The Throughline Is the Future
I named my LinkedIn newsletter The Throughline Project before I knew what the throughline was.
That's the most honest thing I can tell you about how I work. The name arrived before the argument. The pattern was visible before I had language for it. I was already standing on ground I hadn't surveyed yet.
That's also the story of everything that followed.
In 2012 I ran a workplace flexibility pilot at a major financial institution. I wasn't trying to predict the future of work. I wanted to be home with my kids. I made a small decision for a personal reason, paid attention to what it revealed, and documented what I found.
A decade later, hybrid work became the most contested organizational question of our time. I had already lived the answer — not because I was prescient, but because I was honest about what a small decision was showing me before it had a name or a mandate or a McKinsey report attached to it.
I didn't know I was building anything. I was just paying attention.
That's how the future actually works. Not in the big strategic commitments. In the small decisions that are already accumulating toward something before anyone knows what it is. The pilot wasn't a prediction. It was a small decision that became evidence. Evidence I had documented. Evidence that was already in the record when the world caught up.
In 2022 I took an AI assessment tool called Plum.
It told me I needed transactional work and external structure to thrive. I'm self-employed by design, by history, and by conviction. The assessment was wrong in a way that would have had professional consequences if anyone in a position to make decisions about me had taken it seriously.
I tried to correct it. There was no mechanism.
The tool wasn't built for the person being assessed to push back — because that person was never the customer. The customer was the organization buying the tool. I was the data. My profile existed to help an employer decide whether I was worth hiring. Whether it was accurate was a secondary concern, if it was a concern at all.
I reached out to the CEO. She initially agreed to come on my podcast. Then she went quiet.
Ghosting is a trust problem. Not because it's rude. Because silence authors a story you didn't write and can't correct. Nature abhors a vacuum. So does the algorithm. So does the audience. The gap doesn't wait — it fills with whatever is most available, most indexed, most plausible given what's already in the record. She didn't author that filling. The vacuum did.
A few months later we were both at Elevate Tech Fest in Toronto. She presented with a Vice President from Scotiabank — her actual buyer, the organizational decision-maker her tool was built to serve. I presented on a panel about making work love you back — the people her tool was assessing.
Same stage. She walked past me.
I already knew what I knew by then. Scotiabank had eliminated resumes for student hiring and replaced them with a Plum profile. The tool that got me wrong, that had no mechanism for me to contest its conclusions, had become the sole entry point for young people trying to get their first professional job at one of Canada's largest banks.
The door had no handle on the inside. And they had removed the other door entirely.
Around the same time, Sweta Regmi was writing about what AI-powered video interviews were doing to immigrants and non-native English speakers. The tools were measuring fluency, cadence, eye contact, facial expression — proxies that had nothing to do with the work and everything to do with performing a particular version of professional that the system had decided was correct.
She tried to get media attention. She tried to get government attention. Nobody picked up the story.
I understood how it connected to what I had experienced with Plum. Different tool, different population, same structural problem: a system making high-stakes inferences about people, with no mechanism for those people to contest the inference, because they were never the intended audience for the tool. They were the product.
I invited Sweta onto my podcast. I introduced her to Hilke Schellmann, a journalist and researcher whose book The Algorithm documents what happens when these systems scale — including the case of a job applicant who used GDPR rights to challenge Bloomberg's use of Plum's assessment, one of the first documented instances of someone getting access to the data behind their own rejection.
I asked her directly. Her answer: "If the person who builds the system doesn't know what the tool infers, the companies don't know it, job seekers are never going to find out."
The transparency problem isn't a bug. It's the architecture.
I was following a thread. I didn't know yet what it was building toward.
Then I interviewed Cher Jones.
Cher works in personal branding — specifically in helping professionals understand and articulate who they are so that the people making decisions about them have accurate signal to work with. It's careful, specific work about the gap between who you are and how you're being read.
Sitting with that conversation, I understood something I hadn't fully named yet.
The problem wasn't just that AI assessment tools were making wrong inferences. The problem was structural: these tools sit in the space between you and the decision-maker. They make claims about your professional identity — your fit, your capacity, your potential — and they do it invisibly, before you're in the room, using criteria you didn't agree to and can't examine. Personal branding assumes you have access to that conversation. These tools remove you from it.
How do you present a coherent professional presence when the inference layer is invisible, uncontestable, and sitting between you and the people making decisions about your career?
That's the question Plum opened in 2022. Sweta was asking it from a different angle. Hilke had documented it in court records. Cher was building tools for a world that was about to need them badly.
Each of them was working the same problem from a different position in the room. None of them had the others in their line of sight. I did.
I was the throughline.
I didn't know any of this was accumulating into a methodology.
I didn't name it until later. But the work was already running — the same forensic instinct that makes a historian ask what assumptions were operating before the direction was chosen, turned forward instead of back. Same discipline. Opposite direction. Applied to the moment before the commitment, not after.
That's the Assumption-Ground Audit. Not a framework I constructed in response to client demand. A practice built from seventeen years inside major financial institutions, from the experience of being assessed by systems I couldn't contest, and from years of paying attention to what small decisions were revealing before anyone knew they mattered.
Authorship of the Narrative Is Up for Debate
You aren't the sole author of your story. You never were.
There isn't just one story being written about you. There are multiples — running simultaneously, without your input, by authors with different motivations, on timelines you don't control. The CEO who went silent authored part of mine. The VP from Scotiabank on that stage authored part of it. The system that got me wrong, with no mechanism for me to contest what it concluded, authored part of it. Sweta's writing authored part of it before we ever spoke. This article is authoring part of it now.
None of them coordinated. None of them asked permission. All of them are contributing to the record.
This is what the inference layer actually means. Not one system making one wrong assessment. Multiple authors, multiple stories, multiple inferences — and the audience asking not just what is true, but what seems coherent. What hangs together. What has enough internal consistency that confidence can do the rest.
That's the standard being applied to you right now. Not truth. Plausibility. Coherence.
And coherence is built before the inference arrives. It's the record you accumulate when nobody is watching, the threads you pull before they become obvious, the small decisions you make honestly and document publicly before anyone knows they matter. A coherent record shapes what fills the vacuum when silence happens — and silence always happens. The question is whether your existing ground is legible enough to be the dominant voice in what gets written into the gap.
The organizations and leaders who understand this aren't trying harder to control the narrative. They're building ground coherent enough that the multiple stories being written about them have to compete with what's already in the record.
I have a role model for this. He didn't work in organizational consulting.
George Michael spent the early part of his career inside an image the industry built for him. The leather jacket. The Wham! years. The carefully constructed version of a person that the machinery of the music business decided was commercially viable. He knew it wasn't fully true. He wrote songs that implied he was straight because the world he was operating in required it. He maintained the inference because the cost of contesting it was too high.
And then he burned the jacket. Walked away from the image. Made the music that was actually his — quieter, stranger, more exposed, more true. Not because it was strategic. Because the gap between the inference and the ground had become unsustainable.
When the disclosure he hadn't chosen came — the arrest, the exposure, the forced removal of the last remaining inference — he didn't apologize for who he was. He made it part of the work. He kept building.
He built some of the inference himself. The closet wasn't only imposed — it was also maintained, because the world required it and the cost of truth was real. The question this opens isn't just: what did the system get wrong? It's also: what have you been performing because the context required it? And what would it cost to let the actual work speak?
His estate's homepage lists who he was. All of it. In full.
Icon. Lover. Legend. Friend. Fundraiser. Campaigner. Philanthropist. Soul Singer. Man. Gay Man. Son of an Immigrant. Activist. Addict. Repeat Offender. Convict. Recluse. Depressive.
Musician last.
Not because it mattered least. Because everything else was also true and they refused to let any of it be ranked into a redemption arc or tidied into a manageable narrative. The full person, claimed completely, in the order that makes you stop and read it twice.
His estate continues this.
That list is the ownership of flaws made into a design decision. An absolute refusal to shrink before a public that demanded compliance. The courage wasn't in becoming better. It was in remaining fully himself — flaws, defiance, complexity and all — and refusing to let any of it be the reason to stop.
He didn't wait for the crisis to know his list. He lived it in public before the arrest forced the question. That's the difference between coherence as a reactive strategy and coherence as a practice.
George Michael figured this out before AI made it urgent for everyone. Before the inference layer had a name. He just knew that the only durable ground is the one you actually stand on — and that you'd better document it, in public, before someone else does it for you.
The strategy predates the technology. The technology just made it necessary for everyone.
Write your own list.
Not the version you'd put on a LinkedIn profile. Not the personal brand you've been curating. The full list. The labels that were imposed and the ones you chose. The ones you've been performing and the ones you've been hiding. The ones that embarrass you and the ones that explain everything.
Write it in full colour. Including the parts that are uncomfortable.
You don't have to show it to anyone. The audit is yours. What you do with it afterward — what you choose to make part of the record, what you choose to keep — that's entirely your call.
But you need to know what's on it. Before the vacuum fills without you. Before the inference hardens into someone else's version of your ground. Before the multiple stories being written about you have no coherent record to compete with.
The courage isn't in the showing. It's in the knowing.
This is how you build coherence before you need it. This is how the future gets made — not in the big strategic commitments, but in the honest accounting of what you're actually standing on, done quietly, before anyone is watching, before the stakes have arrived.
The list is the practice. Start there.
And if you are an organization:
What words would your employees choose for your labels? Your customers? Your competitors? Journalists? Your detractors, your critics?
Those lists already exist. They're being written right now, in exit interviews and Glassdoor reviews and analyst reports and conversations you're not in. In the rooms where your reputation lives without you. By systems indexing everything you've published and everything others have published about you, on a timeline you don't control.
You aren't the sole author of your organization's story either.
The question isn't whether the list is being made. It's whether you know what's on it before it becomes the record that defines you — before the inference hardens, before the direction is chosen, before the cost of looking becomes higher than the cost of not knowing.
What seems true about your organization right now? What merely seems plausible? And who is deciding the difference — you, or the vacuum you left?
Do the work before the dots connect into a path you don't want to walk.