Writing on leadership, change, and the future of work.
Most futures writing tells you what’s coming. This writing asks what you’re already assuming before you’ve started looking.
The essays here are about leadership, trust, organizational change, and the practice of Everyday Futurism — not as a forecast, but as a discipline. How assumptions harden into policy before anyone names them as assumptions. How convergences form before anyone models them. How the most consequential decisions are often the ones no one recognized as decisions yet.
These are long-form pieces. Written when there’s something worth saying. Not on a schedule.
Assumption Audit · Policy Change · April 13, 2026
The $30 Million Assumption Nobody Checked
Every spring, schools send kids home based on a policy nobody thought to question. This is the story of what an unexamined assumption costs — in time, in stress, in a child's mental health, in a parent's employment — and what happens when someone finally checks the ground it's standing on.
One policy change. One corrected assumption. Roughly $30 million in prevented economic harm — and counting. A case study in upstream thinking, change management, and what it actually means to audit what you're taking for granted.
Witnessed Trust · Change · Everyday Futurism · April 8, 2026
Under the Rocks Are the Words
For ten years, I cancelled duplicate forms. The frontline concern was right the whole time. The response was a metric that converted "why does this work exist" into "why haven't you cleared your queue." That is what the gap between due diligence and interrogation looks like from inside it.
This essay traces why change management keeps failing — not because it's executed badly, but because helping a decision land and asking whether it should be reconsidered are structurally incompatible goals. And what the Assumption-Ground Audit does instead.
Trust Architecture · Witnessed Trust · April 3, 2026
The Rabbit Hole
I hid an egg on my website. Six depths of ideas about trust, signals, and what it means to notice something real when everything around you has been optimized to look real but isn't. The Strategic Linguist found it and named what it was doing without being briefed. Dr. Sam Illingworth discovered his own work inside it and thanked me publicly. Most people, even with the map, didn't go.
The essay traces what happened, the assumption it surfaced — that explaining your thinking is how people come to understand it — and why the people who go all the way down are exactly the ones you want in the room. Download the process guide to build your own.
Trust · Discernment · Everyday Futurism · April 1, 2026
Witnessed Trust — A Case Study: A PR Crisis, a Pop Star and a Camera Walk into a Stadium
In January 2025, a Coldplay kiss cam caught two Astronomer executives in four seconds of body language that eighty thousand people read simultaneously — without context, without commentary, without a single word of explanation. The celebrity crisis response that followed generated memes, shifted the conversation, and repaired nothing.
This essay traces what the kiss cam actually caught, why the Astronomer response failed as trust repair (distraction ≠ PR success, attention ≠ trust), and what the unequal distribution of accountability reveals about how witnessed trust forms — and fails — at scale.
Trust · Thought Leadership · Credibility · March 28, 2026
Who Gets to Be Trusted Now?
Trust is not fixed. It has moved from local and embodied, to institutional, to distributed — and distributed trust turned out to be partly manufactured. Peer ratings, affiliate loops, purchased followers, mutual endorsements: the system that was supposed to democratize credibility developed its own closed loops.
This essay traces the shift, names what's failing across the infrastructure at once, and offers a hypothesis about what comes next: witnessed trust — built not on ratings or credentials, but on the irreducibly particular. Specific. Accountable. Impossible to manufacture.
Methodology · Convergences · March 27, 2026
Not Just Another Futurist
The futures industry organized itself around the performance of certainty. What got lost is the harder work: not what's coming, but what your organization is already assuming about it — before the direction gets chosen, before the assumptions become policy, before the convergences arrive at the crossing point.
This essay traces the methodology — from a historiography classroom at Glendon College, York University, through Robin Winks and forensic reasoning, to the Assumption-Ground Audit and why convergences are the discipline that compounds.
Futurism · Leadership · Organizational Trust · March 19, 2026
Everyday Futurism: A Practice, Not a Prediction
In 2008, I had just returned from maternity leave. One-year-old, two-and-a-half-year-old, three-hour commute, still breastfeeding, seeing my kids an hour a day. In those first months back, a woman told me she’d quit her job to take a year off with her eighteen-year-old son. Not for a baby — for the decisions that actually change a life.
This essay traces the principle from a maternity leave conversation to a work-from-home pilot in 2012 to the moment a map expires in your body before you have the language to say so — and what all of it has to do with why organizational trust breaks the way it does now.
Maclean’s · September 2024
Why I Made a Midlife Career Switch
A first-person account of 17 years in wealth management — the commute, the clock-watching, the tug-of-war between a career that made sense on paper and a life that didn’t — and what the pandemic made undeniable. The origin story of Everyday Futurism, in print.
No cadence. No content calendar. When there’s something worth saying, it goes here first.
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Essays on leadership, trust, and the future of work — when there's something worth saying.
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