I asked three different AI systems to help me solve a complex organizational challenge last month. Every single response gave me a decision tree, a prioritization matrix, and an action plan. Not one asked me how the people involved were feeling about the change. Not one suggested I spend time listening before deciding. Not one questioned [...]
There are moments in life when whatever you thought was holding things together simply stops. Not gradually, not politely—just stops. For me, it was a mountain biking accident that fractured my neck at C2 and left me with a traumatic brain injury. The kind of moment where you don’t need a specialist to tell you something [...]
There’s a tendency—especially in leadership circles—to treat trust like a cultural nice-to-have. Something you work on after strategy, after execution, after results. A layer. A tone. A sentiment. That idea doesn’t hold up very well when you actually look at how systems work. Jack Gibb saw this clearly long before most of us were paying attention. [...]
See the Series Introduction for Just Tao It, Part I: HERE See the Just Tao It Series Introduction Tao/It on-ramp, PART II: HERE See Just Tao It, Chapter 1: HERE From my interpretation of Chapter 76 of the Tao Te Ching (Unpublished): Life comes— soft, supple. Death comes— hard, inflexible. Soft and supple— living. Hard and inflexible— dying. [...]
See the Series Introduction for Just Tao It, Part I: HERE See the Just Tao It Series Introduction Tao/It on-ramp, PART II: HERE See Just Tao It, Chapter 1: HERE From my interpretation of Chapter 2 of the Tao Te Ching (Unpublished): When people see beautiful things, Ugly things arise. When people see good things, Bad things are [...]
Some days it’s hard to be hopeful. The scope and scale of polarization and doom-loop thinking about the U.S. and the future can feel like an hourly, daily, monthly assault on the senses. Then a book like Strong Floor, No Ceiling comes out. My intuition sirens flare and my energy returns. A few differently firing synapses, [...]
Winston Churchill once observed that democracy may be the worst form of government—except for all the others that have been tried. It is the kind of line that gets laughs because it lands close enough to the truth to sting a little. Democracy is messy. It is slow. It often looks like argument layered on top [...]
(Part I, "HOPE! Strong Floor, No Ceiling" preceded this Part II.) There is an oft-repeated phrase in the global community of Polarity Thinkers: “Simple, not easy.” Strong Floor AND No Ceiling is a simple idea. It is clear. It is compelling. It resonates across differences in a way that most policy ideas do not. It offers [...]
There’s an old Chinese story about a farmer whose livelihood depends on a single horse. One day the horse runs away. The neighbors stop by and say, “That’s bad.” The farmer replies, “Maybe.” A few days later the horse returns—bringing several wild horses with it. The neighbors return and say, “That’s [...]
One word could change our trajectory. “And.” Every generation inherits problems it didn’t personally create. Some inherit wars. Some inherit economic breakdown. Some inherit institutions that no longer work the way anyone hoped they would. The generation coming of age right now has inherited something different. They have inherited a planetary system sending increasingly unmistakable signals [...]