The Context Feed
Strategy is shaped by what we pay attention to.
This is what's alive in Joel's mind right now — what he's reading, making, listening to, asking.
It sets the tone for everything See Context does.
Updated as the mood strikes.
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Currently Reading
Think Before You Think: Social Complexity and Knowledge of Knowing
Stafford Beer & David Whittaker
A significant selection of papers & talks relating to cybernetics & systems theory from Stafford Beer (one of the great holistic thinkers of recent times).
Theory
Education
Power
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On Rotation
Adam Kahane
Business
Self-improvement
Bill Sharpe
Podcasts
Theory
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Turning Over
The Palimpsest and the Sword, On the Topology of Civilization and the Heroic Error of the Sword
Léon de Sailly
Architecture
Metaphysics
Robert Mariani
Discord
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Writing
I’m finding myself constantly editing and shaping these days.
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On the Calendar
Context Salon · Summer Edition
Hosted by See Context · Format: intimate, unrecorded
We bring up to 30 people into a room to discuss topics of philosophy, history, behavioral science, design, and lived experience. Not to agree. To think better.
Event
Salon
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Next Salon
The Three Horizons is a simple but powerful tool for navigating complexity and change.
Friday, June 19, 2026 @ 8 a.m. CST.
Please join us for free via Zoom.
Event
Salon
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Making
A Framework for Communal Intelligence
See Context · Internal architecture
Not a methodology. Not a process. A way of seeing that other people can borrow long enough to see differently too.
Frameworks
In the Lab
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Working Notes
“Context is not background. Context is the argument that leads to the collaborative solution.”
– Joel Van Kuiken, 2024
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Current Obsessions
What’s pulling at him right now. The connective tissue between disparate things — what links them is usually the real subject.
Narrative infrastructure
Trust as technology
Sense-making
Institutional silence
Collective memory
Craft economics
The editorial instinct
What salons make possible
The feed updates when Joel’s thinking does.