Bearings
Exploring how we get our bearings in a moving world
Some work begins with an answer. Other work begins with a question that will not leave you alone.
I have spent much of my working life thinking about how people find their way: through uncertainty, through changing conditions, through relationships and responsibilities that cannot be reduced to a map.
I am now becoming increasingly interested in what those questions might mean for the world ahead of us.
What capacities will people need in a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, accelerating technology and ecological uncertainty? What kinds of intelligence help us remain attentive to place, relationship, body, intuition, responsibility and the living world? And what might navigation teach us about becoming more fully human rather than simply more technologically capable?
These questions are beginning to gather around an emerging body of work I am calling Oceanic Intelligence.
Oceanic Intelligence
Oceanic Intelligence is a working name for an inquiry I am developing through writing, research, conversation and experience. Oceanic Intelligence asks what we might learn from ways of knowing shaped by movement, relationship, attentiveness and the need to orient within living systems.
It grows from my earlier work in Wayfinding Leadership, Indigenous leadership, stewardship and relational wellbeing, while also reaching into new territory.
I have begun to think of this work as a kind of love letter to the future — particularly to younger people who will live much of their lives alongside forms of artificial intelligence we are only beginning to understand.
I am interested in what it will mean for them to retain confidence in human capacities that cannot simply be outsourced: attention, discernment, sensory awareness, relationship, imagination, ethical judgement, stillness and the ability to read the world around them.
The work is still taking form. Bearings is where I will share the questions, observations and writing emerging along the way.