How did the universe originate?

Are quantum fields conscious?

What does it mean to be human?

What does it mean to be human in the age of AI?

Where is our current political situation taking us?

Where should we focus our attention in an age of technofeudalism1?

Everyone likely has different answers to these questions. Is any of us unequivocally right?

Earlier this week I hosted an online class with students I work with as part of the MIT xPRO Post Graduate Certificate in Technology Leadership and Innovation course.

One student asked me: How do we identify ‘unknown unknowns’ when making decisions, to mitigate unwanted outcomes?

Feeling as though I should have answers, I suggested a couple ideas. We can build argument diagrams to test assumptions and surface unstated premises, or assemble a design structure matrix to gain a systems’ understanding of the sensitivity and connectivity of components within a product, process, or organization to predict emergency emergence. There are many tools or frameworks we could employ—sure.

But, as I’ve reflected since our class, there are sometimes questions we don’t and can’t know the answer to. We might research and compile data and run predictive models. Yet the more we learn, the more new questions form.

If we lust after enlightenment, after the Answer, we might be practicing a wrong attitude. The process of questioning and building our capacity to be with uncertainty might prove at least as valuable as any answers we discover along the way.

I’ve noticed at least two issues emerge when groups are facing uncertainty. One, how the person with the most power in the room can become impatient and force their idea. Two, groups remain endlessly mired in conversation, resistant to prototyping an idea because they don’t believe they know everything they need to know before getting started.

With regard to impatience leading to premature convergence, I liken it to an experience that can be had during breathwork. Yoga practitioner, Dylan Werner, says when we hold our breath for an extended time, we are tempted to break our posture early and inhale because we feel we do not have enough oxygen. When, in truth, we have plenty of oxygen2. What we are experiencing while holding our breath is a buildup of CO₂ in our bloodstream. If we are seeking to lengthen our breath holds, we are really creating more CO₂ tolerance.

Experiencing uncertainty might similarly feel as if we’re holding our breath and CO₂ is accumulating in our bloodstream. Physically, whenever we do not know, our nervous system does tend to produce stress hormones until our brain detects predictability3. I wonder, then: How much capacity can we create to tolerate uncertainty? What if we waited longer than we wanted for answers, to see what might really want to happen?

Lately, as part of my morning rituals, I’ve been speaking aloud various ‘I AM’ statements to frame myself to live more abundantly while not knowing. One of them is:

I am being. I am like a fisherman. Daily, I cast my line into the universe. I tune my antennae to the energetic material around and within me. I notice and observe, and am waiting longer than I want, to see what wants to come back.

Conversely, and to deal with the issue of resistance to trying out an idea, I have an I AM statement that forms a paradox with the previous one.

I am doing. I am like an artist. I prototype and experiment with the raw, colorful, energetic materials of the universe. I am designing in short stages. Living from nudge to nudge, I am bringing all of myself to make the finest work I can.

Whenever teams get stuck in muddy deliberation, I like to remind them, “You can’t know everything before you start.” If we hold an idea lightly enough, we can always create a low-resolution prototype, test it, make changes, or explore a different idea if the learnings coming back are coalescing in a more invigorating direction.

If we commit to being and doing while acknowledging we really “don’t know,” we train our muscles to embrace ambiguity. We gradually come alive, and so much else becomes possible.

Johnnie and I have updated our website to include ‘design coaching’ and our ‘annual group workshop’. You can take a closer look at our new offerings here. If you wish to becoming a ‘founding practitioner’ of unhurried design, you can select that option in your subscription to our Substack. You’ll be eligible to receive design coaching each year until you decide you don’t want it.

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A few weeks ago I came to Pennsylvania to visit some family in my childhood hometown of Bedford.

While there I went out for a run through a local neighborhood, and along the way bumped into a family member I hadn't seen in a while.

Within minutes he attempted to convince me the earth is flat, elites are planning a large-scale purge of the lower and middle classes, 'evidenced' by mass burial sites that have been dug outside many major cities in America, and somehow that all has to do with the Book of Enoch. His conclusion was I needed to vote for a certain political candidate as a result.

Regardless of your political leanings, I am reminded that perhaps nothing is of more importance in our world right now than learning to cultivate a non-anxious, grounded presence.

This family member of mine has not only become extremely paranoid but incredibly rigid—completely disinterested in hearing any views that even slightly contradict his own.

Lately Johnnie and I have been wondering about the differences between rigidity and spinefulness and their implications.

We, along with other interested participants, have been exploring questions like these as part of our Unhurried Practice Group.

Our next conversation will center around the theme of, you guessed it, spinefulness, and take place on November 14th at 12.00 EST (17.00 GMT) over Zoom.

If you would like to join, tickets are available for $10 and can be purchased here.

We are made of muscles. We are made of moods.

Every human has a physical, assertive, adult self, where we do our decision-making and initiative-taking. We wear this self like a lion.

Each of us also has a childlike, affective self. Where we are emotional, intimate, and vulnerable. Some of us tend to hide this self, but it is there like a lamb.

Depending on the context we find ourselves in, we might choose to align with one self more than the other. In society, assertion has often been presented as masculine and affection as feminine, but I believe this is a sad splitting of who humans are meant to be.

As the late Catholic priest Henri Nouwen once observed, “When you need only your lion, you will find yourself overextended and exhausted. When you take notice only of your lamb, you will easily become a victim of your need for other people’s attention.” 

To be split between our lion and lamb selves is to become either domineering or a doormat. Neither is the final destination of a human being. Neither brings the fountain of life to self or others.

But the human that is finally becoming mature is one that neglects neither lion nor lamb but allows those selves to “freely and fearlessly lie down together” (Nouwen). This is, for those of you who had a Christian upbringing, perhaps calling to mind a picture of heaven. 

Regardless of our beliefs and backgrounds, this imagery can be useful to consider in the here-and-now challenges we face on earth. The lion and the lamb lying down together ought not be understood as an esoteric place where there is no flaw, rather a very real and courageous vision where we are experiencing more integration across the whole spectrum of human life - becoming child and adult, vulnerable and assertive, feminine and masculine, following and leading, held and the one doing the holding.

Or put another way, a mature human being.

Johnnie and I have been discussing what kind of traits leaders are in need of as our world spins increasingly into more noise and profound uncertainty. We think what’s needed is more heartfelt connection, skillful giving of attention, and intelligence; or becoming more lion and lamb. This summer we’re thinking of running a course and coaching group on this topic and calling it, ‘Leading Unhurriedly’. If this sounds interesting to you, reply to this email expressing your interest and we can arrange a call to chat more.

Trees might not be sentient, but certainly behave as if they are.

While evolutionary theory has taught us that creatures are pitted against one another in a fight for survival, trees are radically devoted to cooperation.

Peter Wohlleben, a German forester who wrote The Hidden Life of Trees, provides insight into the quality of decision-making amongst trees, and their apparent personalities.

“Their root tips have highly sensitive brain-like structures that can distinguish whether the root that it encounters in the soil is its own root, the root of another species, or the roots of its own species. If it encounters its own kind…we have measured with radioactive-marked sugar molecules that there is a flow from healthy trees to sick trees so that they will have an equal measure of food and energy available.”

Instead of allowing the weaker among their species to die, trees go to extreme lengths to preserve the life of one of their own. Wohlleben continues:

“This one beech tree was cut four to 500 years ago by a charcoal maker, but the stump is still alive - we found green chlorophyll under the thick bark. The tree has no leaves to create sugars, so the only explanation is that it has been supported by neighboring trees for more than four centuries.”

Wohlleben goes on to share that trees are excellent communicators. Whenever one tree is attacked by insects, foresters have observed electrical signals passing through the bark, into the roots, and down into fungi networks in the soil that alert surrounding trees of danger.

Trees seemingly function within a system where ‘everything is connected’. A mycorrhizal network is one such example, where plants transfer water, nitrogen, and carbon in a hidden ‘woodwide web’, which was termed so by Suzanne Simard, a scientist who teaches forestry at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

Laura James is an engineering leader involved with using satellite vegetation intelligence to analyze trees and prevent wildfires and power outages. She builds on Simard’s and Wohlleben’s idea that trees are actively exchanging information to make decisions.  

“An Aspen may not be just one tree: a whole forest of Aspens can be connected underground as one organism. The largest organism on earth is Pando Populus, an interconnected Aspen grove. Each individual tree is not itself, it’s a network.”  

James further suggests that trees gather data, and make short- and long-term strategic decisions together.  

“Trees are agile enough to ask, When do the leaves open? Patterns of rain and sun and wind and pests - all of that is taken into account and informs the decision of when to open the leaves. Long-term, a tree might be 'flagging', with branches avoiding growing on the upwind side of a heavy prevailing wind direction, which can occur over hundreds of years.”

Could trees be capable of reflection, of making decisions according to what they sense?

Wohlleben observes how trees that suffer drought might consume less water the following spring to have more available in the summer months.

“A tree can learn…it can remember a drought its whole life and act on that memory by being more cautious of its water usage.”

In certain places in the world because of more CO2 in the air, trees are growing faster than they used to. But Wohlleben says that is not a good thing.

“Faster growth makes trees less healthy and more susceptible to illnesses. The wood is also of lower quality, so the price we get for it is going down. The cells of these fast growing trees actually become bigger and more susceptible to fungi. A little wound can open them to rot, which kills them.”

How often in our organizations do we make decisions to rapidly accelerate growth, to ramp up the speed of execution, only to scale back because of an overlooked ‘little wound’ that has opened us up to rot?

And what if we humans are interconnected and interdependent, not merely individuals whose decisions have no bearing on the other. What if we are one sprawling, complex, infinitely connective organism?

What might happen if you choose to design a lighter life?

Nearly 100 years ago, Richard Gregg, observing a consumeristic West littered with social anxiety, said:

"The greatest characters, those who have influenced the largest numbers of people for the longest time, have been people with extremely few possessions.

"Buddha, Jesus, Moses, Mohammed, Kagawa, Socrates, St. Francis, Confucius."

According to Gregg, they leaned into 'voluntary simplicity'.

"Voluntary simplicity involves both inner and outer condition. It means singleness of purpose, sincerity and honesty within, as well as avoidance of exterior clutter, of many possessions irrelevant to the chief purpose of life."

What if living heavy is an indication that one has a confused identity?

In our modern world, we tend to lead heavier lives than the aforementioned string of influencers.

If we were to imagine a successful person in the 21st century for a moment, we might picture them in a large house with seasonal properties elsewhere, driving a fancy car or two, wearing a shiny corporate title, having authored a few books, with a huge social media following, and sewn a healthy family lineage to ensure their prosperity lasts for generations.

Yet the ancient characters Gregg identified lived by an entirely different set of principles that informed their legacy.

As Western progress has accelerated, perhaps our understanding of who we are has deteriorated alongside it.

“When ordinary people do not know who they are, they get anxious,” Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan once said.

I believe we have ‘solved’ for that anxiety by purchasing from the capitalistic ‘heavy life’ proffered to us, with diminishing returns.

William James, the 19th century philosopher and first person to offer a psychology course in the United States, once coined the phrase ‘Americanitis’ to refer to a neurotic disease that resulted from the quantity and speed of change.

David Schuster, an associate professor of history at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, argues that Westerners have accepted this widespread neurosis as a side effect of progress.

Julie Beck, senior editor at The Atlantic, outlined possible symptoms of Americanitis as “headaches, muscle pain, weight loss, irritability, anxiety, impotence, depression, a lack of ambition, and both insomnia and lethargy.”

In short, heaviness.

And yet the barrage of content and advertisements to purchase ‘that something new’ remain constant.

The promise that a heavy life can still save us could not be highlighted more than in Elon Musk’s rebranding of Twitter to X, with plans to make it “the everything app…the future state of unlimited interactivity…a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities.”

Westerners still cling to the promise of the heavy life in the naïve hope that “while the world may change, our ability to continue pursuing our personal desires, plans, and patterns will not be affected,” according to Mark Sayers, systems thinker and cultural writer.

We can maintain our affluent individualistic identity.

But what if designing a lighter life is the only way to recover who we really are?

Over the last year, I’ve been exploring the notion of non-anxious presence with several people and reading what various thinkers throughout human history have to say about related ideas.

One input came from a recent conversation with my friend Wes.

He shared he finds his foundation, his sense of presence, in surrounding himself with genuine people, people who are willing to be honest with themselves in a pursuit of meaning.

This reminded me of the late priest and writer Henri Nouwen, who suggested that our community is what holds us, likened to a rope tethered around our waist, keeping us connected to a safe space no matter where we go, so that we can meet high-pressure situations with a differentiated presence. Our community might serve to tug the rope whenever needed.

As we continued to talk, Wes then shared about a recent split in his friend group. People he counted as dear decided to move on for their own reasons.

Even a genuine community is temporary.

What if becoming a non-anxious presence has something to do with not overly attaching or fixating one’s identity to relationships with people?

People come and go, which begs the question, how will we release them?

And who will we be after we release them?

Questions like these kept the philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche up at night.

After five of his six siblings passed away before he turned twenty-five, Kierkegaard was riddled with a crippling anxiety. “Angst,” he called it. Not an anxiety disorder, but an underpinning condition which he believed plagued all of humanity.

“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom,” he wrote.

However, Kierkegaard sought to make sense of and use anxiety. He did not believe it was a bad thing, rather a necessary part of life.

He suggested that our response to anxiety might make the difference between a life of freedom and a life of despair.

To respond well, Kierkegaard proposed a human must pursue what he called “passion.”

When Nietzsche was but a boy, his father was diagnosed with a terminal brain disease and died at the young age of thirty-five. The following year, Nietzsche’s brother also died.

Nietzsche then endured a mostly serious and lonely childhood.

As he lived out his days often receiving medical treatment, he found a kind of freedom in thinking and writing. In time, he suggested that what humans really needed was to pursue a growth cycle of self-dissatisfaction, self-improvement, and self-re-discovery.

For Nietzsche, this process transmuted “the suffering of life into something worthwhile and personally redeemable; a sort of alchemy of the spirit.”

More recently, the pallative nurse and Australian writer Bronnie Ware reflected upon her experiences consoling those on their deathbeds, and wrote, “Loneliness isn’t a lack of people. It is a lack of understanding and acceptance.”

Sir Arthur C. Clarke, in his groundbreaking novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, penned the words, “There are two possibilities: Either we are all alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”

Here is a third: We are not alone, yet we feel loneliness.

How we learn to hold ourselves will make all the difference.

Since the invention of the telegraph in 1855 - the ‘Victorian Internet’ - as British journalist Tom Standage would label it more than a century later - humans have been suffering from a contagious social anxiety.

In its infancy, optimists imagined that the Victorian Internet, and later the World Wide Web, would bring peace and prosperity because of the infinitude of ways it might connect humans and their growing knowledge.

And while constant connection has certainly enabled us to do a lot of good, the late rabbi and family therapist Edwin Friedman observed it spread a troubling condition throughout society.

Friedman’s work with families and organizations in NYC and then Washington, DC between the 1950s-90s led him to theorize neurosis had become so ubiquitous throughout America that it was perceived as normal behavior.

Today, as the futurist David Zach puts it, Westerners have developed a series of maladaptive coping mechanisms that are connected to a state of ‘hyperliving’, where we “skim along the surface of life.”

I suggest this skimming might lead us to bounce between a polarity of disengagement on one end (ex. drug/alcohol use) and rigidity (ex. fundamentalism) on the other.

Friedman was suspicious of the quick fixes and demand for instant results we resort to as leaders for the complex challenges we face. 

Instead, he argued that a ‘non-anxious presence’ was needed to affect sustainable change.

This interior condition was about more than a feeling, it was an approach that put people first.

I might add on that I have found non-anxious presence to not be about the absence of anxiety or fear or unpleasantness, rather how we hold those emotions.

In Friedman’s practice with families, he would identify the person in the group who already exhibited non-anxious presence and worked with them to spread their lack of anxiety throughout the family structure. 

Interestingly (perhaps not surprisingly), he found it was children who showed a greater potential for non-anxious presence than their parents. 

The families would make real progress, coming to him fewer and fewer times. After ten years or so, some families would return, as the child who Friedman had trained would grow up and move out of the home. 

Friedman would then identify someone else to function as a non-anxious presence in the group.

Mark Sayers, writer and researcher on Western philosophy and religion, draws comparisons between non-anxious presence and social change throughout human history. 

A single individual practicing non-anxious presence (ex. Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, the Apostle Paul) might become a socially contagious ‘cell for renewal’ and their very interior condition then spreads into their communities and sparks group presence or ‘revival’.

What implications might this have for our own lives and work?

What if the hardest work we can sometimes do might be counted as a ‘waste of time’ or even ‘lazy’ by our fast-paced society - work that invites us to dip beneath the surface and sit with our thoughts, analyze our feelings and sensations, and notice the stories we believe about ourselves and others?

Such emotional work is difficult, and while we cannot predict the impact of our efforts, history tells us that practicing a non-anxious presence can lead to meaningful change for ourselves first, and then others.

I packed my life into four bags.

And moved to Spain.

For a few months.

Who knows what comes next after that.

I am working remotely from here while Johnnie and I invite people to our Unhurried Design project.

Taking in the sights and sounds and culture from my apartment in Arenas de San Pedro.

Truly this is an unhurried place.

I am still waiting for my WiFi to get hooked up.

The technician cannot be bothered.

In the meantime, I’ll use my personal hotspot from my phone.

And spend more time offline.

The other day I bought a backpack and hiking boots.

Trekked up the side of a steep green mountain.

Sat upon a huge rock overlooking a river.

Contemplated while it flowed into a dark valley.

A few days later, I went for another hike.

Got lost in a forest on the way back. Couldn’t find the path I had taken as dusk fell.

Sometimes life can feel less like a rock, and more like rushing water, with its sudden turns and surging currents into the unknown.

Sometimes life can feel like a murky forest, where the paths around us run out.

What if when beset with such uncertainty, we lean in, instead?

Rather than despairing, or vilifying, or resorting to what’s familiar (the path of least resistance)?

Perhaps there’s some richness amidst what feels like darkness.

Lately I find myself drawn to a practice the Romantic poet John Keats referred to as ‘negative capability’ - where we no longer irritably reach after fact or reason.

Instead, learn to let go.

Swim with the current.

Dance with its unexpected turns.

And then, as we steep into forests that seem cloaked in darkness, slowly we find ourselves.

Being framed.

As a portrait of light.

The other day my friend Johnnie Moore and I were writing some copy in a Google Doc for our new Unhurried Design course Designing with Presence that we are building.

Across the screen he was whipping up words in a flurry.

I hardly typed a sentence before he had two full paragraphs.

Johnnie chimed in, “You can type, too, bruh!” in his cheeky attempt at an American accent.

“I’m…thinking!” I groused.

This presented me with an opportunity to notice how I was approaching our conversation: as a structuralist, or an improvisor.

It’s helpful to realize I am never entirely one or the other. Same goes for you.

Taking this example, I invite you to imagine the roles of structuralist and improvisor existing on a continuum.

Sometimes, like Johnnie on our call, rehearsing what you have to say on camera or live in front of others is where your genius will shine.

At other times, like me in this particular conversation, privately writing things down and tinkering and cutting and adding then slicing again is how you’ll get a better sense of what you are trying to say once in front of people.

There’s no right or wrong.

Except when…

You “rigidize” and don’t practice opposite.

When we rigidize we resort to what we know, preferring self at the expense of others, or sometimes others at the expense of self.

We end up locked into a binary instead of exploring the possibilities that exist along a continuum, like that of self and other.

Or perhaps, instead of an either/or, a more helpful way of imagining this dynamic is with self as part of the larger organism of humanity (to evoke the philosopher Henri Bergson). Not an individual self that is disconnected from others (as we often believe and live out in the West) but inextricably bound up and inseparable from relationship with others. A both/and, if you will.

We might, then, more effectively imagine ‘self’ and ‘other’ as tethered on a circle.

Regardless of how you diagram it, in life you and I will be presented with a range of either/or’s in which we can easily revert to our most rehearsed or preferred binary (self/other, structure/improvisation, conservative/liberal, Real Madrid/Manchester City…you get the idea).

What if, in response, we began to practice in the direction that feels most opposite, without neglecting our own desires along the way?

Back to Johnnie and me.

Sometimes we seem to take opposite positions.

The challenge is to do this playfully, not becoming rigid, while being interested in the tensions between.

This is not just about empathy (looking out).

To work well together it can be helpful to do the work of noticing what we each want and need (looking in).

This does not mean we always end up “meeting in the middle” either.

Sometimes what is found in the middle is a failure.

Meeting there can rob each person of their magic and spunk.

That is why Johnnie and I also make the attempt to create space for ourselves and give each other permission to practice what feels most natural.

Sometimes a simple conversation and shared understanding about what lies in-between can keep us from overcorrecting.

One practical example of how we might practice opposite shows up when we facilitate workshops.

Johnnie might take the lead in one session, and I a backseat.

We might flip it for the next session.

Or run two sessions in a row where one of us leads depending on what we noticed with the participants in the previous session.

While doing this well requires that we set aside time for reflection, it allows us to benefit from our strengths, play with the roles of structuralist and improvisor, keep learning, and co-create the most inspired experience we can for participants.

If we don’t keep tending the quality of our attention though, what emerges might end up as less than the sum of its parts. And we might feel less energized.

So we try to practice opposite.