Robert Carruthers is an economist and analyst. He spent more than twenty-five years inside Western government and regulatory institutions, working across trade policy, tax reform, rail economics, housing strategy and national security analysis in the UK and Australia.
SenseMakingLens grew out of a single question: how does a society lose a war it does not recognise it is fighting? The answer, increasingly, is through the degradation of orientation in John Boyd's sense — the capacity to form an accurate picture of reality and act on it before events outrun the inherited map.
The project began with The Invisible Defeat, a long-form essay series on how the West lost a fifth-generation war through institutional lock-in, deindustrialisation, energy self-constraint, information warfare, demographic fragmentation and strategic blindness.
From there, the project widened into a more general method: OODA, destructive deduction and creative induction, second-order thinking, feedback-loop analysis, map–territory hygiene, and multi-lens analysis as tools for re-orientation under uncertainty.
He also explores how AI can function as a cognitive extension — not as a substitute for judgement, but as a partner in widening perspective, pressure-testing assumptions, and accelerating the search for better orientation under complex conditions.
If you are tired of surface commentary and want a deeper account of the strategic patterns shaping the present, this is the purpose of SenseMakingLens.