Writing from the uncomfortable middle ground between the world as it is and the world that could be. On why the people who go in wanting to change things from inside organisations and institutions so often end up reproducing what they came to fix.
In futures thinking, Horizon 1 is the present system. Horizon 3 is the world we're building toward. Neither horizon is where many of us are actually living, caught between the two, and it's from that uncomfortable middle ground that any real change has to begin.
The writing grows out of a decade spent inside large tech organisations trying to shape how systems affect the people who use them, including years leading player behaviour work at Riot Games across a platform of 140 million players, and out of a longer engagement with the thinkers and practitioners who have been asking these questions well beyond the tech industry, from Grace Lee Boggs to bell hooks to the restorative and relational traditions they helped build.
The series explores four mechanisms through which transformative change gets co-opted, from the psychological to the structural to the epistemological to the dynamics of how ideas spread and get absorbed. It's written for people still inside systems who haven't given up on changing them, but who are honest about how hard that actually is.
The writing sits in the restorative and relational wing of systems change thinking rather than the confrontational or prosecutorial one, leading with construction, curiosity, and honesty because that's where the real leverage tends to be, and because it reflects the kind of community the writing is trying to help build.
Subscribe on SubstackFour mechanisms by which transformative change gets metabolised by the systems it tries to change.
The psychological mechanisms by which systems reshape the inner lives of the people trying to change them, from the erosion of perception to the slow loss of a sense of self.
The structural conditions that reward compliance with existing logic and quietly starve whatever threatens it, regardless of anyone's intentions.
The epistemological constraints that determine whose knowledge counts, which problems become visible, and whose experience of the system is treated as evidence.
The network and diffusion dynamics that determine whether new ideas scale into something transformative or get absorbed into what already exists.
"Without creating intentional and alternative structures that allow us to practice operating differently, we inevitably revert back to the same ways of relating to each other that got us into this mess."Kazu Haga, Healing Resistance
If you've ever watched an idea you believed in get quietly absorbed by the thing it was supposed to change, this writing is probably for you. New pieces go out when they're ready.
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