Writing

Stories filed under the parts of us they belong to

Field notes from my research study, The Incentives Are Working, essays and reflections. Every piece is filed under a card on the map.

Essay30 Sep 2026Why myth belongs in systems changeMyth, ritual and faith were how cultures carried what they knew about loss, thresholds and return, and in a crisis they give people something no strategy can: a way to act before they can see the way through.→Field note22 Sep 2026Where you end and your role beginsThe system didn’t create the self-sacrifice schema; it found it, and it runs it.→Field note11 Aug 2026The work nobody seesInvisible labour keeps organisations alive while appearing in no job description, and having your expertise ignored is its own kind of injury.→Field note21 Jul 2026Silence is load-bearingTaboo decides what can’t be named and stigma decides what we become if we name it, while silence is what holds the whole thing up.→Field note7 Jul 2026A wound to integrityMoral injury doesn’t resolve through rest, only through changed conditions or a coherent exit.→Reflection25 Mar 2026The well and the gardenGrieving and mourning are not the same thing, and a culture that forgets the difference leaves grief with nowhere to go.→Reflection10 Feb 2026The commons inside usWe usually picture the commons as fisheries and forests, but a person’s energy works the same way, and it runs dry for the same reasons.→Essay9 Dec 2025First, do no harmPolly Higgins, ecocide, and what it would mean to make care the legal baseline.→Essay3 Dec 2025What the economy pays forCare, culture and the work of holding things together sit outside the accounts by design, and the people who carry them pay the difference.→Reflection25 Nov 2025What is the economy for?For decades we’ve been told growth is the goal. The better question is growth of what, and for whom, and what the whole thing was meant to serve in the first place.→Reflection14 Oct 2025Inherited money storiesThe beliefs about money and safety we carry didn't come from nowhere. They often come from survival.→Essay22 Jul 2025How fear shapes designBuilding contact tracing tools at speed, and what it taught me about safety, control and power.→Essay8 Jul 2025Home and rootsA train from London to Essex, a hollow heart, and the difference between where you live and where you come from.→Conversation18 Jun 2025In conversation with The Mindful BrandAsh Stapleton on the ethical investing platform I co-founded, and the question underneath it: who has been excluded from decisions, and how can we bring them in?→

How the writing works

Four forms, each with its own shape

Field notes

Findings from the study

Short findings from my research study, The Incentives Are Working. Each one names a single pattern, grounds it in what people told me, and ends on what it reveals about how these systems are designed.

Essays

A story, then the system

A story from my own life or work, followed by a systems lens that traces the same pattern out into other systems and asks what would let it shift.

Reflections

Something that stayed with me

A response to a book, a talk or an idea I keep returning to, what it opened up for me, and the same systems lens as the essays.

Conversations

Other people’s words

Interviews and profiles, introduced here and linked to where they were first published.

Series

Findings from The Incentives Are Working

Read the series

Newsletter

Letters from the map

New writing as it’s published, news of the deck, and the occasional note on the work.