The patterns the project keeps returning to.
SenseMakingLens is a general sense-making framework, not a single-subject blog. These are the recurring lenses through which the work examines the strategic patterns shaping the present.
Strategy & the OODA Loop
Competitive adaptation, tempo, and orientation as the deepest theory of advantage. How the side that orients faster and more fluidly wins — and what that means beyond the cockpit Boyd designed it for.
Institutional Failure
Lock-in, incestuous amplification, true-believer dynamics, and the feedback loops that look like success. How once-functional organisations become engines of strategic blindness.
Information Warfare
Framing, flooding, forgetting, and substrate corruption — the contest over a society's shared sense of reality, and why open societies are structurally vulnerable to it.
Economics & Energy
Deindustrialisation as a self-inflicted wound and energy policy as asymmetric self-sabotage. Why these are choices defended by doctrine, not market inevitabilities.
Complexity & Second-Order Effects
Fragility, asymmetry, epistemic humility, and the interests that become invested in keeping the wrong map in circulation. What happens next — and who benefits from the gap.
AI as Cognitive Extension
Using AI to widen the prism, run multiple models at once, and pressure-test assumptions at higher tempo — without surfacing it into a confirmation-bias engine or outsourcing judgement.
Historical Recurrence
The long patterns Durant traced and Taleb formalised: the recurring dynamics of decline, adaptation, and collapse that make the present legible against the sweep of the past.
Orientation & Map–Territory Hygiene
The connective thread of the whole project: detecting the moment a map stops matching the territory, and the discipline of updating it before events force the correction.
The goal is not a unified grand theory. It is a more robust, more frequently updated orientation. The SenseMakingLens Method
Analysis delivered when the argument is complete.
Essays are long-form, evidence-based, and published in full on Substack when the thinking is ready — not when the calendar demands it. Subscribe now: free today, with the option to support the project as it develops.