Violence today, no matter its form, is never just an act but a performance. When words fail, violence feeds the spectacle; its power lies less in the harm it causes than in how it is staged, shared, and consumed as part of the “real.”
“If you’re not confused, you’re not paying attention.”
Murphy’s Law of Combat (Vietnam Era)
The opposite is also true: If you are paying attention, you are most likely confused, and if you are confused, you’re an easy target for the unscrupulous.
The creation and exploitation of confusion has become, sadly, the default business model of not just social media, but anywhere negotiation has leverage. There is little profit in certainty.
Power often lies in arbitrage, exploiting gaps in what people know. Those with asymmetric information can move faster, frame narratives, and extract advantage before others catch up. Like financial traders, they profit only while the gap lasts; once the information spreads, the opportunity closes, and a new gap is needed.
“The wise man does at once what the fool does finally,” wrote Machiavelli. John Boyd later gave this logic a structure in his OODA loop: observe, orient, decide, act. Information arbitrage works when a leader uses asymmetric information to move through that cycle faster than rivals, acting while others are still deliberating. They reshape the field, forcing everyone else to play catch-up.
It poses critical questions to us as we choose whom to follow when faced with uncertainty. There are myriad fools out there vying for our attention, from politicians to organisations to intermediaries like recruiters and influencers, all relying on us to be the bigger fool. Like counterfeiters, they make their profit on the first sale, with no downstream exposure. Too often, we are not clients; we are the confidence tricksters’ mark.
The situation is hardly new; Thomas Middleton’s city comedy “A Mad World, My Masters” was first performed in 1605. The phrase itself was already proverbial in Middleton’s day, and his play title suggests he was drawing on a well-worn saying about folly, greed, and social corruption.
“He that deceives me once, it’s his fault; but if twice, it’s my fault.”
George Herbert’s Jacula Prudentum (1640):
We can all be fooled once. How do we avoid being fooled twice?
As someone who has been fooled more than twice, I feel able to comment. We are most easily fooled when we want to believe, when the source appears trustworthy, or when we feel rushed and cannot verify the facts. Add a touch of ego, a sprinkling of social proof, a hint of flattery, just enough ambiguity, a good dash of wilful blindness, and we are ideal raw material. Deception thrives in the gaps between what we hope is true and what we have the time, or the courage, to test.
When there are so many aspects that leave us vulnerable to deception, where do we begin? Whilst there is no rule, process, or get-out-of-jail-free card, I suggest the most significant single factor is our capacity to act as ourselves, rather than play the part assigned to us by others. John Kay and Mervyn King suggest the best defence against being fooled is to pause and ask, “What is really going on here?” We are most vulnerable when time is short, peers pull us into conformity, information is narrow, and our own desires tip the scales. In radical uncertainty, we can’t compute the right answer, but we can create better narratives by slowing down, widening our circle, and checking our motivations. That shift turns confusion into sense-making and protects us from easy deception. Easier said than done in a world of work governed by overt and covert performance surveillance, when the sense of being measured is amplified by the potential for us to be, whether or not we are.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie
Lord of the Rings. JRR Tolkien.Suppose desire, ego, conformity, ambiguity, wilful blindness, lack of information, mistrust and uncertainty are deception’s “rings of power”. In that case, urgency is the magic that creates the one ring to rule them all.
And the way to break the magic is to find a space to spend time with ourselves, in the company of others.
We need sanctuary.
The Nature of Sanctuary.
Sanctuary has always meant more than just shelter; it is a space set apart, governed by different rules, where protection and mercy outweigh punishment and fear. From ancient temples and biblical cities of refuge, to medieval churches that offered fugitives a respite from the relentless machinery of justice. Sanctuary has stood as a buffer, a breathing space between danger and safety, and between vengeance and forgiveness.
In today’s workplace, the idea translates into environments where people can step outside the noise and pressure of performance, shielded from retaliation or judgment, and given room to recover, reflect, and speak honestly. It is less about escape than about restoration: the creation of physical, psychological, and social spaces where our humanity is sheltered from the harsher edges of organisational life. In this sense, sanctuary from work becomes not indulgence, but necessity; a vital counterpart to the performative spaces that can drain us. It is about allowing people to sustain themselves in every sense of their being.
Its history reminds us that the protection of sanctuary has always existed on two levels: the short reprieve that buys time in a crisis, and the longer refuge that provides a foundation for renewal. In medieval England, forty days of sanctuary offered space to decide between justice and exile, while the great chartered sanctuaries created communities of lasting shelter.
Modern work needs the same balance; moments of pause where people can step back from pressure, and enduring cultures of trust that let them harness their best selves without fear. Both are forms of sanctuary, and both are essential if we are to find work that matters.
One of the challenges of performative work environments is what happens to the qualities that enable performance, but cannot be measured and recorded. Qualities like care, empathy, humour, and curiosity are central to healthy growth. Yet, we sideline them in favour of the more mechanistic behaviours of extraction from what we already know or have because it is less risky in the short-term rhythm of shareholder returns.
I think sanctuary is a powerful notion when it comes to exploring rather than exploiting. The spaces we typically overlook —those quiet corners where people feel genuinely safe, where the sacred mingles with the everyday, may be our most fertile ground for serendipity. Research is beginning to reveal what many of us sense intuitively: that sanctuary environments, whether they're contemplative gardens, third places between work and home, or simply psychologically safe spaces where vulnerability is rewarded, create conditions where unexpected connections flourish.
It's not just about chance encounters. Sanctuaries operate as liminal spaces where normal boundaries soften, allowing the pressure to perform to give way to a permission to explore. David Cleevely's work on engineering serendipity suggests that our most transformative discoveries often emerge not from frantic networking or brainstorming sessions, but from spaces that first restore us, then connect us.
Technology reshapes not just jobs, but entire work ecosystems. I'm curious about the implications for how we design for innovation outside the walls of organisations whose immediate response to what technology is offering is to try to cage it rather than harness it. This defensive response is a reflection of what has happened at every technology inflexion point, from writing (key concern - it removed the need for old people as wisdom keepers), through printing (the erosion of clerical authority as the moderators of truth), to the industrial revolution, the internet and globalisation, and now AI. In every case, the defensive incumbents gradually disappeared as the emergent technology matured. Pivotal is that growth from new technology comes not from its adoption by incumbents but rather through the innovation of emergent networks.
In his book, “The Quiet Before”, Gal Beckerman suggests that the ideas fueling revolutions have traditionally been conceived in quieter spaces, in the small, secluded corners where a vanguard can whisper among themselves, imagine alternate realities, and deliberate about how to achieve their goals.
I find the concept of “generative sanctuary” appealing because, for most of us, performative cultures generally lack the patience or the culture to support it. Neither do “Mastermind Groups”, driven as they are by expectation, nor business schools, for the same reason (if you’re paying six-figure fees, loans are hungry things).
If we are to hatch the generous, generative ideas that move us forward, it will not be inside organisations wedded to shareholder returns.
Between here and
I have written over 1500 posts as exercises in “thinking out loud”. A philosophy of what work is becoming is emerging from them. It aligns with what Hannah Arendt articulated so beautifully: that modern life threatens both intimate privacy and genuine public engagement. It traps us in what she called the 'social realm', spaces of administered behaviour where we perform roles rather than reveal ourselves.Sanctuary spaces might restore what Arendt called the 'space of appearance.' A place where those for whom work is an expression of self can act in concert with each other and the broader community through authentic conversation and collaborative creation.
Why We Need Sanctuary
One of the key threads running through my posts has been the idea of capacity; something fundamentally different from the productivity maximisation that dominates our working culture. What has become clear is that real capacity cannot be developed within performative environments that demand constant output. Generative capacity requires something like sanctuary: protected spaces where we can operate according to different principles.
Genuine capacity isn't about pushing to our limits but about creating sustainable space for observation, learning, and recovery. True capacity means becoming stronger through uncertainty rather than merely surviving it. Effectiveness more than blind efficiency. This kind of capacity development benefits from sanctuary conditions, spaces governed by mercy rather than measurement, where the pressure to perform gives way to permission to explore.
What sanctuary enables is the symbiotic relationship between capacity, authority, attention, and connection. I've written about how artisans develop this capacity for attention through seemingly simple practices: journaling, walking the same route daily, creating space to sense what's changing. These aren't productivity techniques, they're sanctuary practices that restore what Hannah Arendt called our capacity for authentic action. The central challenge I keep returning to is how we create time and space for what I call "quiet time"—that essential reflective capacity that connects us to our thread, when business cultures demand frantic urgency.
My conclusion has become stark: this essential practice cannot be found "at work." It requires the intentional cultivation of sanctuary away from the perpetual rush toward performance. Not as escape from responsibility, but as the foundation that makes genuine responsibility possible. Sanctuary doesn't diminish our capacity for action, it restores the conditions where the capacity to do what we need to can develop.
I recognise that this is more easily written than done, and am currently working on creating a space where we can start.
Work is changing in ways that are not yet clear. The passion for using AI to replace jobs, before we really understand how it might affect work ecosystems, is a recipe for confusion. Understanding what gets “lost in transition” will be something we experience as it happens. The opportunities it opens up for us humans will be as varied as they are unpredictable.
It will feel like chaos (and already does for many).
We need Sanctuary.
Over the next couple of months, I am going to be following my own advice to simplify and lighten. I am considering how to align what I do here and at more effectively, to provide a space for sanctuary for what promises to be a challenging 2026. Whilst I’m doing that. I have paused paid subscriptions to both blogs, and will make all content free whilst I think out loud in your company….
Some Posts I Appreciated This Week
And finally, there are those, like
, making a difference, who deserve our support.