SenseMakingLens is a long-form analytical project about orientation under uncertainty: how people, institutions, and societies perceive reality, misread it, and how they may be able to recover the capacity to act intelligently within it.
SenseMakingLens explores how to better understand what is happening and what to do through using OODA, mental models, map-and-territory failures, feedback loops, narrative capture, and multi-lens reasoning as tools for making better judgements in complex systems.
How individuals and institutions build their picture of reality, why that picture so often goes wrong, and how better orientation changes what becomes possible.
How inherited categories, assumptions, and prestige narratives shape judgement long after they have ceased to describe the world accurately.
How complex events become more intelligible when approached through several lenses at once rather than a single ideological, institutional, or disciplinary frame.
How people and societies may recover strategic coherence once their existing maps, narratives, and incentives no longer fit the territory they face.
This fourteen-essay series serves as the first major demonstration of the SenseMakingLens approach, applying it to fifth-generation warfare, demographic fragmentation, deindustrialisation, energy policy, information warfare, institutional lock-in, and the problem of re-orientation.
Introducing Boyd's OODA framework as the primary diagnostic tool for understanding how the West lost a fifth-generation war it did not recognise it was fighting.
Read on Substack →How multi-lens analysis works in practice: breaking complex events into constituent causal layers and reassembling them into a more accurate picture of reality.
Read on Substack →How reinforcing feedback loops accelerate institutional decay, narrative capture, and strategic blindness — and why they are so difficult to interrupt once established.
Read on Substack →The full fourteen-essay series — covering demographic fragmentation, deindustrialisation, energy policy, information warfare, institutional lock-in, and re-orientation — is free to read on Substack.
Read all essays →Economist and analyst based in Portugal. Former senior roles across trade policy, tax reform, rail economics, housing strategy, and national security analysis in the UK and Australia.
SenseMakingLens grew out of a single question: how does a society lose a war it does not recognise it is fighting? The answer leads directly to Boyd's concept of orientation — and to the project of rebuilding it.
Full biography and influences →Free to read. Free to share.
Subscribe on Substack to receive new essays as they are published. The series to date is free. Clear thinking in a world of manufactured confusion.
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