ACCIDENTAL TRUTHS What slips out when we're not trying to make a point. The behavioural tells, the contradictions, the moments when the performance cracks and something real shows through. What I'm actually tracking in all my work.

ALGORITHM The invisible hand that has convinced organisations to optimise for distribution rather than substance. Rewards frequency over quality, emotion over insight, brevity over depth. The error lies in mistaking its logic for wisdom.

ATTENTION DEBT What accumulates when you've been looking away from the thing that matters.

AUTHORITY What is crafted, not claimed. The result of sustained intellectual work. It is not algorithmic. It accumulates through sustained quality, not optimised cadence. Organisations with authority are consulted, cited, and listened to. Organisations without it must pay for attention.

AXIAL IDEA The central concept around which all messaging rotates. The gravitational core of your intellectual universe.

BEHAVIOURAL ECONOMICS OF EXPERIENCE Applying the logic of "why we stay" or "why we choose" to the messy, non-logical parts of human life, like conversations that last three hours or why certain cities feel like exile.

BEHAVIOURAL GROUNDING My practice of anchoring editorial narratives in empirical psychological frameworks. It is a transition from "subjective advice" to "objective truth," to give the reader a structural foundation—rooted in science—to support their personal evolution.

CADENCE Organisations are told that consistent publishing creates authority. This is backwards. Consistent thinking creates authority, which then justifies consistent publishing. Publishing on cadence without the intellectual infrastructure to support it produces only the appearance of activity. The question is not "How often should we publish?" The question is "Do we have something worth saying often enough to sustain a publication?"

CARTOGRAPHIES OF ATTENTION My signature methodology. The belief that where we look (and where we refuse to look) is the most honest map of who we are. It’s the study of what holds our attention, especially when we insist it doesn’t matter.

CLARITY The absence of evasion. The discipline of saying what you actually mean in language that cannot be misunderstood. Clarity is rare because it is dangerous. To be clear is to be disagreeable to someone. Clarity is the first requirement of intellectual authority. If you cannot say what you think clearly, you either do not know what you think or you do not have the courage to say it.

COUNTER-INTUITIVE FLIP The structural pivot in a piece of writing where an established expectation is inverted to reveal a deeper utility. It is the "Aha!" moment where a source of anxiety is reframed as a source of relief.

CULTURAL INTELLIGENCE The practiced awareness of audience context, norms, and subtleties that shape how ideas land.

CULTURAL SYNTHESIS My intentional layering of modern phenomena with historical, anthropological, or philosophical precedents to remove the "newness" from an idea to reveal its timelessness. It is the craft of proving that our modern struggles are part of a much older, more graceful human story.

DISCIPLINE The capacity to maintain standards when velocity demands compromise. Editorial discipline means killing good sentences that weaken the paragraph, cutting interesting tangents that blur the thesis, and refusing to publish when the work is not ready.

DRIFT The opposite of discipline: content or strategy that reacts to trends instead of vision. It happens when organisations stop asking "What do we think?" and start asking "What performs well?" The drift is reversible, but reversal requires acknowledging the problem and accepting that the solution is structural, not tactical.

EDITOR The person who asks "Is this clear? Is this true? Is this necessary?" before publication. Organisations often publish without editors. They have "content managers" who ensure cadence but not quality. This is why most organisational publishing is forgettable. An editor is not a copywriter, not a proofreader, not an approver. An editor is the institutional guardian of intellectual standards.

ENGAGEMENT Clicks, likes, shares, comments. The metrics platforms provide to convince organisations they are succeeding. Engagement measures attention, not authority. Organisations addicted to engagement metrics become incapable of producing work that matters over time. They optimise for the dopamine hit rather than the structural trace.

EXCAVATION VS AMPLIFICATION Two competing modes of attention in modern life. Amplification: making things louder, more visible, more viral—the machinery of being seen. Excavation: digging beneath surface explanations to find the behavioural truth underneath.

FALLOW, THE The necessary emptiness that precedes creation.

GEOGRAPHY OF FEAR Borrowed from Adrienne Rich; The atlas of avoidance we build around pain.

INCUBATION The period of apparent inactivity necessary for the unconscious mind to integrate disparate experiences into insight.

INDUSTRIAL CLOCK, THE The internalised pressure to be constantly productive, stemming from industrial-era management and the Protestant work ethic.

INHERITED NORMAL Conditions accepted as natural because they were never presented as choices.

INTELLECTUAL AUTHORITY The central value proposition. The capacity to be taken seriously based on demonstrated thought leadership rather than transactional presence. The state of deserving attention rather than demanding it.

INTELLECTUAL INTIMACY The goal of my work. The specific, visceral click that happens when someone finds language for a feeling you’ve had but could never name.

INTELLECTUAL SPINE The fundamental architecture of an organisation's thinking. Not merely messaging or communication, but the structural framework that supports all external expression.

INTELLECTUAL VITALITY The quality of content that prioritises psychological depth over surface-level utility. Writing that seeks to expand capacity for thought. The hallmark of work that refuses to be "content" and insists on being "contribution."

INVOLUNTARY HONESTY The body's refusal to sustain concealment.

JARGON Specialised language that excludes non-specialists. Sometimes necessary. Often lazy. Technical jargon (legal, medical, engineering) exists because precision requires it. Corporate jargon (synergy, leverage, impact) exists because clarity is dangerous. Organisations might use jargon to sound sophisticated while saying nothing. The test: can you explain this concept to an intelligent outsider without using the jargon? If not, you do not understand it well enough to use it.