Writing
Writing
Current work is published on Substack and it is free to read — essays on leadership and complexity, and some of the deeper diagnoses Soundings has produced. Earlier pieces live here and on Medium.
Current
On Substack
Free to read. No subscription required.
The Card You Play Once
From a Soundings diagnosis. Reading an adversary’s peace plan with the tools of complexity science. — July 2026
The Edge You Didn’t Draw
From a Soundings diagnosis. A complex system never ends where your map does. Why the people viewing the most‑watched negotiation of the year may be misreading it. — June 2026
The Reckoning
From a Soundings diagnosis. A grid built for one world meets a different one. — May 2026
The Transformer
From a Soundings diagnosis. The AI transition five years out, read from the signals available now. — May 2026
The Map That Sees Itself
From a Soundings diagnosis. Sixty days in. — April 2026
The Leader Is Not the Engine
On complexity-informed leadership. What adaptive leadership gets right, what it misses, and what four hundred million years of evolution can teach us about the rest. — March 2026
The Map That Wasn’t
From a Soundings diagnosis. How mechanistic doctrine entered an adaptive war — and what it could not see. — March 2026
Earlier
On this site
Why Leadership Development Fails in Complex Environments
What goes wrong when a linear model of development is applied to a nonlinear system.
Leadership as a Process, Not a Position
Leadership as something a group does, distributed and relational, rather than something a person holds.
Teams as Complex Adaptive Systems
How high‑performing teams emerge from culture, trust and feedback rather than from selection alone.
Resilience Beyond Grit
Physiology, psychology and relationships as one collective capacity to absorb load and return.
Decision‑Making Under Uncertainty
Judgment and bias when the information is incomplete and the clock is running.
On Medium
Older work, mostly published with The Change Leaders.
The book
Heard is due in 2027. It is about what it takes to build an organization in which the thing nobody wants to say gets said early enough to matter — and what it costs a leader to make that true.