The lens comes first.
View full screen. Society is optimizing the wrong thing. For decades we've been taught to improve performance, productivity, communication, leadership,...
The Gap
Something happened. Then the mind added something. It happens so fast and automatically, we never notice the difference. I built Notice to experience that...
Fewer People, Seen More Clearly
For many years and like many others, my approach has been to make things and publish them — articles, interviews, images, a newsletter every week. That made...
The Thread Running Through It All
SEE DIFFERENT - A realization sixteen years in the making. In 2010 I sat down with an expert in process improvement. We met to talk about capability models,...
We think we're seeing reality...
Most people think they're seeing reality. But that's where the trouble begins. Before we react, decide, communicate, lead, or use AI, the mind has already...
AI Scales What You Bring to It
For the past year I’ve been noticing something I can’t unsee. AI doesn’t just generate content. It reflects something back about the person using it. I find...
The Decision Before the Reaction
Reactions begin before we realize we are reacting. Before you opened this email, an interpretation was already forming. Before you read AI's reply, you'd...
The Perception Miracle
Humanity has spent centuries trying to change the world externally while remaining largely unaware of the perceptual lens through which the world is being...
The Problem that Isn't There
Imagine you wake up one morning, and there is nothing to fix. It's not because everything is perfect, but because nothing is being labeled as a problem. In...
See the unseen first.
“Today's ethic? See the unseen.” That was the comment from John Bell on my recent post. John wrote a book called Do Less Better. Before that, he was CEO of...
Fifty-four Minutes
On April 6, four astronauts watched the moon eclipse the sun. For fifty-four minutes, the moon was between them and the sun. On Earth, totality lasts a few...
AI Didn’t Change the Game. It Exposed It.
AI doesn’t show us reality as it is. It shows us reality as we see it—at scale. That changes what matters. For decades, we’ve focused on improving what comes...
There Is No Chaos
We’re not struggling with chaos. We’re reacting to judgments we mistake for reality, and no amount of better leadership or AI can fix a problem that begins...
The Sublime Power of Synchronicity
View the image full screen. Over a period of 13 years, I published six articles in the Cutter journals. One focused on Agile and CMMI. Another on digital...
I thought that was a good sign.
You can't improve what you're not seeing For many years, I was doing what most of us do. Always trying to improve and do better. Always learning. Always...
The Moment Between Event and Experience
View this image full screen here. For many years I believed my work was about leadership. Like many people, I was trying to understand how we develop better...
The conversation everyone is having, and what it keeps missing.
View the image full screen. There has never been more leadership content than there is right now. Every day there are countless more new books, articles,...
What have you been naming it?
Think of the challenge that's been ruminating in your mind the most. The difficult person. The stalled initiative. The problem you keep addressing but never...
The Gap
This image came out of a conversation I had this week. It wasn’t with a client but with myself. I’ve been observing a pattern in how I meet new situations...
The Art of Seeing
We are trained to believe leadership is about vision, strategy, skills, and decisive action. Joseph Jaworski points somewhere else. Perception. Long before...