Why Write
"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking." — that's Joan Didion
I once assumed writing was tidy, where you take the thoughts you've already had and arrange them nicely for others (that is a book). It turns out that's wrong for new thinking, I write (about new thinking) to find out if my ideas can survive contact with narrative and structure.
Sometimes it can but more often, something I was certain about at 06.03 looks embarrassingly thin by coffee. Ideas that felt sturdy in my head turn out to be held together with wishful thinking and caffeine. It is why I dislike slides, where you can skip over and avoid all the problems in logic.
So often I have to walk away (go to the mountains) and come back weeks later. Something shifts… the idea, something I read, or me. Honestly, I can never tell which.
The struggle, the difficulty, the revision, the giving up and trying again? That's not what gets in the way of writing, It's my irreducibly human bit. I know an LLM optimises against a loss function. I wrestle with a vaguer, more annoying question: does this actually say what I mean/feel? Often the answer is no, and I have to sit with that, usually while making more coffee.
This space isn't sponsored. Nobody pays me to write here. The purpose is to work through where value gets created, to articulate opportunities and threats to myself first, before sharing with boards and leadership. I don't ask permission… but often forgiveness. This is just my thinking, pinned down.
Why I Publish
There's a line I keep returning to: You are only rebellious in the eyes of those who cannot control or manipulate you.
Publishing makes control harder. Once ideas exist on a screen [tested, revised, outthere] they're easy to copy but difficult to twist. They become part of the chain, a record. Nobody gets to tell you what you believe when you've already written it down. That's not performance, it's my commitment to myself. It fixes thinking in time and space, open to scrutiny. Including my own, which is usually the most uncomfortable kind.
What I'm Working On
Most of what I have written over the past two years circles one idea, and it needed a word that did not exist, so I made one.
Consurgence is what arises from conditions that are tended rather than from projects that are managed. You cannot build trust, resilience, judgement or innovation. You can only tend the conditions in which they arise — and then wait, without a guarantee. Its shadow is desurgence: what happens when those conditions are quietly consumed by optimisation, while every dashboard stays green and nobody files an incident report.
That is the thread running through the work on metrics, on competition, on governance, on venture capital, and on what AI is about to do to all of them. The uncomfortable part is that the conditions are usually removed by people doing their jobs correctly. Nobody decides to destroy them. They are simply not on the scoreboard, so they are free, so they get eaten.
Who Is Writing
I sit on boards, and I write this before I take it into the room. That order matters. These are not summaries of settled positions; they are the arguments being tested, in public, ahead of the meeting where they will have to hold.
Thirty-five years of building digital businesses, six books, a visiting fellowship at Henley Business School, and teaching on AI and ethics at London Business School and the LSE. I am neurodivergent, which is relevant here mostly because it explains why I keep returning to the thing everyone else has agreed to stop looking at.
The Machine
I use AI as I write, becasue I am neurominortiy and severaly dyslicx .
It helps with structure, with flow, with finding the sentence I was circling. It is genuinely useful for arguing back. What it cannot do is the part that matters: staying with something long enough to find out whether I actually believe it. The resistance, the false starts, the abandoning of a piece three weeks in, that is not overhead on the thinking. That is the thinking. A model that agrees with me quickly is worse than useless.
So the words have been through a machine. The judgement about whether they are true has not.
My hope is that my thinking makes you think.
Everything I do is published under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0. Free to share and adapt with attribution, for non-commercial purposes, under the same licence. Go copy, mix, blend and add; it is what makes us human.
#consurgence #conditions #governance #decision-making #boards
