Find what you didn’t know you were looking for

What I do

Your team probably already has someone who brings the outside in, the one who sends the “have you seen this?” link. I read more widely than anyone on a team has time to, and what I find gives them, and everyone else, more to work with. It comes in two forms.

How it works

1. We start with a conversation about your organisation, the question on your mind and what your team already follows, so I know where your field of view stops.
2. I watch your sector and everything around it, through the sources I’ve built up over the years and new ones specific to your question, and keep what could matter to you.
3. You get what I find as a report on what the observations add up to, or as a newsletter that keeps them coming. Both are written for your team to read and discuss.
4. Your team puts it to work: as input for a workshop or a strategy session, a brief for a new project, a check on plans already under way, a way to define and support a new prototype, or the start of a conversation that wasn’t on the agenda.

I’m not your industry expert

The ideas that change a field often appear somewhere else first. You and your team know your sector in depth, and I won’t pretend to. My own depth is in technology: how it’s built, who owns it, and what it does to work, culture and society. I bring that, along with what sits around your sector: early signs of change that haven’t been framed yet, and practices from distant sectors that could transfer to yours. Your expertise decides what matters; my job is to find what you might otherwise miss.

Who this is for

For people responsible for where an organisation goes next: heads of strategy, innovation or programming, agency partners, directors of cultural and public organisations, especially where technology is changing the work, the product or the audience. It usually starts at a moment of change: a new planning cycle, a product or programme to rethink, or a sense that the usual sources have stopped turning up anything new. It works best for teams who want material to think with.

My background

I’ve always been the one who reads widely and passes things on. It became my work in 2012, when we launched The Alpine Review, an award-winning print magazine whose motto was “Observing the things that matter.” Since then I’ve written more than 400 weekly issues of Sentiers, covering AI, climate, cities, economics, speculative fiction and much in between. I’ve also written almost as many bulletins and briefings for clients, including Braindate, C2 Montréal, Fab City, CloudRaker, the NFB and Biron. I helped launch la Société des demains, a foresight studio, and still work with its team on longer projects that follow a full foresight process. Check us out for that type of work.