Strategy is the management of constraints to enable coherent action in a desired direction - amidst a plethora of inescapable tensions such as short vs. long, exploitation vs. exploration, control vs. autonomy, and so forth.

Complexity theory tells us that planning is arguably less important than understanding that plans fail all the time, to work with that knowledge, and manage the potential for change (a plan in and of itself) because life doesn’t work to pre-conceived ideals.

Then, last but not at all least, there’s the fiscally disastrous (and absurdly named) “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which throughout the week slowly worked its way through the constipated bowels of Congress like a toxic turd destined to be left in the center of the sidewalk of American democracy.

Instead, allow multiple visions to coexist and use them all together to prioritise action today that will make them all likelier and/or clearer.

Plans ultimately form the core of business organizations; they corral and structure, channel thought and action into a controllable field. But it's important to understand that plans do and will fail. The future is unknown and things change; it is imperative to understand and plan for it.

The leader who claims to embody “the truth” becomes attractive not only ideologically but structurally. Certainty simplifies, lowers the cognitive costs of decision, and offers security in the face of fragility. Authoritarianism is not only a political pathology; it is an epistemic adaptation to vulnerability.

Sustainable success comes from small, parallel, safe-to-fail experiments and scaling only proven responses, rather than betting big on ambitious but rigid plans.

n this landscape, freedom is not ornamental. It is structural. The situational freedom of agents becomes the only viable means of generating appropriate responses in context. No algorithm, no universal law, no central planner can anticipate every emergent contingency. The task of navigating complexity falls to distributed agents, each capable of... See more

We live in complexity: systems that are entangled, adaptive, and emergent. Impacts are non-linear. Consequences are unpredictable. Pathways cannot be precomputed. Futures unfold through feedback and interaction, not through equilibrium.