Co-creating What We Can't Find
The Potential of Conscious Dialogue
The liminal space where matter meets metaphor also marks an intersection of my intellectual enthusiasms with one of the greatest needs in the marketplace: Individually, institutionally and collectively, we are scrambling to adjust to the ever-widening gap between our stories and our realities.
When Thomas Huxley wrote that it's sad to see a beautiful theory killed by an ugly fact, the witticism seemed adequate for his time. But, in our time, the killing of theory by reality has accelerated to a high-frequency genocide, and the resulting deficit of orienting structures has left us adrift in a flood of epistemic anarchy. As people and organizations at risk of drowning in this flood, we frantically scan intellectual history and the horizon of discovery to find a DYI manual for building a Noah's Ark, but we mostly find descriptions of the water.
Some of these descriptions may entice us with their beauty and precision, but we want and need something beyond mere description. We want and need a way to respond to our predicament. In this yearning, we are pained by the obsolescence of the pre-scripted responses that still govern our sclerotic institutions and established schools of thought.
M2 Dialogue is an invitation to:
Co-create what we can't find either in our intellectual history or on the frontiers of discovery.
Step away from grand theories and use dialogue as a path to context-sensitive epistemic clarity.
Exit the cage of categories that limits the potential of dialogue in the context of traditional business consulting, psychotherapy, academic and mythopoetic discourse.
Until recently, our stories seemed cryogenically frozen, while the emergence of new realities propelled us toward ineffable event horizons. But something started to shift, and then it shifted again and again, until we could no longer deny the crumbling of our epistemic order and the irrepressible quest for new cartographies of our terra incognita. For me, these shifts started in 2013, and by 2016, I quit my last "real job" to pursue my quest.
So, M2 grew out of the last six years (2016-2022) of my 26-year corporate career, a lifelong study of the psyche, and a decade-long struggle with Understanding Media. For at least the past six years, I pursued a two-pronged agenda of self-directed deschooling and re-education: I unlearned many of the lessons I had internalized, and I learned to speak about emerging realities not yet reflected in the language of institutional consensus.
Self-directed re-education is a lifelong cyclical process. However, the six-year cycle that ended for me at the end of 2022 had several special qualities incomparable to past back-to-school adventures. Two of these special qualities help shape the editorial mission of M2.
First, through M2, I want to "find the others", as Terence McKenna might say. In this context, the essential quality of "the others" is an appreciation of the redemptive potential of dialogue as a response to the catastrophic pollution of our media ecology. Whether they join M2 as subscribers, Founding Members or contributors, I think of them as synapses in a growing neural network, and I am deeply grateful for their interest and investment.
In my initial attempts to find the others, circa 2019-2020, I turned to Substack as a "blog" that simply offered a few attractive features that distinguished it from WordPress, Medium and other "social media". For about a year, I enjoyed whispering my truths into the din of the Attention Economy, and I attracted a small cadre of subscribers, and even a single paying subscriber.
By contrast to my initial stint on Substack, I don't think of M2 as either a blog, a newsletter or a podcast. I think of it as a space or sphere hospitable to the sensibilities of the neural network of kindred spirits drawn to the promise of dialogue. In this space, there's no advertising, no algorithms governing the journey of messages across the synaptic cleft. Finding the others is such a precious gift that I shudder at the thought of exposing it to the toxicities of the media ecology.
The second aspect of my re-education that affects the editorial mission of M2 is the blurring of boundaries between the personal and the professional. In contrast to my corporate jobs in the past, I no longer hide behind the veneer of objectivity and formality, and I no longer separate my "creative work" from gainful employment.
My "Investor Relations"
Cutting through the Gordian Knot of these false dichotomies helps me think of everyone drawn to M2 as an investor, including the free subscribers investing their attention, the "connectors" investing their word of mouth, subscribers investing $5 a month, and Founding Members (aka Clients) investing $1,000 a month or more.
Having started my professional career in Investor Relations (IR), I have thought deeply about the meaning of this phrase and the special resonance it has acquired amid the redefinition of value and risk. My most important message to all my investors is that, regardless of its form, their investment gives me joy and energy, and it fuels my exploration of the M2 path to our New Story.