Business ethnography.

Follow the idea through the organisation.

A team has an unfamiliar idea. It needs work before anyone can judge it. The manager needs a clear recommendation for tomorrow’s meeting. The next person up needs three bullet points. Somewhere along the way, the interesting part disappears.

I’m interested in those moments: the gap between what an organisation says it wants and what everyday working life makes possible. Who gets listened to? What earns someone a promotion? Which questions are awkward to ask? What do different teams believe the future will look like—and what happens when those beliefs collide?

Through observation, conversations and research, I follow the relationships, decisions and small accommodations that make an organisation work. They help explain why a strategy takes hold, gets quietly rewritten or never leaves the document.

The institutional filtering of the future.

In five years as a Senior Futurist at Dstl, I repeatedly encountered a problem: an unfamiliar future needs time to develop before its importance becomes clear, but it is asked to justify that time before the work has been done.

Stranger possibilities take longer to explain and can make the person presenting them look foolish. At each level, the pressure is to shorten, substantiate and make acceptable. People learn what survives—and start filtering their own ideas before they put them forward.

The futures that reach the final report may tell us as much about the organisation’s requirements as about what could happen. I call this the institutional filtering of the future.

There is no clever method that makes this tension disappear. But we can investigate where the filtering happens, what it removes, and which possibilities deserve the time to be developed. Someone needs to champion the futures that don’t make it into the futures reports.

What we do with what we find.

The point is to make different choices possible. We bring competing assumptions into the open, examine what people stand to gain or lose, and identify where a proposed change runs into the organisation’s actual incentives.

That understanding feeds into strategy, implementation and the story people tell about the change. It can also shape a scenario or a workshop: put people inside the dilemma and let them discover why another team sees it differently.

With Speculative Edge.

I co-founded Speculative Edge with Simon Willis. I bring investigative filmmaking, scientific and technical expertise, and futures work. Simon brings experience shaping policy, leading innovation and changing institutions across HM Treasury, Cisco, Mastercard and The Young Foundation.

We work on emerging technology, power and social change, with a particular interest in AI ethics, control and limits. Who gets to decide what an AI does? Whose judgement does it learn? What happens when a useful system becomes something people can no longer afford to refuse?

Simon and I lead each commission personally, bringing in other experts as needed.