People like Donella Meadows, Russell Ackoff and E. F. Schumacher, in their different ways, arrived at a complete view of how organisations or societies get stuck and what to do about it. In many ways their work is timeless, but also think the world is now ready for fresh, subtle and creative ways of looking at these issues.
I sense there is a wider cultural appetite for examining assumptions than there was a generation ago. People are more willing to question what counts as knowledge, what gets measured, and whose perspective matters. Practices like mindfulness, movements around sustainability and social purpose, greater epistemic humility in science, all point in the same direction. People put more faith in work as a route to doing good, not just doing well. Worldviews are more diverse. The questions have become in some ways more subtle and in others more divisive.
This creates an opportunity to bring together issues that are usually kept apart. Contemplative traditions take inner experience and attention seriously. Technical disciplines take rigour and evidence seriously. Social movements take justice, wellbeing, and purpose seriously. Each has something the others lack, and each is diminished without the others.
There are many more strands than this, and I sense the capacity to bring them into the workplace is slowly increasing, even if political motivations complicate this trend.
The form of this work is also part of the argument. Marshall McLuhan observed that the medium is the message: what a communication does is inseparable from how it is structured. A network of interconnected notes is not a neutral container for ideas. It enacts a claim about how understanding works — through relationship and connection, not through linear exposition. The structure here is itself a position on epistemology.
This work tries to hold all of these dimensions without collapsing into any one of them. That is a creative act, not just an analytical one. It is not something a purely technical practice can contain.