SITUATION LITERACY

30 January 2026: Early days of converting a complete system in my mind into words on a page. You can watch it develop daily, if it’s of interest, or ask me questions.

The Gist

All complex situations have a shared anatomy, and can be mapped and explored via this anatomy for information and inspiration. AI (eg ChatGPT) can do this to a breadth, depth and nuance way beyond any human ability, yet keep it manageable to explore and provide you with a solid mental framework.

Why you might find this useful

What is this situation? Pretty well anything: from designing an effective kitchen layout; to understanding your business’s market position and options; to adding depth and coherence to your film script; to understanding how Farage is farming grievance to deliver a de-regulated UK to foreign wealth.

Given a complex situation, there are perhaps four main concerns or interests:

1. Maintaining stability while all around seems to be changing
2. Finding new opportunities (for oneself or the competitors)
3. Examining why your efforts are not producing results but instead unintended consequences and backlash
4. Understanding the topic at both high level and nuance.

In all this AI is an intense spotlight, allowing you to see further. However, it is a process, requiring the development of its ‘thoughtscape’ of the situation. My nearest metaphor for that: AI sits in the library of all human knowledge, but it has only read the index pages – so if you ask it directly, it will produce banal, unnuanced answers. This is the process of getting it to read all the relevant information, to surface the weak signals and emergent properties that are so hard to see – and are the usual source of both blind-siding and intense creativity.

The Anatomy

Framework: what is (largely) fixed in the situation.
Field: what moves and flows through the situation.
Shadow: what is unseen, ignored or marginalised in the situation.
Ecosystems: the n-dimensional Venn of intersecting ecosystems in play for this situation.

Coming soon: more anatomy description and examples. How any apocalypse, disaster, thriller and success/resilience movie can be understood through this lens.