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❦ Essays & Books · The Writing

Ideas need somewhere to take root.

The slow, written wing of the Collective - essays, field notes, and books on the future of work. Where the thinking is grown patiently, in deep water, before it is carried anywhere.

Read the essaysBrowse the library

25 essays · 3 books · published in the open

The Essays

Written slowly, published in the open.

Field notes and longer pieces on working alongside intelligent systems - sorted newest first. Filter by the depth they belong to.

01

The Workaround We Mistook for the Goal

Taylorism, Fordism and ISO were three answers to one constraint. Processing variation was too expensive, so we removed the variation. That constraint is lifting, which raises a harder question than whether we can personalise everything.

Salinity6 min read
Aug 2026
02

The Interface Is Not Neutral

Billions are going into AI agents that can drive a computer, and almost nothing into studying what using them is actually like. Three papers convinced me the interface is not a neutral wrapper around the model. It decides what people are able to think.

Salinity6 min read
Aug 2026
03

Minimum Viable Governance: a human-first governance framework

The smallest amount of governance that keeps you, your people, and the people you serve safe - eleven promises, six questions, and a cadence, for organisations too small for boards but too exposed to go without.

Salinity8 min read
Jul 2026
04

The Metaphor That Was Not Carrying Its Weight

Two days of rebuilding the site after a piece of gentle feedback landed.

Salinity4 min read
Jul 2026
05

Handing on the Reins: A Story from the Wren Project

How a children's story became a game, and how a fifteen-year-old on work experience took the reins and swam Wren further. A journey and an argument, in that order.

Salinity
Jul 2026
06

Cost Optimisation: some models are just cheaper

A £3 budget alert sent me down the AI-model-pricing rabbit hole. What I found - sneaky caching costs, order-of-magnitude spread between models, and why the answer for most SaaS chat workloads is boring.

Salinity7 min read
Jul 2026

The Library

Three books, one journey.

Know yourself, know your world, navigate it, and bring all of yourself. The long-form spine of everything written here.

Vol. I · Playbook
The Ocean
How AI-augmented organisations earn the right to run themselves.
Know your world →
Companion
The Practitioner
Finding the operational creed you already live by.
Know yourself →
A fable
The Worker
Wren's journey - a story about finding your school in the deep.
Bring all of yourself →

One considered piece a fortnight. Nothing else.

New essays and book chapters as they are published - no cadence games, no noise. Just the writing, when it is ready.