I work with governments and organisations on futures, strategy, ethics, games, and public engagement.
Mostly, I help people see the frames they are in, and what else might be possible.
Futures
Most organisations project a single future, and plan everything around that. That’s a real problem of egg-basket allocation.
I help people notice what they’re assuming will stay the same. Break some of those assumptions. Follow them to uncomfortable consequences. Imagine futures that are actually different.
And then we bring it back to the present: What changes in what we do now?
Strategy
Sometimes the problem isn’t the strategy. It’s the story underneath.
Organisations carry around assumptions about how the world works, what kind of organisation they are, who is responsible for what, what matters, and what people will or won’t do. Most of these never make it onto a slide.
I help teams surface those deeper assumptions. Pull apart the narratives they’ve built around the problem. Ask what changes if some of them are wrong.
And then we rebuild: What becomes possible once the old story is no longer the only one available?
Ethics
Some disagreements are not really about the facts.
They’re about what matters. What we owe each other. What counts as fair. Which harms are acceptable, and which responsibilities we’re willing to take on.
I help people surface those value judgements instead of hiding them inside technical language. Work out where the real disagreement is. Take seriously the possibility that several competing claims might all be reasonable.
And then we ask the harder question: What should we do when there is no option that leaves everything we care about intact?
Public Engagement
A lot of public engagement stays stubbornly near the surface.
People ask what stakeholders want, whether they support a policy, what concerns they have. Useful questions, sometimes. But often not the questions that explain anything.
I design engagement that digs deeper. Better questions. Better ways of understanding what people actually care about. Moral foundations, values, identities, assumptions, stories about who is responsible for what.
Then we use that understanding to rethink the policy, the engagement, or the message itself.
Because if you understand the thing underneath the opinion, you have a lot more to work with.
Games
Sometimes the fastest way to understand a policy is to stop talking about it and make people live inside it for a while.
I design games and simulations that let people inhabit systems: make choices, compete for resources, respond to incentives, discover unintended consequences, and occasionally make a complete mess of things.
The point is not to make policy fun.
It is to make the system visible.
Critical Thinking
Critical thinking is usually taught as a collection of mistakes other people make.
Fallacies. Biases. Bad arguments. Useful stuff. But spotting them is the easy part.
The harder thing is noticing the habits in your own thinking: the assumptions you stopped seeing, the frame you mistook for the problem, the idea you cannot quite let go of.
I teach people to pull arguments apart, test what follows, move between different ways of seeing a problem, and know when they have good reason to move back.
Thinking differently is useful.
Knowing when the difference is actually better is harder.
Underneath All This
Work in Progress
Where This Comes From
Work in Progress
Who I’ve Worked With
Work in Progress