River crossing (wk 9/2026)
Here and there; navigation, many games; slop, possums, agency, immaturity.
Hello friends,
Seven weeks since the last time I wrote, during which I went into the field in Guangzhou, Bangkok, and Okinawa before coming to France to run a strategy retreat for a client. Now, I’m hiding under a rock and finally getting around to backburnered stuff.
River crossing
How embarrassing is it to be unable to find my own work on my own website?
I’ve spent over three years writing about not-knowing. Over fifty essays: some are core theory, working through what not-knowing actually is and why it isn’t risk. Others summarise group discussions of those theory pieces. Others apply the new thinking to analysing situations, or use it as a lens for thinking about building new things. When I started writing a chapter outline for a book proposal, I discovered I couldn’t find most of it easily. What I had was a schema from the beginning of the project, when I was still hunting for a path through the material.
I was already in the middle of pulling together a proper repository and doing some meta-analysis of how these ideas had developed over time when a friend messaged me. Finally fed up with being unable to figure out the reading order of the not-knowing material, he’d done me the compliment of scraping my site and making an epub of it himself.
That was the push I needed, at the right time. So I spent a surprisingly large number of hours sitting down to rethink how I’d navigate readers through this series of essays. The result is a properly annotated contents page, organised by what the essays actually do rather than by when they were written, available here.
This is only a waypoint. Writing a body of theory is like crossing a river by laying stones: each stone placed from where you’re currently standing, without being able to see the whole path ahead. The annotated contents is a retrospective map of that crossing as it happened: motivations first, then conceptual problems that had to be cleared away, then the theory itself, then provisional practical tools for working with different kinds of not-knowing.
The book is the next step. The core of the theory is intact: four structurally distinct types of not-knowing, and the thinking about how to work with them. What has shifted is the wrapper around the core: how to frame why it matters, how to explain where the constructs come from, how to address the problems people actually run into when trying to understand and use them. I’m working that out now.
While I was doing all this, thinking clearly about not-knowing became much more important. Slowly at first, then, more recently, very quickly.
Ten forecasts for a world of many games
In many domains that touch daily life — in geopolitics, media, culture, the organisation of work, how economies run, what business models make sense — the rules of the game are changing opaquely and unpredictably.
Early last year, I joined 10F, a global consortium of futures and futures-adjacent people who were seeing similar signals. We started work on an open-source project to develop forecasts to make sense of these changes for people and organisations that work across borders. After months of planning, we hosted a short, intense meeting in Singapore last September to develop the base material, then finished the forecasts in November.
They were under embargo until February 13 because of our funder agreement, but they’re all available now. These forecasts aren’t predictions of where the future is going. They are descriptions of where we see things already happening and how those might play out in the near future.
The core insight across all ten forecasts: for a long time there was a consensus belief that everyone worldwide was trying to play the same game. That belief — or illusion — began to fall apart in the last couple of years. This year, it fell apart completely. We can no longer pretend that many games aren’t in play at the same time. The rules of each game don’t always align with others. They may not even be legible or comprehensible to players of other games. But we’re still expected to play by the rules.
There’s precedent for this kind of sensemaking failure. Scott Boorman’s The Protracted Game reads the US-Vietnam war in this way. The Americans were playing chess (direct confrontation, attrition, force ratios) while the Viet Cong were playing weiqi (indirect encirclement, accumulation, territorial ratios). The two games have different rules but, more importantly, are built around different win conditions, different spatial logics, different relationships between forces and territory. The US lost because it couldn’t see the game it wasn’t playing.
The ten forecasts cover domains ranging from climate and migration to technology sovereignty. They provide a new way to make sense of a world that is fragmenting much faster than we want it to.
In the first few weeks of 2026, while the forecasts were still under embargo, the 10F team watched many things we’d written came true sooner than we’d expected. There is now not-knowing in abundance, and significant disruption. Whether this fragmentation creates opportunity depends entirely on how clearly you can see what is actually happening.
Right now, that is genuinely not obvious — and the tools for seeing clearly are still being built.
Writing
An annotated contents page for the not-knowing essays. The essays on not-knowing: motivations first, then conceptual problems that had to be cleared away, then the theory itself, then provisional practical tools for working with different kinds of not-knowing. It’s a waypoint, not a finished product — but if you’ve been meaning to get into this material and didn’t know where to start, this is the entrance.
10F Consortium forecasts. Ten open-source forecasts to help people and organisations that work across borders make sense of the rapidly changing world order. The through-line: the world has shifted from one game with shared rules to many games with different rules, win conditions, and logics that may not be legible across them.
F09 From dollar dominance to money unbundled. How the dollar-dominated global financial system is unbundling into an increasingly diverse and weird range of Money Things. For those operating across borders, especially if some of those borders are outside the US/EU system, this unbundling creates both pitfalls and opportunities worth understanding carefully.
Elsewhere
See you soon,
VT
