Two Januaries

It’s the first Tuesday of the month—January 6, 2026. I remember where and how I was five years ago today: holed up in my office, up in the finished attic of our previous home, cold but cozy, laboring desperately and fruitlessly to finish some mildly overdue items for a client, making no progress whatsoever, instead watching video feeds on C-SPAN and texting furiously with Liana and various friends. My consulting partner on that project (hi Jennifer! miss you & hope you are well) created a little wiggle room for us that day. People die only the once, but ideals fall again and again, and either way the absence and grief is felt whole-heartedly.

Yesterday was the first day back at work for many of us who had the good fortune to enjoy some downtime or time away around the end of the year. I felt tense going into the weekend, not from apprehension about returning to work but rather from worry about what they’d do on—or for—the fifth anniversary of January 6. I needn’t have waited. In 1992 Leonard Cohen sang that he couldn’t “run no more with that lawless crowd / while the killers in high places say their prayers out loud.” In the current circumstance the killers skipped the praying in favor of congregating in front of a wall-sized display with results of a search on X dot com for ‘Venezuela.’

Square that with the expectation that work happens underneath a context-free, ahistorical capitalist realism dome; in this dome the past is about two months long and the future extends only as far out as the end of the quarter or the next round of asinine bulk layoffs. I see cracks in the dome. I wonder what might shine through.

Three responses

How to respond in these conditions? I see three ways:

1. The first response is to remember. I wrote recently about undiscussables and shifting baselines. In both cases I think this is what I was really on about. We have to remember this, so we can give an account of what happened, and hold to account those responsible, and produce a better place in its aftermath, restoring rights and generating protections for all.
2. Another is to take time & show care. People are hurting, worried, scared. These are best antidotes I know of, at least on a the scale of local, daily interactions.
   1. Taking time: this looks like 90 minutes with friends instead of 60; showing up early to arrange chairs and cushions into an inviting circle; and joining a few calls or meetings that are not strictly necessary but I hope will be beneficial.
   2. Showing care: helping people around me ease back into things. At work this means a deliberate, gentle reiteration of commitments and arrangements. What have we all signed up for? By what method will we try to it get it done? We might adjust as needed, but largely I think people just need to hear it again.
3. A final response is to do what we can. My city elected its new mayor, someone I know and respect and for whose campaign our whole family was proud to volunteer. He’ll be sworn in at the top of tonight’s city council meeting. There is a sense that this is the start of something good, despite the limitations of that position and other constraints in place.

These three are incomplete, but it’s what I have, and how I’m operating right now.

‘Failure gaps’—online reading

Cat Hicks in Fight for the Human:

The experiences of folks who find themselves fighting on a technical battleground—privacy, security, infrastructure, or even developer experience—have a lot of common themes. There’s a psychological fortitude that goes into becoming a Champion, a clarity of seeing the consequences that other people don’t like to see. Most people systematically underestimate the problems, failures, fragility, and errors around them … Researchers tested people’s estimation of failure rates across more than thirty domains and found a consistent “failure gap.” Champions may just be the people who have learned to overcome the typical failure gap in a particular domain. They’re like our sociocognitive field scouts, with sharper prediction skills for the disasters most of us can't tolerate imagining for long. 

Can we make Security Empirical, and why might we want to?

There’s a paper I recently came across by Mohammad Tahaei and colleagues called Privacy Champions in Sofware Teams: Understanding Their Motivations, Strategies, and Challenges. In it, they interview 12 folks on software teams who try to promote user privacy across their teams and organizations. It’s a small group, and there

Fight for the HumanCat Hicks

The paper Hicks mentioned is this (freely available to read online or download): Eskreis-Winkler, Lauren and Woolley, Kaitlin and Kim, Minhee and Polimeni, Eliana, The Failure Gap (August 04, 2025). Across seven studies, this team looked into responses to failure:

People closest to a failure—those with the clearest access to information about a failure that occurred—will tend to be those with the strongest motive not to share it. This could seriously impede the accessibility of information. For example, a reporter looking to write a story about an individual, a company, or an organization, may find that the most knowledgeable and powerful sources more freely share information on what is going right, versus what is going wrong.

If you’d rather not read the entire, dense paper, read Fred Hebert’s summary and discussion instead.

I’ve been thinking about how and why bad news related to likely failures or recent failures does not get communicated inside organizations, or is deliberately hidden from view; hence my recent posts on shifting baselines and undiscussables. As various initiatives don’t pan out—in the typical case of mandated ‘AI’ usage, because they won’t, and can’t—people are left the unenviable task of ‘easing in’ the bad news (to use Argyris’ phrasing).

Some good things from 2025

This is the part where we bask in the accomplishments of my friends, pals, and comrades. An incomplete, roughly chronological list:

• Chris and pals at Fenwick published Rewild Magazine (issues 0 and 1 available) as part of a larger community project.
• Jenny created Show Up Toronto, my favorite newsletter for local events in a city I haven’t been to in 20 years. Wherever you are, read the manifesto.
• Tonianne and Jim started their Humane Work newsletter. Recommended: Tonianne’s Sundays with Saarinen.
• Greg published Eject Disk, a set of 4 zines for people who are stuck in work or otherwise. Read online, or pay Greg to mail them to you. The first zine told me what I need to do in 2026, for which I’m grateful.
• Shannon (singer) and Jamie (producer) released the album that is now part 1 of their 80s Kids project, toured all year, and have raised funds and released the first single from 80s Kids 2, for which a 2026 tour is already scheduled. When I imagine I am busy, I think about these two and sit back down.
• Isabel launched flux studio. If you loathe ‘personal branding’ or ‘content marketing’ but gotta do it anyways, hire Isabel to help.

Beyond this, various friends left jobs (by choice or otherwise), started new work or adventures, and have done the right things for themselves. My family is healthy and mostly doing stuff they like. Walk into our home and beware sewing scraps, LEGO bricks, and books piled underfoot. Meanwhile: a steady, year-length drumbeat of protest. I love all of this, and this is what I celebrate.

I bring you a few practices of doing otherwise—doing anything other than the default, expected, thoughtless thing. Wiggle room where and how we find it.

As a person

First, a practice of refusal, from Winston Hearn:

When you practice refusal, you start conjuring up space for different futures. It’s a magic trick. When you refuse to do a thing that the majority of other people are doing, you create space for others to join you. When you refuse to enforce a dumb rule, you make the world malleable. When you refuse to believe a story without doing your own research, you build trust in yourself. When you refuse to take people at their word—when you understand that trust has to be earned it is not just given by default—you undermine power. The effects of the practice of refusal is to create a less predictable world, which makes planning harder. 

Practice Refusing

When you practice refusal, you start conjuring up space for different futures. It’s a magic trick.

Winston Hearn (the third)Cadwell Turnbull

Next, a practice of invitation, from Jack Kornfield:

You see a hungry child, a painful injustice, an act of violence to an innocent person and your heart goes out. You want to help. The profound reality of suffering is an invitation to step out of the fiction of separateness, grasping at what is called the “small sense of self” or the “body of fear,” where we are frightened or selfish or self-centered or cut off. This is not who we are. We know there is a reality beyond this. We feel it walking in the high mountains or making love or being there at the mystery of the birth of a child or the death of a human being. All of a sudden we step out of time-bound consciousness, the separateness, and feel ourselves part of the turning of the seasons of life. You can feel it on retreat. You’re doing walking meditation and all of a sudden you realize you’re not doing it. It’s all just doing it itself. It’s amazing. One of my teachers explained this as “No self, no problem.” More self, more clinging; more self-centered, more problem.

An Invitation to Freedom

Meditation teacher Jack Kornfield on how to view our suffering as a gateway to liberation

Tricycle: The Buddhist ReviewJack Kornfield

In the workplace

The busy lil’ consultant in me is preoccupied with how this plays out in the workplace. First, let’s acknowledge with Sumantra Ghoshal—in his classic paper from 2005—that labor markets are not efficient, and transfer risk to workers:

Shareholders can sell their stocks far more easily than most employees can find another job. In every substantive sense, employees of a company carry more risks than do the shareholders. Also, their contributions of knowledge, skills, and entrepreneurship are typically more important than the contributions of capital by shareholders, a pure commodity that is perhaps in excess supply.

(This paper is well worth reading if you haven’t. JSTOR and mysterious PDF links below.)

Bad Management Theories Are Destroying Good Management Practices on JSTOR

Sumantra Ghoshal, Bad Management Theories Are Destroying Good Management Practices, Academy of Management Learning & Education, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Mar., 2005), pp. 75-91

If you’re a worker storing your bosses’ risk in your head and heart and hands, what might you do? Mandy Brown writes:

Most employment in the US is what is known as “at will.” Legally, that means both you and your employer can end the job at any moment, for any reason or for no reason at all. But to “will” something is to choose it, to exercise the mind and body towards an act. Every choice you make in your work is an act of will, an act of your will, and the collective will of the people you make those choices with. And will is a powerful thing! The story of inevitability is a story that wants you to forget that you have the will to change things; but the future remains, as ever, unwritten.

Not doing | everything changes

At will.

everything changes

And, finally, Jenny:

It’s possible to see this with despair or derision: who are we becoming that even the use of tools and technologies has become a matter of identity? But the fun thing about reading anthropology is learning how much humans have always been Like This™. There were tribes who refused to adopt agriculture not because they didn’t know about it, but because the tribe up the road does agriculture and they’re not like them. Groups that refused to domesticate cattle because it was important to their group identity to see bulls as wild and untamed. I refuse to use generative AI because I simply don’t want to be the kind of person who uses generative AI. The promise of AI is that it removes friction. It doesn’t matter whether it can actually fulfill that promise, it matters that the sovereign wealth funds with seemingly infinite pockets and patience for Sam Altman’s megalomania believe it can.

choosing friction

In 2018, legal scholar Tim Wu wrote in the New York Times that: Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey. This piece well predates the current AI boom, but “all destination and no journey” is a pretty good explanation for why using AI to create art is mainly compelling to people who think about creativity in terms of producing content and generating intellectual property. They just want the thing they can market and sell for money or clout; they don’t care how they got there. I know you’re sick of talking about AI. I am too. This is only a little bit about AI, I promise. Like all my writing about technology, it’s mostly about people.

The Roof is on PhireThe Roof is on Phire

A book recommendation

I’ve been enjoying this new book of edited talks from Ram Dass, with supporting essays by various teachers:

There Is No Other: The Way to Harmony and Wholeness

The Way to Harmony and Wholeness

HarperOneHarperOne

Ram Dass—who you may know as the author of “Be Here Now” among may other books—was not the most accessible speaker or thinker to get into, but this collection provides a generous structure for doing so. For example, the ‘invitation to freedom’ by Jack Kornfield I mentioned above is one of the supporting essays from this book. I’d recommend this collection to anybody.

A year of whole-heartedness closes

A year ago, I wrote about whole-heartedness as we entered into what we all knew would be—politically, socially, culturally—a very bad time.

Monthly links & notes for November 2024

A talk on values at work. The Multisolving book, which I think you should read. Whole-heartedness.

Improve Something TodayBrian Kerr

How has this year of whole-heartedness worked out? Great, I think, but not without a lot of heartache. I try to be less cynical, to bring care and kindness. It’s hard, sometimes (all the time), but also something I can do to run counter to the culture being produced while the “killers in high places say their prayers out loud.” In that same post I wrote that this song is what whole-heartedness means to me, and a year later, I have no better definition:

Anthem by Leonard Cohen on Apple Music

Song · 1992 · Duration 6:09

Apple Music - Web Player

It’s Election Day in the United States. My ballot is dropped off and has been counted. On Friday, Mavis Staples’ new album is out. The tracklist indicates she’s covered this song. I look forward to it.

One more thing. If you’re in the US, consider a cash donation of any amount to your community food bank. This part of the social safety net is in crisis right now due to the government shutdown and the Republican party’s refusal to fund SNAP (aka food stamps). Here’s detailed information about how SNAP works, how the Trump administration broke it, and the day-by-day accumulating impact on families:

How Propel’s Emergency Fund Is Supporting SNAP Households With Cash Transfers

Propel launches $1M Relief Fund to support SNAP households affected by the government shutdown. Track real-time data, see the impact of direct cash transfers, and join us to help families buy food.

Propel

Take good care. See you a little further down the road.

Looking ahead

I’m adjusting the schedule of this newsletter. We’re looking ahead into the month as we begin, not back at the past month.

So: October. Let’s go, together.

Online reading

Sometimes you read something that clarifies the moment. What is going on right now, really? For me, it was this detailed reporting from a ‘materials sourcing’ conference for footwear companies:

When you make stuff to sell—mountains of stuff, so much stuff that the human mind cannot fathom the volume of it—you cannot pretend that your industry will just function as it has forever. Sneaker manufacturing isn’t like tech, where you can blabber on about how you actually need to devour cities’ worth of energy for years at a time in order to make Generative AI and keep your investors happy. These companies are in a more tactile business. Whatever Nike’s vision of itself might be, it sells shoes and facilitates the manufacturing of shoes. For a company in that business, thinking five years ahead means thinking about what the marketplace will be like five years deeper into multiple environmental catastrophes.

The Future Of The Sneaker Business First Requires A Future | Defector

PORTLAND, ORE. — Global capitalism begins with apparel. Slaves were brought to the American South from West Africa to do farm labor, and by the 19th century that largely meant cotton, a ubiquitous puffball that is easy to grow and aggravating to harvest. Seeds would be removed with a cotton gin, and the bulk of…

Defector homeCorbin Smith

Books

Fall is a season for old science fiction. Let’s visit J.G. Ballard’s Studio 5, The Stars from 1961. Here, ‘VT’ is short for ‘Verse-Transcriber’—a machine that emits soulless poetry on demand, to spec.

Fifty years ago a few people wrote poetry, but no one read it. Now no one writes it either. The VT set merely simplifies the whole process.

Ballard’s vision of text extruders everywhere fits our moment, which is the moment of over & over encountering LLM-generated text, copy without end, argument-shaped things without arguments. Of “pushing a button, selecting metre, rhyme, assonance on a dial.” I’m so tired of all of it.

Fall is a season for Wendell Berry, who helps me remember that caring is not abstract, or theoretical. I love his definition of ‘provision’—what it means to provide—from the recent collection The Art of Loading Brush.

Provision, I think, is never more than caring properly for the good that you have, including your own life. As it relates to the future, provision does only what our oldest, longest experience tells us to do. We must continuously attend to our need for food, clothing, and shelter. We must care for the land, care for the forest, plant trees, plant gardens and crops, see that the brood animals are bred, keep the house and the household intact. We must teach the children. But provision does not foresee, predict, project, or theorize the future. Provision instructs us to renew the roof of our house, not to shelter us when we are old—we may die or the world may end before we are old—but so we may live under a sound roof now. Provision merely accepts the chances we must take with the weather, mortality, fallibility. Perhaps the wisest of the old sayings is ‘Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.’ Provision accepts, next, the importance of diversity. Perhaps the next-wisest old saying is ‘Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.’ When the bad, worse, or worst possibility presents itself, provision only continues to take best possible care of what we have, or of what we have left.

We’re here in the moment of bad, worse, or worst. What to do? As Berry puts it, ‘only continue.’ I can do that. So can you. It just might be enough.

On the site

I’m running a new publication schedule. If you’re reading this on the e-mail newsletter, you’ll get two mails a month:

1. newsletter for the month ahead (first Tuesday of each month), and
2. a regular old blog post (third Tuesday of each month).

Now, I update the site more frequently than this. One example of updates that aren’t sent out as e-mails (or even distributed in the RSS feed) are HOWTOs. These HOWTOs are more telegraphic and less explanatory than what I usually write here. Procedures for assembling a particular kind of diagram, checking in with a group—that kind of thing. I joked that I have reinvented the concept of putting up a plain old web page, for my own use. Take a walk through them here:

HOWTOs

How to do different things. More quick reference than deep explanation.

Improve Something TodayBrian Kerr

Upcoming events

This month, my friend & neighbor Andy is hosting Awktober—a monthlong celebration of being genuinely awkward, or maybe better put, awkwardly genuine. A thesis of Andy’s work is that when you embrace your awkwardness, you’ll find joy in the doing, and confidence thereafter.

Awktober - Andy Vargo

Awktober is here! Play Awkward Bingo, join live events, and take part in challenges to celebrate your awkward all October long.

Andy Vargo

And looking ahead to November, you can get your ticket today for Makesensemess on Nov. 7. This will be an incredible event, as always. It is:

The brain child of information architect and author, Abby Covert. It is an annual (virtual) celebration of sensemaking that started in 2021. Part virtual unconference, part virtual party, all virtual fun. It is celebrated every November, which also happens to be the publication anniversary for How to Make Sense of Any Mess.

Makesensemess: An Annual Celebration of Sensemaking

Makesensemess is an annual celebration of sensemaking and happens to take place around the publication anniversary of How to Make Sense of Any Mess written by Abby Covert.

Header Logo

The undefined moon

Pity the wayward Moon Phases Mastodon bot. It posted the following on October 1:

Today’s undefined moon is 0% of full brightness, and is currently NaN km from Earth and NaN km from the sun. It’s been NaN days since the last new moon.

I thank this misfiring script or disconnected data feed for nearly a week of happiness produced by that phrase. It is the season of the undefined moon, unnumbered in distance, duration, and brightness. Yet, as I write these words, the moon is up, and it is full, and still, and brilliant.

Remembering Joanna Macy

The environmental activist and Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy died this month, the end of a long and generative life. Here’s a little passage from her book World as Lover, World as Self:

The strength and wisdom we need is not to be concocted on our own, but to be found in interaction—for that is how they arise, interdependently. The same is true for our goals and the visions that guide us; they, too, interdependently co-arise. New visions do not come from blueprints inside our heads, concocted by past experience and old habits of thinking, so much as from our interactions with our world and fresh sensations and perceptions. And for that we need Earth and body, the stuff out of which we are made. For these remind us that we are not brains on the end of a stick, but an organic, integral part of the web of life.

One thing I appreciated about Macy is that she never seemed satisfied with theory. She needed to know: how should we act? What can we do in intractably difficult, hate-filled, inhumane times? So if you’d like to learn more about Macy’s work—and how to apply it directly to your own—I encourage you to take this free, online “Active Hope” training based on the book she coauthored with Chris Johnstone.

Books

Creative Intelligence

I’m deeply skeptical of LLMs and related “AI” technologies, and think people should not use them. However, a lot of folks I work with have been made to, like it or not. Bosses are looking for returns on their investments—returns that don’t exist, and won’t. So the pressure is on.

If you are being required to demonstrate use of LLMs at work but want to do this in as considered and thoughtful a way as humanly possible, give Greg Storey’s new book Creative Intelligence a shot. Greg will even get you started with a free chapter.

Designing and Facilitating Workshops with Intentionality

I found this new book from Dr. Tolu Noah helpful in filling in the middle spaces between (a) having a grab bag of facilitation methods on hand, and (b) knowing how to design and run professional learning workshops skillfully.

Newer facilitators will benefit from the practical advice about gluing together methods, approaches, etc., to get to the outcomes they have in mind. And more experienced folks will find something interesting and insightful in the mix. Personally, I appreciated the discussion of ten traits that facilitators can demonstrate to produce the right kind of tone in a workshop setting.

Order a copy today.

The burning, flowering chair

I leave you today with two passages from two books giving different—yet similar—ways of looking at a wooden chair and seeing what is ‘inside’.

First, from Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Other Shore:

The word interbeing was born while I was leading a retreat at Tassajara Zen Center in the mountains of California in the 1980s. I was teaching about emptiness and I did not have a sheet of paper with me to illustrate the point, so I used an empty wooden chair. I invited everyone to look carefully into the chair to see the presence of the forest, the sunshine, the rain, and the clouds. I explained that the chair was not subject to birth and death, nor could it be described in terms of being or nonbeing. I asked them whether there was a word in French or English that could describe how the chair existed along with all the other non-chair elements. I asked if the word ‘togetherness’ would do. Somebody said that it sounded strange, so I suggested the word ‘interbeing.’

And second, from Rob Burbea’s Seeing That Frees:

A thing is ‘empty’ of its seemingly real, independent existence. And all things are this way, are empty. This voidness is what is also sometimes termed the ultimate truth or reality of things. To illustrate this and begin to get a hint of what it means we could consider a wooden chair thrown onto a big fire. The chair begins to burn, then gradually deform and fall apart, slowly turning to ashes. At what point exactly is it no longer a chair? Is it not the mind perceiving and conceiving of it one way or another that determines whether it is ‘a chair’ at a certain moment in time after catching fire? Its chair-ness is given by the mind, and does not reside in it independently of the mind. The lack of an inherently existing ‘official’ time when it stops ‘being a chair’ points to a certain emptiness, its lack of inherent chair-ness.

Both of these visions of a chair bring me comfort, and their juxtaposition makes me smile. I hope you can keep at least one of them with you and remember it next time you notice a wooden chair.

Online reading—on caring

It started with Dan Sinker’s The Who Cares Era on May 23. Sinker wrote about a situation where US newspapers published a summer reading supplement generated by ‘AI’ referencing nonexistent/fabricated books:

The writer didn’t care. The supplement’s editors didn’t care. The biz people on both sides of the sale of the supplement didn’t care. The production people didn’t care. And, the fact that it took two days for anyone to discover this epic fuckup in print means that, ultimately, the reader didn’t care either. It’s so emblematic of the moment we’re in, the Who Cares Era, where completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore.

A few days later, Les Orchard wrote that Only the Metrics Care:

It reveals such a grim meathook future ahead, a solipsistic view of humanity: most people reduced to NPCs in someone else's growth funnel. Not peers. Not audiences. Just marks—behavioral units to be nudged for another uptick.

Then Jenny Zhang wrote that it’s time to Kill the Metrics in Your Head:

I want to know who is visiting my site and whether they’re returning visitors and what pages they clicked through and for how long because it gives me the illusion of knowledge and control. Maybe I’ll know my project is connecting with people if I just hit some arbitrary threshold of pageviews, subscribers, conversion rate. But none of that will tell me the thing I actually want to know, which is: am I making a difference?

Back to Sinker’s original post:

In a moment where machines churn out mediocrity, make something yourself. Make it imperfect. Make it rough. Just make it. At a time where the government’s uncaring boot is pressing down on all of our necks, the best way to fight back is to care.

There is more where that came from, from Mandy Brown and Molly White and many others. This is a year where caring—sheer, mere giving a shit, wanting to know that you’re making a difference, and putting in the effort day after day—is the most important, human, humane thing.

A personal note

Please do whatever you can to keep showing and giving care. (And turn off analytics wherever you can.)

A professional note

This experience of being wrenched into the ‘Who Cares Era’ is exhausting for everyone. Yet many employers expect their teams to show up and perform work while not caring about any bad things happening in the world, in their communities, to/with themselves, their families, friends, and so on. I find this expectation is an important cause of burnout and despair in 2025.

My countermeasures—ways of showing care—as a consultant are twofold:

1. Leave wiggle room for people to talk about this, when possible, if they want. Because we bring to work our entire lives and whole beings as people with bodies in places, even if the company wishes we didn’t.
2. Plan as if everyone will enter into a meeting or activity immediately after reacting to bad news or difficult circumstances. Because they might be, even if they keep this to themselves. It is always important to use time skillfully and get the fenceposts established. Now, it is also another small way to show care.

Gratitude

Let me leave you with a short, early, minor, Emily Dickinson poem. I memorized this as a child, and I think cross-stitched it onto a little piece of cotton fabric. While it doesn’t compare to the more esoteric word-mazes she’d write later, its directness precisely fits this moment.

If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.