Now
This is what I'm busy with now (updated June 2026).
Strategy coaching
The constant is working with CEOs and their teams to align on strategy, and then getting the energy in the organisation to back it. Strategy nobody owns goes nowhere. A lot of that is encouraging leadership rather than management, and I keep coming back to Direction, Alignment and Commitment as the simplest honest test of whether a team is actually leading.
I have been using Snapshot with client teams to surface where everyone really stands before the talking starts. AI is now the undercurrent in almost every conversation and workshop. Underneath it all, the steady work carries on: quarterly priority planning and shaping executive teams.
Going deep
Two rabbit holes at the moment, and they pull in opposite directions.
The first is AI and the shape of organisations. The interesting question is not what AI does to a task, it is what it does to structure. a16z's institutional versus individual AI makes the point that productive individuals do not make a productive firm. The gains stay trapped at the desk unless the organisation is redesigned around them. Block goes further in from hierarchy to intelligence : once a system can hold the company's world model and coordinate the work, the layers of management that existed only to move information start to look optional. Intelligence in the system, people on the edge. I am watching for where that is real and where it is a story leaders tell themselves.
The second is non-duality. I have been reading Ramana Maharshi and sitting with the direct path through Rupert Spira and the wider Advaita Vedanta tradition. Consciousness as the ground of things rather than a by-product of them. It is the least strategic thing I do and quietly the most important.
Portfolio life
- Trails, foiling and yoga
- The Knysna half marathon in July, running it with my two daughters and friends
- Still circling Stewart Brand: pace layers, the Long Now, the idea that fast gets the attention and slow holds the power
Building
Snapshot is an alignment diagnostic for leadership teams. One question. A set of ambiguous images. Everyone responds at the same time, before filters kick in. The variation in what comes back tells you where the team actually stands.
I have just put up the Whole Earth Coaching Catalog (WECC) — 156 coaching, leadership and facilitation tools, arranged around the challenges people actually bring rather than by theory. It joins the Whole Earth Strategy Catalogue (WESC) I built a few years back. Both take their name, and their spirit, from Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog: access to tools, laid out so you can find the one you need and get on with it.
Fun Fact Now Now
Anyone who has been to South Africa knows that now (sometime, maybe, eventually), now now (I plan to get there but could be shortly or a bit later), right now (a little more urgent but still ambivalent) and just now (later) all have specific meanings that are known to locals and opaque to anyone not familiar with them.
This Now page inspired by The Now Page movement . For a full collection of Now pages see https://nownownow.com .