Twenty-five years of the same question

How do you help people navigate situations that exceed the available maps? The question took shape around 1999 and has run through the work since. Most entries below point to a dated page, layout, or recording.

• Early 1990s. At about 13, a sense that school was oddly dystopian, and that the Internet would change how knowledge is found and made.
• 1999–2001. Work at RightNow Technologies on web customer-service software built around an FAQ knowledge base, including a simple phrase search. Colleagues later developed it into a self-learning system. The tools routed and classified problems for institutions, but the situations that mattered most didn’t fit the categories.
• 2002. A self-directed alternative to college, with an open-ended assignment from a family member: find the knowledge and explain the plans, in monthly reports judged on breadth and depth of knowledge, a coherent outline, and plain English as George Orwell defined it in “Politics and the English Language.” It came with a copy of Dostoevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor.” The search turned up many reference points, and showed how much of the knowledge needed wasn’t being produced yet.
• 2004. The first dialogue-mapping sheets: word-bubble layouts tracking where conversations stall, including what was said, what was meant, and where it broke down.
• 2011. Wall and table layouts linking books, songs, videos, games, and life decisions. A July layout already includes An Atlas of Interpersonal Situations (Kelley and colleagues, 2003), still a core reference here.
• 31 December 2011. The project’s earliest recordings, “Decision Chain and Reality Editing” and “Brain Vlog,” made the same day: decision chains, consequence chains, and reality-TV editing as a way to think about interpretation.
• 2012. Video dialogues on the YouTube channel now called Personality Epistemology in Liminal Times, where “meanwhile” is already a recurring frame. “Wearing 20 Hats” (March) names the problem at the center of this site: too many roles, and no one who sees the full picture. Stanford’s online course Designing a New Learning Environment, where Paul Kim taught needs analysis: get to know the people before designing for them.
• 2013–2014. “Many-Person Situation” (September 2013) describes holding several people’s needs, communication patterns, and conflicting priorities at once. Two 2014 whiteboard videos define Screenstorming, a term coined in 2012: time-boxed collaborative brainstorming, consultation across many perspectives, and personal learning networks. Google Hangouts with five to eight people at a time, working on projects from the transforming-education world.
• 2016–2018. Years of working through complex, many-person situations from the inside, building skills that have no job title: reading a situation from several positions at once and tracking it over years.
• 2019–2021. Work with the Institute for the Development of Human Arts on transformative mental health education, including a proposal to replace Mental Health First Aid with training that centers lived experience. A 2021 essay, “From Knowledge Vacuum to Epistemic Overwhelm to Collaborative Sensemaking,” gathers the work’s lineage for the first time, from the history of education and psychiatry to trauma research.
• 2022. Dated concept maps work out a triage taxonomy (calamity, tragedy, drama, karma) and trace how pressure piles up into liminality.
• 2023–2024. Short videos from a cliffhanger moment in 2023, expecting there would be ways forward: “the whole world is in an unusual state of liminality.” A June 2023 post, “Narrative-informed Causal Competence,” names Fog of Story: as with the fog of war in a strategy game, much of a situation starts out hidden, and more comes into focus as people share what they know, piece by piece: what happened, and what to do next. Many of the patterns on this site get their names in working sessions with AI, both ChatGPT and Claude.
• 2025–2026. The work is published as Story Dynamics: four-page templates, conversation fork cards, a Substack, and this site. A field-journal page from 26 September 2025 still maps a situation by hand: about fifteen people around shared decision points.

The work took this long because it couldn’t be done from outside. The patterns had to be lived, logged, and tested under the conditions they describe.