In Pursuit of Strategic Clarity
I wrote this essay after a morning spent helping a Scottish food bank with its strategy. It is one of over a thousand outlets now operating across Scotland, run by over 600 organisations, and still overwhelmed by demand. It made me want to refine my thinking about why this need persists in a wealthy country. This essay sets out seven economic factors driving food bank supply and demand in…
Over the past decade, I ve been watching an array of technological trends develop in parallel. Individually. Each seems reasonable in isolation, whether it be cloud storage, subscription software or biometric authentication, AI assistants, data centres, digital ID. Together, they point toward a future that is considerably more consequential than any single trend suggests. This essay explores a…
A few months ago, Facebook suspended my account and offered to restore it on one condition: a 3D scan of my face. I refused. But the experience got me noticing what else is happening around digital surveillance and control, and I found a pattern that had accelerated rapidly over the past six months, which most people haven t had reason to notice yet. This essay documents that pattern. It looks…
I spent 30 years building a consulting career around a brain I didn t fully understand. Through trial and error, I made intuitive career choices and developed a set of compensatory systems without knowing why I needed them. This essay is my attempt to make sense of it all. I try to describe, in plain language, ten distinctive ways my brain works and how I ve adapted my environment and methods to…
The UK voted to leave the European Union in 2016. Ten years later, the Labour government is debating whether to rejoin, citing Brexit as a net economic loss. But from my perspective, Brexit never really happened. The UK left its biggest marketplace and made it harder to travel to Europe. The experiment was never properly conducted, which makes it impossible to evaluate properly. I examine six…
I wrote this essay because I kept encountering two increasingly entrenched and opposing views about rich people, and I found both of them inadequate. One treats wealth as inherently suspect, the other treats markets as a cure-all. Neither asks the more useful question: what kinds of rich people does a country actually want? This essay sets out a framework for answering that question. I argue that…
Alongside the Loch Ness Monster, the disappearance of several great industries is one of Scotland s most intriguing mysteries. This mystery has puzzled me since I moved to Scotland in 2021. I did not expect this long-form essay to emerge from my investigations, nor did I expect it to reach around 25,000 words. Neither did I expect that the factors behind Scotland’s industrial decline over the past…
I wrote this essay the week after the Defence Secretary revealed that the Royal Navy had spent over a month tracking three Russian submarines in the North Atlantic, specifically designed to survey undersea infrastructure in peacetime and sabotage it in conflict. This news finally pushed me to write something I had been contemplating since the Nord Stream pipelines were blown up in 2022. The UK…
I wrote this essay because I kept hearing the same conversation everywhere I went. Charities complaining about local government. Local government complaining about the Scottish Government. The Scottish Government complaining about Westminster. Everyone arguing about their share of the pie, and nobody asking how to make the pie bigger. I wrote the outline one evening at my gym in Paisley, on my…
In the middle of 2025, facing a career at a standstill and doors closed on all sides, I reached a place of despair and decided to reinvent myself and train as a cybersecurity professional. Over the following months, I completed two qualifications and was well into a third before a family health crisis and an honest conversation with a career counsellor brought me back to my senses. This essay is…