[Note: This article is a re-post from the original on my website, which dates from February 10th, 2019. If you like what you read, I send subscribers an article straight into their inboxes every friday morning. Nothing much else. Just a plain text article. No click required. You can sign-up here.]

Grant me a moment to stalk this unknowing monk. I took this picture in Dharamasala, India in 2013. I remember coming to the end of a hike and walking past this man and feeling struck by him. He’s wearing a pair of trainers (seemingly indoor 5-a-side football shoes!), has…

[Note: This article is a re-post from the original on my website, which dates from February 10th, 2019. If you like what you read, I send subscribers an article straight into their inboxes every friday morning. Nothing much else. Just a plain text article. No click required. You can sign-up here.]

Last night my awesome and inspiring yoga-teaching wife Gabs stumbled upon a comment on her favourite yoga podcast J.Brown Yoga Talks which she felt articulated pretty well what I’m trying to do here. Roughly 55mins into the episode, the host says that:

‍“We’ve moved away from the kinds of…

[Note: This article is a re-post from the original on my website, which dates from February 20th, 2019. If you like what you read, I send subscribers an article straight into their inboxes every friday morning. Nothing much else. Just a plain text article. No click required. You can sign-up here.]

Am I late to notice this? I was on a flight the other day and instead of a no smoking light above each seat, it had a no tech sign. Have you seen this?

I found it so strange. Partly because it’s always been a no smoking sign, so…

Context: After almost two years of flux.am, Jim and I are doing some brand spring cleaning by clarifying what we do, how and why we do it. We’re proud of the work we’ve done and want to do it justice, hopefully attracting more of the good stuff. Here are some rambles I jotted today trying to figure out why we do what we do. Jim said I should publish them on medium. Here they are.

I love that feeling at the end of a workshop. Everything’s different.

A couple of days ago, when people came in, they kept checking their…

A deep & distributed democracy is coming

At the moment, my mind keeps coming to the question of our technological infrastructure because it is on this foundation that we are now going to build a deeper democracy around the world. Because briefly: before the only technology we had to involve citizens in decisions was pen and paper, meaning hierarchy was necessary to have a working democracy. But now, we have the technology necessary to have deep democracy, a democracy which is distributed, and which is, well, democratic. …

I was recently working with an organisation that like many organisations is super siloed. Nobody really knows what is going on in other parts of the organisation, people are have a devastating information deficit and that lack of commonly held information and understanding costs money, creates confusion, slows things down. It also generates more and more secrecy and politics and power (after all information is power).

This is pretty common and is a big problem in big businesses because they treat the organisation like separate sections on a fictional chart when the reality is that everything is interconnected.

Copy nature

There…

Hey 👋🏼

Jon here. Your virtual pal 🤣

This is weird for me, because I know of you more than I know you. But I have been lucky to meet (and even work with) some of you and to have Jim involve me in your process. And the thing is that for somebody like me, spending most of my professional time helping big organisations to change, hearing the stories from the Academy has been a huge part of my year and a huge source of energy. …

I love how sometimes, you can have a little experience which shapes so many subsequent experiences. This year has been a little like that for us, and it started with a week in Albania…

A week in Albania

Earlier this year, Jim was invited by our pal Kushtrim to help out on a project in Albania. It was run by the United Nations Development Programme and funded by our friends at Swiss Contact and the aim of it, was to help a group of people turn their ideas and dreams into businesses.

With me being in Brighton and Jim in Berlin, we tended to…