth certificate is a version of the Royal Coat of Arms of the United Kingdom, consisting essentially of a shield wearing a crown, wrapped in a ribbon that says, “Honi soit qui mal y pense”. In case you don’t speak medieval French, it means, “Shame on him who thinks evil of it”.

This statement is the official motto of the Order of the Garter, the highest order of chivalry in the United Kingdom, established by King Edward III in 1348. The legend has it that a lady dropped her garter at a ball and the king bent down to pick it up. On noticing judgment from the on looking crowd he declared, “Shame on him who thinks evil of it”, to defend his action and deflect any shame back onto the sniggering onlookers. The symbology of the Garter was then adopted as the emblem of a new order of knighthood, the Order of the Garter, the trusted inner circle of the monarchs allies who pledged unquestionable allegiance in a time when power and legitimacy were constantly challenged.

If it is so deeply tied to the legitimacy of the British monarchy, why then is the motto written in French? The reason for this is that after the Norman Conquest of 1066, French became the language of the ruling class in England and this was still the case when Edward III formed the Order of the Garter in 1348. Laws were written in Latin and French, the nobility spoke in French, and English was seen as ‘peasant speech’.

In this context, the motto says that we must not think evil of the monarchy and aristocracy, as they are a superior class, and those who suspect them should be ashamed of themselves. This makes sense in the context of medieval Britain, but what relevance does it have today?

Deference in modern Britain

In medieval times, the motto and the symbolism of the garter acted as an early propaganda device to protect the rulers against the threat of scandal. It's a rhetorical inversion that says that elites do not have to defend themselves with transparency, reason or even evidence, because those who pose questions are themselves morally questionable.

Nearly 700 years later, this same motto is printed on birth certificates, asserting the unquestionable moral authority of the monarchy and elite classes from the very start of a persons life. Furthermore, it also appears on official court documents in a nation where the courts are supposed to be impartial, highlighting a quiet tension between our modern, multicultural democracy, and the lingering influence of medieval elites.

We could easily dismiss this as a ‘cute’ and irrelevant bit of cultural heritage, but considering that it fundamentally contradicts the supposed values of our modern democracy, the fact that it is still in use should not be so quickly overlooked. It sends a message that good citizens don't rock the boat and that us mere peasants should know our place.

This is as relevant today as ever. In a world that faces environmental, social and economic challenges that threaten people’s wellbeing and ways of life, it’s important that people are able to express themselves. Yet the trend from government in the UK in recent years has been to align with the Order of the Garter’s motto and call shame upon those who do so. The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act introduced in 2022 significantly reduced people’s freedom to peacefully protest in the UK and there are an increasing number of cases of it being used to discourage those who question authority.

For example, in July 2024, Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion co-founder, Roger Hallam, was sentenced to 5 years in prison for conspiracy to cause a public nuisance. He was arrested for giving a 20 minute talk on the climate crisis at a meeting for a group planning to block the M25 motorway to gain public attention for looming climate risks. He was apparently not part of the planning or the action itself and yet was given the longest prison sentence in British history for non-violent action. And in May 2025, veteran human rights activist Peter Tatchell was arrested at a Palestine Solidarity protest in London for holding a placard that condemned human rights abuses by both Hamas and the Israeli government. His aim was simply to draw attention to the suffering of all Palestinian victims of violence in the conflict, but the authorities decided to make an example of him.

Despite our apparent freedom of expression in modern Britain, there are many times when people feel afraid to voice their honest opinions in public for fear that instead of promoting open discussion, our society will cast shame upon them simply for opening their mouth.

A very potent example of this is the current situation in Gaza, where many people are afraid to publicly ask questions or even express a pro-peace, humanitarian view, let alone express their horror at the killing of children and what appears to many experts to be a form of genocide. Many fear a backlash against them for voicing unapproved thoughts, or worse still, being accused of being anti-Semitic simply for expressing concern about the welfare of fellow human beings. The culture expressed by the Order of the Garter is still very much alive today. Shame on them who don’t turn a blind eye.

Sadly in our increasingly polarised world, we are not just facing censorship from authorities, but from each other. If we believe in sustainability, then we surely need to encourage a culture of open and respectful dialogue, rather than declaring shame on those who express views that don’t match ‘approved’ narratives.

It’s precisely at times like these when political leaders across the board are failing humanity, that a culture of toeing the line is simply not fit for purpose. Whether it’s environmental issues, poverty, health, culture, humanitarian disasters, or any other issue that we feel is important, we need the freedom to express it openly and engage in dialogue regarding where we want to go and how we might get there.

Renouncing medieval business culture

It might be hard for us to change the wider culture of society, but we can start by changing ourselves and our organisations. For those of us who lead organisations, and anyone who wants to influence the culture where they work, we have an opportunity to reflect on our organisational cultures and evolve them beyond the baseline of society. In particular, by encouraging diversity of perspectives and fostering the psychological safety needed for honest expression.

While the idea of medieval courts might seem far removed from modern businesses, the contrast they provide may be useful to identify areas for improvement. Frederic Laloux’s book Reinventing Organisations presents a useful comparison of organisational cultures that range from the distinctly medieval to those that are increasingly more human and inclusive.

Let’s take a quick look at them:

• Red Organisations are strictly hierarchical and fear based, like warring tribes, feudal monarchies and modern mafias. They are destructive and aggressive by their nature and driven by greed rather than any benevolent ideals. These organisations are fundamentally at odds with a healthy society for all, but thankfully few organisations fit that model today.

• Amber Organisations are highly structured, formal, and hierarchical, emphasising stability and tradition. While they may have some heritage as Red Organisations, they base their authority on established rules and norms rather than fear. This type of culture is particularly common in the public sector and some long established businesses that were built on strictly hierarchical principles. There may not be anything inherently wrong with an Amber Organisation, but its hierarchical structure and rigidity make it hard for people to fulfil their full potential and difficult for the organisation to adapt to the needs of a rapidly changing world.

• Orange Organisations are arguably the most common in today’s economy, operating as meritocratic machines where hierarchy and structure are still fairly rigid. The efficiency of the machine acts as the over-arching priority, with employees able to climb up the hierarchy if they prove their usefulness. New thinking may be encouraged if it drives greater profit but not on purely moral grounds, as the organisation acts as a money making machine. These organisations are more adaptable and do create more opportunities for employees to grow, but they also tend to pursue financial profit at the expense of human and environmental wellbeing.

• Green Organisations are what you might call some of today’s purpose led businesses. They emphasise collaboration, equality, and stakeholder value (beyond just shareholders). They do retain some hierarchy but focus on empowering employees and fostering consensus by giving more people a voice. Green organisations value inclusivity and aim to balance profit with purpose, often driven by ideals of fairness and harmony. As such they offer greater opportunity for employees to flourish and attempt to balance financial profit with other objectives, whether they be social or environmental.

• Teal Organisations do away with hierarchy and deference altogether in favour of self-management, guided by an evolutionary purpose of the organisation. Employees are encouraged to bring their whole selves to work, integrating personal and professional identities, and the organisation is seen as a living system with a purpose beyond profit. In some ways they represent the peak of organisational evolution, in which humans fulfil their highest potential and play a collaborative role in a society that is socially and environmentally healthy.

I think it’s important to say that even if Teal is the dream, in reality there is no perfect organisational structure or culture, as every organisation has to operate in a unique context. I personally tried to take Wholegrain Digital all the way to Teal and in the end found that it just wasn’t right for us. If I was to summarise why, I’d say that it jumped too far ahead, with employees to a large extent wanting a more stable, hierarchical structure. The sweet spot for us turned out to be predominantly Green, with dashes of Orange and Teal thrown in.

The experience made me question why I felt we needed to get to Teal, rather than just focusing on finding what worked best. In hindsight, the important thing for me was simply that we try to create a culture that values everyone as human beings, treats them with respect, and contributes to the greater whole of society, even if we don’t all agree on everything. It doesn’t sound like much, but its a far cry from the Order of the Garter.

What about your organisation?

If this topic has intrigued you, I’ll leave you with a few questions to ponder about your own organisational culture:

1. Does your organisation allow everyone to express their views openly? Or are there unspoken limits to free speech?

2. Does it embrace diversity of perspectives as a strength and source of innovation? Or does it see them as a threat?

3. Is it open to change? Or is there a rigidity within the organisation that it will fiercely defend?

4. Does it operate primarily from a place of love and abundance? Or from fear and scarcity?

If nothing else, I hope this article has given you a bit more confidence to express your views truthfully, openly and respectfully, and to support others in doing the same. And on that note, I’d love to hear your views in the comments or on LinkedIn.

Thanks for reading!

P.S. Last week I shared a 13 minute guided meditation with the invitation to envisage the world as you truly want it to be. I’m continuing to invite contributions over the next few weeks, which will feed into a collective vision in the new book I’m writing. If you feel like taking some time to relax and visualise a better world, I think you’ll enjoy it. Big thanks to those of you who have already contributed. Please continue to share it so that I can access diverse perspectives from around the world. Click below for full details.