Before and after science (wk 25/2025)

A workshop on meaning-making; the future of education is meaning-making; question-value, the aesthetic value of uncertainty; what happens before and after science.

Hello friends,

This week, I ran a half-day workshop in Adelaide on different types of not-knowing that aren’t risk. The group was multi-disciplinary (psychologists, educators, mathematicians, curators, designers, futurists, artists, social workers, and statisticians) and I’m told that the participants enjoyed it and found it insightful and useful.

Hard at work on meaning-making (20 June, 2025).

I’ll write more on this in the next few weeks but my main takeaways are:

1. It takes at least an hour to effectively explain the different types of not-knowing, but the value and relevance of the construct and typology is clear and seems applicable across a wide range of disciplines,

2. It takes so long because “risk” and “uncertainty” have been used imprecisely and inconsistently to describe not-knowing for decades (even by people who should know better) and this obstructive underbrush has to be cleared before a new foundation for understanding can be built,

3. The framing of not-knowing as a generative principle is what gets people to really engage with the typology of not-knowings, and

4. People with different disciplinary backgrounds come up with unexpected (to me) ways to experience the different types of not-knowing, many of which can be implemented quickly and experienced in minutes (vs hours or days).

Writing

All through June I’ve been working on a project which isn’t ready for the public yet — it’s about what education and educational tools look like in a world where AI is increasingly ubiquitous. I’ve written something short about it for now. This is the tl;dr version: AI tools are increasingly accessible, cheap, and seem potentially able to produce any output a human can produce — they’ll certainly reconfigure what work looks like. I agree with this read on AI, except for one important difference: Humans can and must do what I call “meaning-making” because AI can’t do it yet. Meaning-making consists of making subjective judgments about the relative value of things. Education at all levels, but especially higher education, has largely abandoned teaching students how to make and justify subjective value judgments. To remain relevant, education must reorient around helping students learn what meaning-making is, and how to do it well.

You can read the whole thing, plus more context at the links below.
👉 The future of education is meaning-making.
👉 What makes us human for now. [context]
👉 The meaning-making lens on AI. [more context]

Marino Rocks (20 June, 2025).

Elsewhere

This week I’ve been thinking about partial knowledge a lot, and going through my old files (in some cases from decades ago) to see if I could find more ways to talk about the benefits of partial knowledge.

Robert Irwin; in Lawrence Weschler, Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees:

I find it very precarious for a culture only to be able to measure performance and never to be able to credit the questions themselves ... As the questions go up, the performance level goes down — and that's natural, since people don't yet know how to act on those questions, they're stumbling around in a fog — whereas when performance goes up the quality of the questions tends to go down.

Donald Francis Tovey, Essays in musical analysis, vol. 3:

Theorists are apt to vex themselves with vain efforts to remove uncertainty just where it has a high aesthetic value.

Philipp Otto Runge to Johann Wolfgang Goethe (3 July, 1806), in Goethe’s Zur Farbenlehre (1810):

There have been those who have built bridges and suspension work and other such technical things simply by eye. That is certainly possible for a time, but once a certain height has been reached and one naturally hits upon mathematical conclusions, his whole talent will be for nothing unless he works his way through the science and back into freedom.

See you next week,
VT

Someone else’s music (21 June, 2025).

Severely overinsulated (wk 24/2025)

Hot air balloon conferences; ideal-typical convenings; open space; delicious trash foods in South Australia.

Hello friends,

This morning, I ran a half-day workshop on distinguishing uncertainty from risk, and on using signals and scenarios as a strategy tool when facing uncertainty. It was for a mixed group from risk, resilience, strategy, and continuity functions at SA Water, the state water utility of South Australia. If you want something like that done for your team or organisation, you could drop me a line.

The Botanic Gardens, Singapore (8 June, 2025).

Writing

In the last decade, I’ve designed and facilitated several convenings and been a participant at many more. The ones which were the hardest to do (and to get approved) were also the ones most worth doing and being a part of. What do I mean? Most convenings are what I call Your Usual Conference, built around a “fixed schedule of keynotes, papers, and panels published in advance.” These are rarely easy to actually run, but they are easy to conceptualise and conceptually easy to plan. So the people paying for them and running for them know what to expect — Your Usual Conference is easy to get approved and to actually do. But they’re never Great.

Curiosity Camp 2024, Cazadero, CA (2 June 2024).

For a convening to rise to the level of being Great means deep memorability, unexpected but strong connections formed, and transformational exposure to new perspectives and ways of thinking. The first MAD Symposium in 2011 was Great, so was MAD5 in 2016, Science Foo Camp in 2008, the Bar Camps in Boston in 2011/12, Kinnernet 2013, and Curiosity Camp 2024. For Greatness to happen, the structure of the convening must respond to what is happening during the convening. A predesigned conference is definitionally unresponsive. In its ideal form, a Great convening is an emergent phenomenon, and it always requires extremely good facilitation, an absurd amount of preparation, and an unrealistic willingness to not-know what is going to happen. I love Great Convenings, and it turns out I’ve written about aspects of this for some time:
👉 Behind the scenes at a non-linear, emergent conference.
👉 The ideal form of a convening (for me).
👉 Why designing for open-endedness is hard but essential.

Setting up for MAD5, Copenhagen (24 August, 2016).

Elsewhere

I’ve been in Adelaide at MOD. for a week, and have already had a chicken parm, some Cherry Ripe, and a bunch of Tim-Tams. Still looking for FruChocs, a burger with the lot, a good frog cake, and the infelicitously named Chico Babies. All the fancy people are wearing RM Williams, and all the tradies are wearing Blundstones. The central business district is appealingly small, walkable, and heterogeneous — it feels more like the core of Marseille than the City of London. The weather right now, in the Depths of Winter, is appropriate for T-shirts. I was told by Locals to bring lots of warm clothing so am severely overinsulated. Soon, I hope to report favourably on my attempts to obtain a secondary market NST egg.

The Botanic Gardens, Adelaide (10 June, 2025).

See you next week for real,
VT

Public strategy (wk 23/25)

A symphony of freshness; not-so-monolithic problems; public sector strategy; now-ish; Old Skool methods; sauna talk; signs.

Hello friends,

I’m running on fumes after a spate of overscheduling, which is why I skipped last week. Also, I seem to have gotten the week numbering wrong — now fixed.

Excellent copy; New York City (22 May, 2025).

Writing

I’ve been working on putting together a strategy course that is specifically designed for the public sector and public servants: Not short-termist, not profit-oriented, not efficiency-obsessed, not conflated with planning, focused on tradeoffs. Gave a talk about the logic and motivations underpinning the course last week, and wrote it up this week.
👉 A course on public strategy.

The structure of a course on public strategy.

Public sector problems look big, monolithic, and unsolvable. But they’re more tractable when broken down into five types of problems: Coordination, strategy, category, capability, and tradeoff. You won’t be surprised to hear that tradeoffs (to me) are foundational and unblock progress on the other types of problems.
👉 Decomposable strategy problems.
👉 Unpacking Boris: A strategic tradeoffs workshop.

Breaking down apparently monolithic problems.

And I finally got round to updating what I’ve been up to recently: Fighting procurement bureaucracy, running emergent strategy workshops and convenings, visiting an old city, a temporary city, and a fabled research centre.
👉 Now-ish (5 June, 2025).

Making Things the Old Skool Way; Falls Church, VA (17 May, 2025)

Elsewhere

At Edge Esmeralda, I happened to be staying where the Edge City team had installed their sauna and cold plunge facilities. Interesting conversations happen when too many people are packed into a dimly lit, overheated space. On successive nights and mornings: The economics of big cities and small farms; whether living forever makes one boring or makes the people around one boring (or both); Iain M. Banks, the Culture, and the best case scenario of benign AGI; Walter Miller and the fragility of knowledge; the categorical imperative; cozies and other Quality Trash; achieving better sleep on floors/tatami/metal-free wool mattresses/ceramic; contract assassins; the unintuitive case of population wheats; what happens to old AI computational hardware; and how to defeat a sauna thermostat.

The nice thing about sauna conversation is that “being done with the heat” is always a viable escape vector.

It’s a sign; Healdsburg, CA (27 May, 2025)

See you next week for real,
VT

Slice nerd (wk 20/25)

Pizza nerd; talking (or not-talking) about not-knowing; partial light transmission (and photos of same).

Hello friends,

I left the East Coast on a chilly and rainy spring day, and got back to a hot and humid (but fortunately not absurdly humid) Singapore. The word “torpor” is applicable to my current situation.

Tomorrow’s technology today, in the West Village (19 May, 2025).

Writing

New York has a lot of pizza. There are the enormous slices of foldable pizza at the likes of Coronet (enjoyable but ultimately trashy), and the obsessive attempts at Neapolitan pizza (eat within seconds or watch it turn to soup), and the fried pizzas, and the Greek pizzas, and the Chicago-style deep dish pizzas, and and and. I forwent all these however, for a New American pizza. This loosely defined school of pizza doesn’t rely only on traditional strong flours or Italian 00, and has a more robust crust which is baked for longer. The New American pizzas I’ve liked most blend flours from older wheat varieties into the dough, and pay close attention to where the ingredients on top come from. Like everything else, pizza can be regarded as having nearly infinite detail — I have been here for this #content for several years now.
👉 An idiosyncratic view of Greatness in pizza.
👉 Strategic tradeoffs in making a Great pizza.

ASAP, which is no longer with us, London (29 August, 2020).

So far this year, I’ve worked with teams in government ministries, multilateral organisations, big traditional companies, and one startup. Each had different strategy discontentments but there was one common thread. The teams all had a growing awareness of the importance of embracing uncertainty and not treating all unknowns as risk — but none of them had a nuanced language for talking within the rest of their organisations about strategic unknowns that aren’t risky. And so everything from procurement systems to team incentives is designed wrong and gets in the way of doing effective work. Not only do we need a good way to distinguish uncertainty from risk, we also need better ways to distinguish and talk about different types of uncertainty. I call these different not-knowings, and this week I wrote about why it’s valuable to separate them conceptually.
👉 What we keep getting wrong about not-knowing.

Elsewhere

I watched all of Dune: Prophecy on a very long flight. Lavish visuals everywhere, but what I noticed was the recurrent motif of partial light transmission used both architecturally and for costume: Fine meshes and ornamented netting of many types, filigree metalwork, lace and eyelet cloths, pierced-work and latticework screens. This partial transmission is more chiaroscuro than translucence, and is structurally appropriate for a year-round bright sun climate — it’d be nice to have more of this kind of thing in Singapore.

Melrose Hill, Los Angeles (6 June, 2024).

St. Peter’s Church, New York City (13 May, 2025).

Charles de Gaulle Airport, Paris (25 September, 2023).

Marseille (29 April, 2023).

See you next week,

VT

Architecture tourist (wk 19/25)

Product and service strategy; amorphous consulting; Guastavino arches; Chinese Rooms and vampirism; Louise Nevelson on the wall.

Hello friends,

Another week spent underwater. I’ve a) been buried in last-minute work, b) failed to fully transition idk to new logistics providers, c) finally finished filing taxes, and c) been trying to set up a bunch of neat projects in June and August as part of a research fellowship with MOD and the University of South Australia.

Falls Church, VA (18 May, 2025).

Writing

I’ve been working with two teams from a global economic development agency on their offerings strategy. A big part of what they do is work with countries to explore and better articulate what their development challenges are. Their approach tries not to begin with assumptions about what the development challenges are; instead, they aim to be open, responsive, and adaptive to what they discover. This kind of work is a high-touch human service offering, not a product. So I wrote a bit about how to think about the differences between products and services, and what happens when you try to offer a product when a service would be more appropriate (or vice-versa).
👉 Read about how to think more strategically about products and services.

The work on products vs services reminded me of something I wrote last year, about how loosely defined, exploratory, scoping-oriented consulting helps clients find and understand problems that they don’t even have words for yet. This kind of “amorphous consulting” (my term) is especially valuable for clients in uncertain environments, but is always hard to sell compared to concrete consulting (which is easily comprehensible, highly legible, and easily scoped at the outset). Amorphous consulting, by its very nature, must only be offered as a service.
👉 Read about amorphous consulting.

Guastavino thin structural tile arches at Grand Central Station (13 May, 2025).

Elsewhere

I’ve been stealing time to read Peter Watts’s Blindsight. I’m only 15% in, but the book has already used an alien first contact situation to consider artificial intelligence, transhumanism, consciousness and Chinese Rooms, the failures of game theory, vampirism, and neurotypicality. I think it’s going to be a good one.

Early this week, I finally went to St Peter’s Church. The church is tucked under one corner of the Citigroup Center, a rectilinear, 59-storey office building occupying an entire city block on the corner of East 51st Street and Lexington Avenue. To accommodate the church’s location, the Citigroup Center’s massive support columns come down to the ground in the middle of each of the four faces of the building instead of at the corners. The year after construction was completed, an architecture graduate student discovered that this unusual column placement made the building vulnerable to strong winds. The vulnerability had been overlooked in the structural engineering process, so the already-occupied building had to be retrofitted stealthily. There’s a great long read in the New Yorker about it. But I also wanted to visit the Church for the modular reconfigurable furniture by Lella and Massimo Vignelli, and the chapel filled with assemblages by Louise Nevelson.

Nevelson wall pieces in the Chapel of the Good Shepherd (13 May, 2025).

See you next week,

VT