Use AI. Break AI. Go Beyond.
For the most intractable challenges, you need something different. Something your competition doesn’t have or won’t do, something you can’t do in your organization. Heterodox methods and ways of thinking that AI can’t produce and that break the norms of your operations. We use AI until it breaks, then go beyond, to deliver insight, foresight, and action.
Our enemy is path-dependence.
Costly Mistakes
Everyone wanted to believe the future was green. Data showed that’s where money was headed.
The infrastructure never arrived, investment granted and allocated doesn’t equal investment manifest, and behavior matters.
The vehicle as a connected device, built on the paradigm of software and mobile devices. Automotive leadership desperately wanted to keep up with Palo Alto, safety wasn’t sexy enough. But what’s less sexy is retooling hardware and litigation.
The future won’t always look like the future, it may just look like chatting.
The Metaverse was a dramatic error, setting Meta behind on the AI race having chased an image of the future rather than the next immediate step in human interaction.
What we offer
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We assemble a bespoke team of experts, practitioners, and catalysts from diverse disciplines and unorthodox intellectual backgrounds.
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We start with custom AI-enabled analysis and push it until it breaks. We move beyond with Speculative Design Fiction, Futures and Foresight, Transcendental Anthropology, and experimental ethnography.
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Diagonal thinking drawn from anthropology, philosophy, art, theology, and literature.
What you get
Mythic Cartography
We exist within mythic structures - governed by culture, ideology, and legacy frameworks. And so does AI. AI is trained with opaque rules and data sets that govern what’s sayable, what interpretations are available, and what conclusions are permissible. From within these durable interpretive structures, it’s next to impossible to notice what’s missing, taken-for-granted, and assumed.
We will swiftly map the mythic landscape around your organization and category, locate your organization, and reveal what gaps and perspectives you’re missing, why your product or strategy isn’t resonating, and what you can do about it.
Four Truths and the Lie
We are misled everyday, not necessarily intentionally. AI doesn’t merely hallucinate, it reproduces the ideology and mythic structure embedded in its training data and programmed by its builders.
Traditional market research misleads too, it’s subject to the same ideological and mythic interpretive frameworks that reproduce what’s easy to observe, easy to measure, and easy to say - and interprets those within the ideological structure we see collapsing all around us.
We will decode the Four Types of Truth that govern your work, reveal the one lie that’s holding you back, and expose the shadow future you can now avoid.
Luminous Futures
If the future you build is merely the reproduction of failing mythologies at ever faster rates, you are identical to your competitors and will be commoditized at the speed of AI.
More data, faster synthesis, and tighter metrics will narrow your aperture, building path-dependence to sameness.
We will open the aperture so you can see what your competition cannot, or won’t dare to. We will identify a new horizon and the path to get there, landing on the vision and roadmap that cuts diagonally across the conventional category landscape.