Reading · Directed Curiosity

I heard a lot of people talk about liminality in 2020 (imagine that), but 2025 delivered a new dose of that sense of being between things. I’ve been between things, too. Between projects, between clients, between short answers to “what do you do?”

There’s a through line in my projects; it started showing itself back in the early social media days, now two decades on. I’m interested in how organizations can know more about what matters, from the mundane questions of daily business to the looming disruptions that have the potential to change everything. I think our systems – digital and human – should help us understand more.

Over the years, I’ve developed some ways of looking at conventional methods that push at the boundaries of what we allow ourselves to think about. I have some frameworks of my own, and I’ve learned about useful-sounding approaches that have been hidden away in silos of expertise. What if we assembled a superset of these mindsets and toolsets and understood more signals for ourselves?

So I’m going to work on that, starting with some things that have been in the drafts folder for far too long.

The working title for the larger project is Zoomed-Out Thinking. Nothing against zooming in, but I’d argue that’s what we do by default, and I keep learning about useful ways of thinking big picture that I should have known years ago. The big project is about doing more of that exploration and organizing it for sharing.

First, though, it’s time to bring some of my own ideas out. If I’m going to organize other people’s work within my own frameworks, I should explain how they work.

The big one is the Omniscience framework, which I started showing people around 2010. This is the original challenge to think bigger. It incorporates the Analyst’s Canvas, my argument that intelligence and analytics are fundamentally the same. I have some old drafts to work with, so I plan to start sharing the pieces here as I put together the bigger project.

Step one was breaking the logjam on the newsletter.

Updating the standard diffusion-of-innovations model with off-ramps for innovations that don’t reach mass adoption.

Mining mine waste for not-waste-after-all.

Microlibraries in Indonesia.

You know that thinking out loud works; here’s how.

Nkenne – A language-learning app for African languages.

README: A Bookish History of Computing from Electronic Brains to Everything Machines – A review of this one already put The Cuckoo's Egg on my read-again list.

How to Stay Smart in a Smart World: Why Human Intelligence Still Beats Algorithms – Humans have our advantages.

A Stunning Image of the Australian Desert Illuminates the Growing Problem of Satellite Pollution – City streets in the night sky.

‘Meadowscaping’: The people turning their lawns into meadows

Photo by Janne Simoes on Unsplash