Christopher Alexander, architect, passed away four years ago today. He was a direct influence on several of my teachers, mentors, and friends, although I knew him mostly as a warm writer of challenging ideas. The independent consulting company I ran for a decade was called ‘Different Chairs’ after a passage he cowrote.
First, let’s enjoy the crispness of Alexander’s writing. Here’s a passage from his first book, Community and Privacy, coauthored with Serge Chermayeff, published 1963:
People want to be everywhere. The reason they moved out was to find the country and escape the disadvantages of the city. The reason they are moving back is that the country is no longer there and they would like to regain the advantages of the city. But when everything is everywhere, wherever you go there is nothing tangible to find.
Second, we dwell in the inviting and clarifying nature of his work. This passage is from the concluding pages of his last book, The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth, with Hans Joachim Neis and Maggie Moore Alexander, published 2012:
Again and again we are confronted daily by decisions, by the question, “What should I do, what path should I take, how should I approach this problem?”
There is no human being who does not, in some form, encounter this kind of self-doubt. Every one of us needs help or guidance in doing the best possible thing, in so far as what is available and practical, on the day when you encounter this question, in yourself.
Gandhi-ji, Christ, the Buddha, Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma, and the man down the street at the gas station. They did it for love. I can do it for love. Any one of us can do it because of love, and because love is simple and so powerful.
Love itself! Not love for this person or that person—but love for a small spider who has fallen into a tin can, love for the field which nourishes, and the individual grasses that sway as the breeze comes gently across.
The ecology of humankind is created by the fabric of buildings, by the human fabric of affection, and by the powerful force of our love for our Earth—love, even for the smallest pebble.
Try to be aware, every waking day and every minute, of the love that lies in your heart. The most tender wakefulness lies in your heart, and gives you the only realistic picture of the world. It can give you access to the ultimate reality. At every moment, remain wakeful and aware of your love for the Earth and for the Universe around you.
I showed up to some consulting work this morning befuddled, tired, and uncertain of which of several alternatives—all equally irritating—to pursue next. This inside the universal local/global backdrop of loss, confusion, and cruelty. Remembering Christopher Alexander’s answer to ‘what should I do?’ has helped me a hundred times over across the years, including today, right now. Maybe it will help you, too.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The original tagline for this site and newsletter was ‘continuous improvement in a world that’s one damn thing after another.’ Today let’s revisit that last bit. What does it mean for a world to be one damn thing after another? And what does this have to do with the potential for continuous improvement, or the possibility of provision?
Something fishy
In 1995 fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly (by this time 20 years into his career and already a prolific author) wrote a one-pager published on the back page of an obscure biology journal.
This was the location of one of the biggest, gloomiest ideas going. Pauly described a ‘shifting baseline syndrome’ affecting his profession:
This syndrome has arisen because each generation of fisheries scientists accepts as a baseline the stock size and species composition that occurred at the beginning of their careers, and uses this to evaluate changes. When the next generation starts its career, the stocks have further declined, but it is the stocks at that time that serve as a new baseline. The result obviously is a gradual shift of the baseline, a gradual accommodation of the creeping disappearance of resource species, and inappropriate reference points for evaluating economic losses resulting from overfishing, or for identifying targets for rehabilitation measures.
Pauly viewed this as a generational ‘shift’ to be countered with careful data collection and analysis. These countermeasures would occupy much of his time and publication schedule for the rest of his career.
The blissfully boiling frog
When I first read this article some years ago, it really stuck with me. It seemed to explain a lot. But I wondered:
Might it explain more, and more broadly? Doesn’t everybody do this?
And at a faster pace than the gradual, generational cycles under discussion? I believed then, and believe now, that people can get used to just about anything. The evidence is all around us.
I also worried that expanding the idea of ‘shifting baselines’ beyond Pauly’s original scope would lead to nostalgia. There are many important ways in which the present is better than the past, even as we rush to forget what has passed away.
Eventually I poked around the archive. No surprise that Pauly continued to think and write about this big, gloomy idea.
In 2011—sixteen years after ‘shifting baselines’—he wrote:
Without firm rooting in scientific, quantified knowledge of what we now have, or had, we will inevitably experience the ‘shifting baseline syndrome.’ As I have described, successive generations of naturalists, ecologists, or even Nature lovers use the state of the environment at the beginning of their conscious interactions with it as the reference point, which then shifts as successive generations degrade that same environment. The story of the frog kept in water that is heated very slowly comes to mind here, and if we are not careful, we are going to get boiled as the frog does: a runaway greenhouse effect would do the job nicely.
I found here in the 2011 writing the broadened scope, the boiling frog, and the slow-but-fast progression of human-caused climate change that is the defining feature of our century.
The decade-scale example is excess deaths caused by COVID-19. We never did a great job tracking mortality due to COVID. Instead, we mostly stopped counting 3 years ago, and mostly stopped estimating one year ago, as the body count neared 30 million. There is a huge impulse to forget and to move along, although insurance companies remember. (Thanks to Susannah for these links.) Is this another aspect of shifting baselines? Despite, alongside, and during this unsurpassed tragedy, we continue to care for the people in our lives and provide and labor in community. What the hell else would we do? Emerson wrote that “we learn geology the morning after the earthquake.” This is true; also true is that only a few days or years pass before the “cloven mountains, upheaved plains, and the dry bed of the sea” become as unremarkable as any other feature of our surroundings. A disaster as invisible as any other.
Pauly made an additional point—also revealed to me by my friend Summer:
For baselines to shift is not always bad. There are many stupid things that must be forgotten even if they have been the rule for thousands of years. Getting rid of these notions will free our minds and enable us to concentrate on things that matter, including some important things that we should remember.
Forgetting, remembering—and in Pauly’s discussion, forgetting some things in order to remember others. All baselines can shift. It seems that most will. But a few must not, lest we lose our footing during the ongoing scramble toward liberation. This is the idea. It is big, and it is gloomy.
📖
These 2011 quotes are from a book chapter called “On baselines that need shifting.” It is reprinted in Pauly’s 2019 book Vanishing Fish.
Shifting baselines in the workplace
This is not mere theory. I see it in my daily efforts as a consultant supporting people in their work and in their workplaces.
The conditions of shifting baseline syndrome—of vast, continual retrenchment of natural and built and social environments—are those under which people work. Even if undiscussable, it’s ever-present.
As someone who lives and works in the US, this has only accelerated in our current bad times. The Christian fascists in power have an agenda that depends on baselines shifting quickly and broadly. Whether people resist and ignore this—or, as a minority do, accept it—the effort keeps everyone distracted and uncomfortable.
Finally, certain ultra-Amazonified workplaces intentionally leverage the ‘shifting baseline syndrome’ to get staff to accept bad policy, missing strategy, poorly leveled workloads, and so forth.
If employees are to perform inside these settings, they must develop a context-free, history-less pragmatism.
Some people will shift to accommodate.
Other people will wash out.
Either way, the corporation gets what it wants.
I don’t have answers to any of this. But I find it helpful to remember that these are the conditions people are in.
Pauly’s closing advice
Let’s give Pauly the last word. He ended his 2019 book Vanishing Fish with an offer of advice, which—after all of the above—I was eager to accept. His advice is honest and true. I suppose time will tell whether it is sufficient. Pauly wrote:
If I have any advice to give, it is that one should have friends and work hard.
Identify project risks using this fun, thought-provoking 15-minute method to capture wisdom from the people who know best—those who will do the work and those who will be affected by it.
It’s the venerable project premortem.
I recommend this method if you’re leading a project in your own organization. And if you’re a consultant, like me, it can be a significant information-seeking behavior at the beginning of a project.
The underlying capability is prospective hindsight. Here’s a definition from Gary Klein, in his HBR piece from 2007 on premortems:
Prospective hindsight—imagining that an event has already occurred—increases the ability to correctly identify reasons for future outcomes by 30%. We have used prospective hindsight to devise a method called a premortem, which helps project teams identify risks at the outset.
The premortem is not a new idea—this 2007 article popularized the technique. However, I keep using it because each time I do, I learn things that are valuable to know at the beginning of a new project—and particularly with a new client.
The power of the premortem is this:
People will just tell you things if you ask them nicely.
And if you ask using prospective hindsight, they will come up with surprising answers, sometimes even mentioning their organization’s ‘undiscussables.’
A few things I’ve learned from premortems
That the current effort was the second attempt, and therefore doomed to failure for the same reasons the first effort failed.
That the current effort was the third attempt, etc.
The existence of a specific policy making the intended change impossible, and that policy-makers were not involved in designing or selecting the project.
That the ongoing budget to support this work had already been allocated to a particular technology, program, or team.
That people don’t trust or believe their leadership, or the project’s sponsors, or one another.
Various discoveries about organizational problems in communication and clumsiness in making changes.
These were all things worth learning quickly—as in, cheap and early—so that possibilities remained for adjustment or better awareness of the environment.
Here’s how it’s done: running your premortem
Before the meeting, write a simple scenario. Something like: “It is December and our project has failed spectacularly. As the first snow falls, we gather together and ask—what happened? Why did this fail?” Be precise about the future date: maybe 2 months after the presumed project completion; link the date to some major event or local seasonality.
Schedule 15 minutes in a project kick-off meeting to run the premortem.
At the start of the premortem, state the scenario and ask the question.
Allow 1-3 minutes for individual reflection.
Offer an anonymous feedback form and invite participants to provide their responses. Clearly state how you will use these, for example, that individual responses remain anonymous, but you will share themes and takeaways with the group and with project sponsors.
After the individual reflection time is complete, open up for a brief discussion across whatever participation modes are available. Acknowledge and thank people for their responses. Do not attempt to problem-solve or diagnose right now, but make it clear you’ll be doing so later. If project sponsors, execs, etc. attend, you will have to coach them on this behavior in advance, the message being: we’re listening now, we’ll problem-solve afterwards.
Close with sincere thanks and by telling people where and when you’ll share takeaways from the premortem—ideally with planned remediations for each.
An encouragement
The project premortem concept may seem a little weird. It is.
But it’s a great way to show up and listen. The simple act of listening to people and adjusting based on what you hear is wonderful.
And, almost as a side effect, the things people mention might be the things that doom the project to failure—or the things that, adjusted and kept in mind, might make it a great success.
October 7, 2025: Edited for length & added new photo.
