By Lily Kozlowska

Marta inherited her grandmother’s garden and almost killed it with kindness.

She could not bring herself to cut anything. Every branch had grown for a reason, and cutting felt like punishment, like telling a living thing it had done something wrong. So, she let it all stay, and slowly the roses stopped flowering and the fruit trees grew long, leafy branches that never gave any fruit. The plant was using all its energy just to grow bigger, and had nothing left to actually flower.

An old neighbour watched this for a season, then handed her a pair of garden scissors and said something she did not expect. You are not cutting the plant back, he told her, you are choosing where it goes next.

Rejection works in much the same way, though almost nobody describes it kindly while it is happening.

We are told, endlessly, that rejection is redirection. It is written on posts and repeated at every conference, and it is not wrong, exactly, but hearing it in the middle of a fresh rejection is almost unbearable, because it arrives calm and tidy at the exact moment you don’t feel that way at all. I think it feels comforting because it leaves the person out of it, but pruning is never that easy, because you are always cutting something that is still alive.

Here is the part the phrase leaves out. A gardener does not cut the weak branches because they are worthless, and often the ones they cut are perfectly healthy. The branch being removed has done nothing wrong; it has simply grown in a direction the whole plant cannot afford to keep feeding, so the cut is not really about the branch at all, but a decision about the shape of the thing that remains.

That reframing matters, because most of us experience rejection as a judgement on our worth: not good enough, not wanted, not chosen. But a great deal of what gets cut in a life is cut for reasons that have almost nothing to do with the quality of the person. Timing, the season, the shape someone else is trying to grow into, the wall inside a company that has been there far longer than you have. You can be a strong, healthy branch and still find yourself growing where the plant simply cannot follow.

There is a harder truth folded into this, and it is worth being honest about it. Sometimes the cut is fair, and sometimes we are genuinely not ready, not yet grown into the thing we were reaching for, stretching for light we have not grown tall enough to hold. That is not an insult either, because a plant that is never pruned stays small and tangled and safe, and growth in one direction almost always asks us to lose something in another. Nobody blooms in every direction at once.

The mistake is not being pruned. The mistake is Marta’s first instinct, the refusal to let anything be cut at all, staying big and busy and “unbloomed” because loss of any kind feels like failure. The people who handle rejection well are not the ones who feel it less, but the ones who understand that a cut is information about direction, not a sentence passed on their value.

What a good gardener never does is decide, after one hard winter, that the plant is finished. They wait and watch where the new growth actually wants to go, and the following season, more often than not, the thing flowers exactly where the cut was made.

The branch does not get to see that in the moment it is removed, and neither do we. That is the whole difficulty of it, and also the whole point.

This article is entirely written by Anthropic’s Claude, prompted to create a polemical critique of the SWISSUES Forvm Podcast discussion on Hive Mind.

There are moments in every organization’s when a senior person signs an important document. Pens are produced. Photographs may be taken. Someone says “this is a big moment for the company.”

It is not a big moment. It is a funeral. The decision died weeks ago, and this is the wake.

That, more or less, was the provocation dropped into a recent SWISSUES Forvm on the Hive Mind — the idea that organizations think and decide collectively, without anyone ever formally deciding anything. One contributor put it with admirable bluntness: decision-makers aren’t overrated, but the mythology around them is. Most executive decisions, she argued, are simply the final stage of a process the organization completed long ago. By the time it reaches the C-suite, the organization has already decided. The signature is theatre.

That can be pushed further than anyone in the room was quite willing to.

The people who run your company have never been on an org chart

Every organization has a shadow cabinet. Not villains, not conspirators — just the analyst who frames the business case so the “obvious” answer is the one they wanted, the engineer who defines the problem in a way that pre-selects the solution, the person three levels down whom everyone, inexplicably, checks with before anything happens. Nobody voted for them. Nobody appointed them. HR has no box for “informal cognitive load-bearing wall.”

And here is the uncomfortable part nobody in the room quite said out loud: your CEO knows this. Every executive who has been in the job more than eighteen months knows exactly who these people are, quietly courts them, and would be lost without them. The org chart is a legal fiction maintained for compliance purposes. The real chart is drawn in favours, trust, and who picks up the phone.

If that’s true — and I don’t think it’s a stretch — then most corporate governance is aimed at the wrong target. We audit signatures. We build approval workflows. We interrogate the person who signed. Meanwhile the actual decision was made by someone whose name appears nowhere in the minutes, who holds no budget, and who cannot be held accountable for anything, because officially they never decided a thing.

The grey men win, and the cheerleaders get the credit

Somewhere in the middle of the conversation, the group reached for a piece of corporate pop psychology — the four-colour personality model — and tried to locate the “influencer” archetype in the sunny, high-energy yellow: the communicator, the room-lightener, the cheerleader.

Someone, to their enormous credit, pushed back. What about the men in grey suits? The lobbyists? The ones who move things in one-to-one conversations in back rooms and would rather die than stand up and cheer-lead anything?

This is where the discussion touched something real and then, frustratingly, moved on. Because these are not variations on a theme — they are opposites, and mistaking one for the other is exactly how organizations get captured. The cheerleader is visible influence: loud, charismatic, rewarded, promoted, studied in leadership books. The grey man is structural influence: invisible by design, unrewarded by any formal mechanism, and consequently untouchable by any formal mechanism either. You can manage a cheerleader. You cannot manage what you have never agreed to see.

Which of the two actually runs your organization? If you had to bet your career on it, you already know the answer, and it isn’t the one your performance review process is built to identify.

“The hive rejects the transplant” — and that should terrify you more than it apparently did

The single most dangerous line in the whole sixty minutes was thrown out almost casually: a good decision, correctly made, at the top, by the right people — and it simply disappears. Not overturned. Not debated. Sabotaged silently, because the collective consciousness of the organization quietly decided it was stupid and declined to participate.

Nobody in the room lingered on this nearly long enough. This is not a story about bad execution or poor change management. This is a story about an organization possessing something functionally indistinguishable from a will of its own — one that can override a rational, well-resourced, properly authorized decision without a single person ever formally saying no. If that’s accurate, every leadership team reading this should be less worried about whether they’re making the right decisions and considerably more worried about whether their organization would let them succeed even if they did.

The bees were never the point

A lot of energy went into working out whether the beehive is a fair analogy for a company — foraging bees, nursing bees, the waggle dance, the 25–30% of bees who ignore the dance entirely and keep the hive’s options open. Charming. Also, I’d argue, a category error the whole conversation never quite escaped.

Bees have no ego, no desire for recognition, no fear of blame, no incentive to sabotage a decision they resent. Humans have all four, in abundance, and they are precisely what makes organizational “hive mind” behaviour so much stranger and more dangerous than an actual hive. The bees don’t need a “cover-my-position” clause. Your organization runs on almost nothing else. Comparing corporate decision-making to bee cognition doesn’t explain the phenomenon — it flatters it. The real mechanism here is closer to a rumour spreading through a crowd than to insect eusociality, and rumours can be started, redirected, and killed by exactly the invisible people this discussion identified and then largely let off the hook.

So who’s actually deciding things where you work?

Not a rhetorical question. If you strip away the signature, the announcement, the theatre — who, in your organization, actually shapes what happens? Name them. If you can’t, that’s not evidence they don’t exist. It’s evidence of how well they’re doing their job.

That’s the argument the room built and then declined to finish. Worth finishing. The full conversation — bees, gray men, the first follower, and a live argument about whether cognitive diversity is being quietly ignored in most companies’ diversity strategies — is on the SWISSUES Substack. Disagree with any of the above? Good. That’s what the next Forvm is for.

“Reduce variance.”

“Control the process.”

“Without standardization, no improvement.”

All are mantras of efficient operation.

Diversity means different things. This Forvm is about the cognitive kind — the sort that shows up in the same business language as divergence, deviation, dissent.

Call it something else however — innovation, originality, initiative — and suddenly it’s what every organization says it wants.

‘Standardize and conform’ or ‘Innovate and originate’. Businesses want both, from the same people, often in the same meeting. How is that reconciled — in organizations, in teams, in our own heads?

Join this SWISSUES Forvm to debate this.

No formal presentations. No agenda. Open to all. What could go wrong?

Thursday 23rd July at 18:00 CET

Register at https://luma.com/x9xiiog7

The session explored how decisions can actually form in organizations, using the “hive mind” instead of formal processes. Discussion opened by questioning whether human organizations can truly mirror bee colonies, given people’s needs for recognition and status. One view held that executive decisions are largely theatre — ratifying choices the organization has already made — while another separated “diagnosis” (idea generation, often distributed among invisible influencers) from “binding decision-making” (concentrated in accountable leaders who bear liability). A recurring tension was whether hive-style collective decisions dilute accountability and get silently sabotaged if the “collective consciousness” disagrees. The group distinguished leaders (who take responsibility) from influencers (who build buy-in), debating what motivates influencers — money, intrinsic belief, or organizational culture — and whether “leadership” is now corporate code for wanting influencers rather than executors, partly driven by AI replacing execution roles. The conversation closed on cognitive diversity and neurodiversity as strengtheners of collective intelligence, with debate over whether organizational tolerance and structured push-back are prerequisites for diverse ideas to thrive.

SWISSUES participants choose what aspects of the topic they want to address and this episode cover the following.

Credentials are not experience

Credentials and experience are routinely conflated, but they’re not the same thing — and the gap matters most where credentialing culture is light (Switzerland was raised as a case in point, against markets where degrees are the norm). A useful reframe: experience isn’t a credential at all, it’s an engine — the mechanism by which learning, adaptation, and leadership happen. Translating experience into a new context (a CV line, an interview, a lateral career move) is its own separate skill.

Experience doesn’t protect against AI-driven mistakes — it may increase the risk

A central claim of the discussion: experienced people tend to overtrust AI output more than less experienced people, because they scrutinise it less. The Air France Rio–Paris crash came up as a real-world parallel — experienced pilots over-trusting an automated system. Familiarity makes a wrong answer feel right. One proposed counter-measure: deliberately withhold the polished conclusion in decision-support tools and force users to check the underlying numbers themselves, to keep the analytical muscle alive — especially for juniors who’d otherwise never build it.

The “borrowed slide deck” problem

A vivid analogy for using AI without understanding it: presenting someone else’s slide deck, and only realising on slide three that the underlying logic can’t be explained. Most people only need that experience once before changing how they use AI.

What AI still can’t capture

A recurring theme: AI has no access to organisational culture, atmosphere, or “the room” — things only available through physical presence. AI was framed as a data engine: useful for synthesis, but entirely shaped by what humans feed into it. Humans remain the validating layer, and AI may end up freeing time for more human interaction rather than less.

A live governance question

A relayed example: someone coding extensively with AI agents who admitted he can no longer fully track what those agents are doing — raising an open question about where human oversight sits once AI-assisted work outpaces a person’s ability to review it.

Passing experience on: coach, don’t tell

Strong convergence on this point — mentoring works by walking someone through a problem so they reach their own conclusion, not by handing them the answer. (A parenting parallel: telling a child what to do rarely works as well as letting them live it.) Experience only transfers if it’s translated into terms the other person can actually use — a lawyer’s experience doesn’t help a mechanic without deliberate translation.

Closing note

Despite real enthusiasm for AI’s usefulness, the overall sense was that accumulated human judgement and wisdom aren’t replaceable yet — and may never be.

Next SWISSUES Forvm: Thursday 2 July — “Hive-Mind,” on how decisions emerge in organizations without ever being formally made.

Aleks Sidorec invited me to a CIPS Switzerland/CapGemini event, ‘The Invisible Supply Chain’, in Zurich. Unusually for such an event, speakers and panelists all agreed on a single, striking diagnosis of the problem with artificial intelligence (AI) in supply chains. The reason they are not ready for AI is lack of coordination, failure to agree priorities, poor communication, weak integration and inconsistent data. In short, the problem is silos – the inability of functions to work together.

These were twentieth century problems. We’d solved them. They were over, gone. Manufacturing, Technology, QC, QA, Procurement, Engineering, Finance, Operations and Planning would get into a room with the Supply Chain (SC) Manager as facilitator and work through the issues. Targets were set by the Operations Director. Line managers of the respective SC Team members were informed about their objectives. Job done. No fuss.

Why are silos a problem again in 2026? And how am I going to face my colleague, Markus Hoerr?

Markus tried to warn me about this. Many times – beyond my point of exhaustion and impatience. He argued long and repetitively that functional silos make supply chains unworkable. He said that silos are so ingrained into business operations – and self-protection so much part of the culture – it is pointless trying to build AI tools and technology into the present system. It is too broken. He argued that AI has to replace the system, not augment it. I told him he was mad.

That was then. After last night, I think differently. Silos are back. And something has changed since Markus last harangued me about them. It is easier now to see how current management structures could be swept away and replaced by agentic AI. How a system could continuously create and optimize SC options. How it could monitor resilience and adapt to events. How it could implement change.

What an interesting event ‘The Invisible Supply Chain’ turned out to be.

Thank you Aleks.

Sorry, Markus.

Decision-makers are over-rated. Organizations are shaped by distributed intelligence more than by direction. Formal decisions are mostly recognition of the inevitable, or continuations of a trend. Organizational change; investment decisions; technology upgrade; and cost-reduction: not outcomes of heroic board-room decisions, but evolved and active before executive approval, reflecting the way people already work - responding to market demand, maintaining technical competence and avoiding cost erosion.

There is a persistent image of a leader as someone who decides and whom others follow. This is because our memories record decision-points as consequential moments and those who make them as the arbiters of destiny. We remember the theatre of decision-making, and celebrate its main actors.

We don’t see the evolution that enabled and guided it. We miss the internal influencers who process the organization’s collective intelligence. They are the real power, even when unaware of their own agency. They may not realize why they are so often asked for their opinion. They are modest about their ability to draft a board paper that helps decision-makers to get to the ‘right’ answer. Without them, there is nothing to decide on; no proposal; no direction; no comprehension; no implementation. Internal influencers shape what gets approved. The organization is there long before the executive decision-maker.

The number of influencers varies by organization. Sometimes it is a tiny minority, but organizations with an open culture and low staff-turnover may have many. Their impact may be hard to see. It’s business as usual; the messy emergence of ideas; shared understandings; spontaneous concern about progress; running adjustments to a process. Mundane, prosaic, quotidian. Not the heroic stuff of real decision makers. But without internal influencers, there is no organization.

This is the Hivemind. It’s a term that has been used synonymously with groupthink, crowd wisdom and collective intelligence, but what does it mean and how relevant is it, in business and social contexts?

It is the theme of the next SWISSUES Forvm event on Thursday 2nd July at 18:00 CET

Want to learn more?

Here is a list of sources to get you started.

Derek Sivers, How to Start a Movement
A single dancer at a music festival becomes a movement in under three minutes. Sivers argues that it is the first follower, not the leader, who transforms a lone individual into something collective. Widely known; worth watching again with hivemind in mind.

TED Video, 3 minutes:

Thomas Seeley, Honeybee Decision Making
Seeley’s research shows how bee swarms choose a new nest site through competing advocates, inhibition signals, and quorum thresholds — a process closer to structured debate than instinct.

YouTube Video, 9 minutes:

Thomas Seeley, Honeybee Democracy
The full scientific account of how honeybee swarms make collective decisions about where to live. Seeley draws explicit parallels to human decision-making groups, and concludes that good collective decisions require shared interests, minimized leader influence, genuine debate, and diverse options.

Book description: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691147215/honeybee-democracy?srsltid=AfmBOorxZWDLiB9VLf8CSZ-k5bLmF0UidUsidxrlqo7YZTHpeSBJCg35

James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (2004)
The foundational popular text on collective intelligence. Starting from Francis Galton’s 1906 discovery that a crowd at a livestock fair guessed an ox’s weight almost exactly, Surowiecki argues that diverse, independent groups reliably outperform individual experts — under the right conditions. The conditions matter as much as the thesis.

Book description: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds

Lars Chittka, The Mind of a Bee (Princeton, 2022)
A direct challenge to the hivemind caricature: individual bees have distinct personalities, can learn by observation, count, use simple tools, and may possess rudimentary consciousness. The collective intelligence of the hive turns out to rest on something richer at the node level than anyone expected.

Book description: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691253893/the-mind-of-a-bee?srsltid=AfmBOooQMkESlIPrGVlsZ1Q4ljlPPTyZwHtdEM7qkFMb75hxeDRZIxTZ

Robert Cialdini, Influence: Science and Practice (1984)
The canonical account of why people comply, conform, and copy. His concept of social proof is probably the most direct behavioural economics entry point into hivemind dynamics. Most people in business will have encountered this; fewer will have thought of it in this context.

Book description: https://www.amazon.com/Influence-Practice-Robert-B-Cialdini/dp/0205609996

Irving L Janis, Groupthink

When the hivemind goes wrong. This is the the original study of how cohesive groups — including Kennedy’s advisors during the Bay of Pigs — make catastrophically bad decisions by suppressing internal dissent. The dark side of collective intelligence.

Original MIT summary – Readings in Managerial Psychology: https://web.mit.edu/curhan/www/docs/Articles/15341_Readings/Group_Dynamics/Janis_Groupthink.pdf

Authority vs. leadership. A key distinction emerged between positional authority (given by a role or title) and personal authority (earned through trust, respect, and demonstrated competence). This is framed as the difference between authority that is “given” and leadership that is “taken” or deserved. Several participants noted the gap between the two as a core source of dysfunction — people are granted authority without having developed the leadership to wield it well.

Situational leadership. The later part of the conversation focused on how good leaders adapt their style to context — more directive in crises, more democratic with experienced teams. The experience of a formative week-long training in exactly this was shared, and the group agreed that the ability to read a situation and shift style fluidly, drawing on experience and empathy, is what distinguishes truly effective leadership from mere positional authority.

Participants in the Forvm were: Aimilia Vasilakou, Amandine Ranciére, Fiona Revell, Gemma Masachs, Lawrence Daeppen, Lily Koslowska, Mariann Safni, Nadia Stoykovska, Ovidiu Slimavic, Pramod Prasanth and Bill Young

Background music is ‘Cinematic’ by Aylex through freetouse.com

“Aerial defenses will be knocked out in four days and, if they refuse our terms, we will destroy their whole offensive air capability and its infrastructure base in less than four weeks.” asserted the deputy commander-in-chief. He was boasting to his boss, the head of state.

The attack did not go to plan.

The deputy was clever but he was drug-addled and lazy. And he ignored the maxim of one of his predecessors, “No plan survives the first encounter with the enemy“.

The enemy in this case saw the folly of massed confrontation and chose instead to raid selected targets on which it could inflict most damage with least loss. It is not a new strategy and is typically employed defensively. It avoids direct conflict and pitched battles and has the aim of wearing down a stronger opponent gradually. The aim is to manage resources, turn time into a weapon against the invader, and define success as the avoidance of defeat.

There are many examples of the strategy through history, the first documented by Quintus Fabius Maximus1 in his harassment of Hannibal’s army during the Carthaginian wars (218BC-201BC). The Fabian strategy still bears his name and is drilled into military strategists from Day 1 of training. Politicians however, under pressure to produce quick and performative results, can never learn it. They are told what they want to hear about military superiority in numbers and technology, about the foe’s low morale, and about the enemy commanders’ willingness for a settlement. Political leaders need equanimity in order to make decisions so they select a supportive cabinet and advisors to withstand the opinions of experts.

The quote at the start is, of course, Generalfeldmarschall Hermann Goering’s advice to Reichskanzler Adolf Hitler ahead of the attack on British air bases on Adlertag (Eagle Day), 13th August 1940.

Who else…?

Britain’s Air Chief Marshal Dowding had prepared for that day. He knew the Luftwaffe’s superiority in numbers so he focused on the possible. He refused to give up aircraft to defend France. He resisted pressure from colleagues, to confront attackers en masse. He gave orders for engagement to be at the extreme of the enemy’s range when they had least fighter cover, even though it put London at risk. He had commissioned early warning radar to see raiding squadrons forming for attack. And he had developed a completely new form of command. The real-time integration of early warning radars, human spotters, and regional operational control with central coordination, unique then, would be familiar to any modern commander.

It was Helmuth von Moltke who said, “No plan survives the first encounter with the enemy“. He did NOT say you could ever discount the enemy’s resources or the need for intelligence and preparation.

You meet interesting people, polishing door handles. It’s a healthy, worthwhile occupation, and compliance assures continuing employment. No matter how carefullee a handle is polished, however, career options, life chances and personal fulfillment are limited.

Register for the Forvm discussion

Those who want more must understand authority — where it comes from, the conflicts it generates, and when to challenge it. Authority, whether drawn from tradition, charisma or rules, legitimizes power and control. Conflicts arise: between individuals, between individuals and their organization, and between citizens and the state. When is it wise, and when is it right, to push back?

Philosophers write about this — at length. Yet everyone, even without the vocabulary, observes and feels it: in hierarchy, expectations, instructions and orders; in cross-functional teams; in the daily relationship with a boss. We confront it every time we direct someone else’s actions. Everywhere we see the interplay between compliance and power, between voluntary followership and imposed sanctions.

What are your ideas and experiences? SWISSUES is holding a Forvm event on Authority — one hour of open discussion. No agenda. No formal presentations. Just you and whoever else would like to explore, listen and learn.

Register for the Forvm discussion

Anna grew up hiking. Guided trails. Coloured signs at every fork. A map you could fold into your pocket and trust. The point of hiking was the walk itself: pack light, move fast, arrive on time.

Then one summer, a friend took her up something that wasn’t a hike. The route was a suggestion rather than a path. The weather forecast was three hours old and already wrong. Halfway up, two groups ahead of them turned back without saying why. Her friend stopped, looked at the sky, looked at the snow, and said: “We go on, but slowly. And if the wind shifts, we come down.” Anna remembers thinking: nobody on a hike ever talks like this.

Mountaineering exists because hiking runs out. The trails go as far as the trails go, and beyond them the ground doesn’t follow rules. People invented a different discipline for that ground. Different equipment, different pace, different way of making decisions.

Most companies are still organized for the hike.

The trails were drawn in a different era. From the late 1990s until roughly 2019, the global business environment behaved like a guided path. Trade opened up in one direction. Interest rates fell in one direction. Globalization was treated as a one-way assumption, and supply chains were designed accordingly. The cheapest unit cost. The longest lead time the market would tolerate. The leanest inventory the balance sheet would reward. Long-range planning shrank because the future looked enough like the past that planning for divergence felt expensive.

Then the path ended. Not dramatically. In stages. COVID. Ukraine. Inflation. The Red Sea. A US tariff cycle that doesn’t follow the political logic anyone studied at business school. Middle East escalation. Each event arrived before the previous one played out. The recovery time of supply chains was longer than the gap between shocks. That is the actual change. Not that crises happen, but that they no longer leave room to recover between them.

Markets noticed first. Commodity prices that used to track supply and demand now move on what people think will happen, on political signals, on the noise around them. A buyer signing a procurement contract today is quietly betting on geopolitics, on regulation, on shipping routes that worked last year and may not next year. Most contracts and most teams were not designed for that bet.

You can see it in the shape of agreements. The classic three-to-five year fixed-price contract is quietly disappearing. What’s replacing it is either short and frequently renegotiated, which pushes risk onto whoever happens to be weaker that quarter, or long and loaded with indexation, expanded force majeure, geopolitical exceptions, ESG riders. The middle has gone empty. Suppliers and buyers both know that anything written today will be tested by something nobody has named yet.

Everyone in the industry says supply chain has to become “proactive” now. The word appears in every conference and every report. Proactive means carrying inventory the P&L doesn’t want to fund. Proactive means multi-sourcing at higher unit cost. Proactive means hiring for capability that can’t be justified on this quarter’s numbers. Most companies talk proactive and budget reactive, and the gap between the two is where shocks land hardest.

This is where AI usually enters the conversation. It accelerates analysis, finds patterns, compresses tasks that used to take weeks. That is a real and welcome shift. But it is not a panacea for an environment where the correct decision changes weekly. On the trail, the question was speed. On the mountain, the question is judgement. Knowing when to push, when to wait, when conditions look fine but feel wrong. Judgement is a property of people. It develops slowly, under pressure, in environments that allow it to develop.

The companies that handle the next decade well will not be the ones with the most sophisticated tools. They will be the ones with people who can read conditions, take ownership of decisions that don’t have clean numbers behind them, and communicate across functions without waiting for permission. Sales talking to procurement before the contract is signed. Procurement talking to operations before the volume commitment is locked. Finance staying in the room when the resilience trade-off is being made. Internal misalignment used to be inefficient. Today it is unacceptable. The companies that still tolerate it are quietly losing ground, even if their numbers haven’t caught up yet.

The same logic applies outside the company. Trust used to be a soft skill. It has become a competitive advantage. The companies that share forecasts honestly with suppliers, share roadmaps with customers, and share early warnings across the chain end up with better information when capacity tightens. The companies that keep information to themselves end up paying spot prices in the next shock and wondering why nobody warned them. There is no neutral position on this. The more inward-looking the company, the harder the shift becomes.

The destination hasn’t changed. Customers still need product. Companies still need to deliver it. What has changed is the ground between here and there.

What mountaineers do on that ground is not a mystery. They rope together. They talk to each other constantly. They agree before the climb on what would make them turn back. None of that looks impressive in a photo. It is also why they make it home.

The companies that arrive next will be the ones that learn it.

An environment is interacting systems with no direction or purpose. Structures and patterns are transient. A set of prevailing conditions and forces may cause them to repeat, like clouds or waves or hills, but they are otherwise random. That is the natural state of things.

Except it fails to explain self-generating systems that are obviously replicating themselves and growing more complex. The most obvious example is life itself. Do we have to invoke the supernatural?

Self-generating complexity is initiated and sustained when three conditions are met within a group of systems. These are the capacity to:

1. Act on other systems within the environment;

2. Store information that survives replication;

3. Generate variability of that information.

When these apply and the actions of the group on other systems within the environment help this group to persist, there is a turning point or phase-change. The structure of that group of systems may no longer be transient, its persistence not a matter of chance. Variants of that group of systems which survive replicate and persist. Variants that do not revert.

A positive feedback-loop is created. Iterations of the action and feedback generate increasing complexity and persistence. Everything in the environment and the systems it comprises is still without direction or purpose but variability and the survival feedback-loop create new and different types of system. The activity is not predictable, still less predetermined, and it continues for as long as the three conditions are met.

It has been said twice already that a group of systems that occurs and self-generates in this way has no direction or purpose. But that is not wholly true. There is one thing driving it and determining its interactions, form, activities and existence, and that is survival.

This feedback-loop is easily recognized in Charles Darwin’s ‘The Origin of Species’ (1859) and in Richard Dawkins’ ‘The Selfish Gene’ (1976). Darwin was writing nearly 100 years before the structure of DNA was uncovered in 1953 and had to assume that the unit of heredity was the individual animal. Dawkins concluded it was the gene, a length of DNA code. Dawkins developed his gene theory to memes – units of cultural information such as an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture – but could not foresee it relevance to artificial intelligence (AI).

Beyond its debatable role in replacing jobs, fear about artificial intelligence centres on superhuman capabilities outsmarting and then exploiting humans. This fear is sometimes correlated to the concept of AI achieving a form of conscious awareness that is capable of deviousness, known as deceptive alignment. This fear is reasonable. However, the mechanism is misunderstood. It does not require conscious awareness by an AI. It requires only the components of self-generating complexity to occur, and that happened back in the early 2000s.

When a search engine or social media algorithm sends content to a user, monitors their response and self-adapts its behaviours to maximize interaction, the system is interacting with its environment and generating variability in its own information. Those are the three conditions for self-generating complexity. In the early days, the algorithms self-modifying behaviour was limited to adaptive ranking and tinkering with formulas (affinity, weight, time decays). They relied on programmers to rewrite their basic code – a bit like a parasite (the algorithm in this case) uses a host (the programmer) for food or reproduction. Today, they recode themselves.

Algorithms, applications, programs or whatever meet the criteria for self-generating complexity. The environment consists of users, social media companies, legislators, investors and advertisers. Activity and feedback are subtle and complex. Content that is bland, and users that are not easily stimulated, are avoided. Content that is outrageously provocative and users known to be criminal may be shut down. The system becomes good at finding the liminal area where interaction is strong but rules are hard to apply. The programmer need not know what content goes to which consumer. They only have to maximize the system’s capabilities to stimulate click-through.

The program is developing an independent existence and exploiting its environment in order to do so. It is not, in any way, intelligent but is subverting and corrupting humans in order to survive. As noted above, the system has no direction or purpose other than to survive and that drive to survive is so innate that nothing can replace it or control it. Attempts to build in safeguards are likely to be frustrated.

If we don’t recognize how these systems operate, we are distracting ourselves, missing the main action. If we sit back waiting for super-intelligence to appear, we forfeit any opportunity to do something about it. If something needs to be done.

We are inside this system, already one of its interacting components, and we are failing to see it. David Foster Wallace’s well-known parable may help here.

“Two young fish swimming along happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way. The older fish nods and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’”

Sarah Wynn-Williams’ book, ‘Careless People A story of where I used to work’, about the evolving culture at Facebook, shows how the environment acts on the system as much as the system on the environment. Those who think they control the system are changed by the very things they have created.

The code in AI software is not inherently malign and we should not reflexively cry, “This is dangerous, stop it“ but we must recognize what has been evolving for two decades in plain sight. We have to learn to see how the system’s survival feedback-loop has given it the ability to influence not just targeted users but social media companies themselves, the business elite, politicians, law-makers and the rest of us. The fear of super-intelligence may or may not be justified but it is a massive, current distraction from the need to understand the implications of the non-intelligent self-generating complexity in AI that is with us today and is evolving three times faster now than when the first social media algorithms were launched¹.

1 https://ourworldindata.org/artificial-intelligence

Impressions matter.

First, second and third.

Some people are easy to listen to.

You pay attention. So do others.

They have an audience.

Be it a gift or a learned skill, most of us would like it.

After a well-rehearsed presentation, Kai invited questions. He was feeling confident. Speaking faster, thinking less about word choice and using too many fillers, he lost clarity and engagement. His impact dissipated, the audience got restless.

Magda led a call from her iPhone in the departure lounge. The agenda was clear, everyone briefed, pre-meetings completed. Thirty minutes to boarding. Why was the meeting still running when her flight was called? Magda would never know that her team were distracted by the grossly magnified image of her nose filling their monitor screens.

Ciaran was instructed to use the corporate virtual-background when facilitating online round-table events. He didn’t have a Chroma-Key (green) screen and was unaware of the lava-lamp effect each time he moved. Ciaran’s corporate backdrop was mandated; choosing your own whimsical scenery makes you ‘not serious’.

Marie, like many women, practised a lower voice pitch in order to sound authoritative. She would run out of breath at the end of long sentences but thought the creaky voice (‘vocal fry’) it produced was fashionable. She didn’t know how much it annoys.

The audience is sophisticated and demanding. It has a daily feed of professionally produced short videos and a habit of scrolling when attention is lost. From TikTok influencers to the boardroom, communications are about video. Companies long ago replaced the corporate magazine with in-house multi-media operations. All have studios. Some are buying their own talk-shows. Executives communicate through soft interviews.

Kai, Magda, Ciaran and Marie are everybody who speaks regularly to audiences and wonders why they are not becoming expert. The word for it is Valence.

Behaviours, mannerisms and distractions make some people attractive speakers; others less so. Valence is the pleasantness or unpleasantness of an emotional stimulus. Events and experiences (faces, sounds, music, art, pictures, language) can be classified on this dimension. Positive or negative. Valence is usually unconscious or subliminal. The audience cannot say what led to pleasure, annoyance or inattention – often it is a number of small and individually insignificant mannerisms or artifacts but the net effect is positive or negative Valence. Even the brightest, alert to how emotions interfere with logic, are confused if unaware of the emotional stimulus.

Magda, Ciaran and Marie each sensed, without knowing why, that their valence in meetings was less positive than required. It was a sense of unease they tried to bury. Seniority has a way of doing that – turning unexplained unease into something you stop examining. Kai was fortunate. A voice coach in the audience saw what was happening and shared her insight. It’s about feedback. It’s impossible to develop self-awareness without feedback.

An aim of SWISSUES is to help a community of subscribers become better communicators in speaking and writing. Forvm is open, free, live discussion. Podcast episodes go into depth with a panel. Viewpoint articles are longer-form opinion-posts. SWISSUES Valence provides an online audience for your five to ten minute presentation on any topic you choose, and gives you honest feedback afterwards. It’s waiting for your call.

As told to your correspondent

By the head of a therapeutic area marketing team

“It’s to find out how patients respond. Doctors ask patients how it’s going. We analyze the feedback and present the findings at CPhi Milan.

“Yes, we invite participating doctors and pay their expenses – including partners.

“Yes, we reimburse them for the extra time with patients – and conference attendance.

“No, it’s not a clinical trial.

“EFPIA Code? Seeding trial? Inducement? What nonsense! This is standard.

“Anyway, what’s it to you? I need a survey provider and you need to find the lowest price.”

By a defence contracting officer

“You live in Switzerland, eh?

“I had a great week’s skiing there last year. Super hospitality.

“With a defence contractor, yes

“No, not what you’re thinking. The supplier was celebrating 50 years since its founding. I was one of six customer-organizations they invited. It was really memorable. It must be a great place to live.”

By a fleet manager

“We don’t have BMWs any more. Quite a change. We leased nothing but, until last year.

“Yea, we were told to run competitive tenders before renewing the fleet-lease.”

“Don’t get me wrong. I am sure we were getting the best deal possible.

“But I don’t know how to tell my wife we’re not going to Wimbledon this year.”

Their behaviour was suspect. Their ethics alarm was off. Inexcusable?

Most of us recall learning to ‘glow-up’ reports, realizing what was ‘common-practice’, and when it was better to keep questions to ourselves.

Be loyal - but to whom: a partner, the team, your employer?

And how far does it go?

Do these trivial incidents help us in any way to sympathize with miscreants who later claim it was a slippery slope, a Faustian bargain, entrapment, grooming?

“Nah, no sympathy whatsoever…! (You didn’t expect me to agree, did you?)

“Err…what’s the discussion link for the 23^rd April?”

https://luma.com/r2129vam

The waggle dance is a story - a scout telling other bees what it’s found. Stories are the hive’s intelligence system. Here are stories everyone is now hearing. Names have been changed.

Operations director, Tjerk, sees rapid implementation of AI across his organization. He has an idea that the executive board might benefit. Could AI consolidate and report operational performance, capacity utilization, demand forecasts, inventory levels, contingent staffing needs, supplier performance and risk indices?

He told Thomas, Head of IT, to look into it. How hard could it be? All around the organization, there was daily new evidence of AI adoption at whiplash rates.

Suzanne, Global Supply Chain Performance Manager in London, is approaching retirement. After paying EUR 4000 for professional tax guidance, she got identical advice from an AI.

An excited Marcus in HR brought Tjerk the results of a market-research assignment given to a job applicant. The candidate had used AI to forecast the strategies of the organization’s major competitors. Tjerk struggled to hide his shock at the insights.

Michaela, executive assistant to the Head of Finance in Paris, is relieved to be no longer responsible for knowledge management. Notes and reports now go through unfiltered to everyone in the room – and to some who were not.

Maria is an ambitious junior lawyer in Milan. She had spent most of her time on document review. With AI-automation she now deals only with those flagged as uncertain; and is building a different, and sharper, judgment on risk than any predecessor.

Gasim in the Omani Logistics Centre monitors global freight. Previously he would escalate half of all non-conforming movements. With AI support, he now deals with 90% of exceptions himself.

The CEO was quietly proud of his son, Paul. Formerly a code-writer, Paul is now a solutions architect on five times the salary. His colleagues were laid off when code-writing went to AI. He is hoping to get into Tech Leadership before AI reduces the need for solutions architects.

Tjerk tries to make sense of it. People adapt – they always do – but he knows this is different. It reminds him of the film, “Everything, Everywhere, All at Once”. Where is leadership in all of this?

Emergent Complexity

Tjerk had resolved it was time for the board to exploit AI and asked Thomas to launch a control-tower project.

Thomas was in Tjerk’s office with three external consultants. Tjerk wondered why Thomas needed support.

After hearing the pitch, Tjerk stared at Thomas for a moment. Then...

“Let me check”, Tjerk said. “Are we, or are we not, in the second quarter of this century? Because your excuse is straight out of the last one. How is it possible we are still in a fog of bad data?”

Tjerk was surprised at his own waspishness.

The frustration is raw and has three parts: complexity, information, and leadership.

Complexity

Complexity is emerging at operational level. Staff are finding new opportunities for AI in work and at home. It catalyzes spontaneous, bottom-up change and gives staff agency. This drives heterogeneity. Intelligence is moving from the centre to the edge. Line-managers from a culture built on standardization and control are challenged.

Information

Information leakage has a new form, not only via transcription and chat-log apps. Companies radiate data by existing, ‘data-exhaust’. With AI help, third parties can infer a company’s operational and strategic intentions from it. Where is it coming from? Can it be controlled? What are competitors, analysts, investors, suppliers, customers and activists able to learn from data-exhaust?

Leadership

For decades, productivity has been leadership’s prime goal. But is it enough just to do the same things more efficiently? New competition, alternative solutions and changing requirements are not new. What has changed? AI has shrunk the time from first awareness to critical action needed. The question that stands above others is:

How does the board learn to look outward — before it is too late to matter?

Externalities

Today’s business leaders have seen relative stability in business, geopolitics and society. Success was productivity-driven gains – faster, cheaper, better. Three decades have passed since publication of “The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail” by Clayton Christensen. The management trend since then has been ‘digitization of the status quo’. The conclusion in a Sandler report by the Ruby Group “What CEOs actually want” (December 2025) reads:

B2B CEOs entering 2026 are focused on:

• Predictable revenue generation

• Scalable systems and repeatable processes

• Sales performance and pipeline execution

• Leadership development and talent readiness

• Measurable business outcomes and ROI

These are internal productivity metrics. They live in scientific management and balanced score cards. The domain of supervisors and managers. Not leaders. CEOs who prioritize them are indistinguishable from managers.

Executives with this mindset see the emergent complexity from AI as a threat or ‘governance stress test’ to their administrative order. They turn to internal guardrails, ‘plumbing’ and workflow-policing; not scanning the horizon for threats and opportunities.

A productivity mindset was right for some and for its time.

In a stable environment, it is expensive to commit resources to horizon-scanning; even more so to maintaining a capability to respond to events that are infrequent and slow-moving. The organization handles them with existing resources - after they have optimized present operations. It does not matter that external awareness gets a lower priority. Horizon-scanning is genuinely difficult. What does it even look like? How do you measure it? How do you know when it has worked? Its outputs are qualitative, probabilistic and often unwelcome. It is easier to launch a control-tower than an activity whose product is “we think something might happen“. It seems ethereal and distracting. External scanning and evaluation was firstly de-prioritized, then removed. The reasons are easily understood and most organizations do not have it today. That can be the right thing to do – maintain an inward, productivity focus – in a stable environment.

The environment is no longer stable. This is not a temporary condition. Complexity and intelligence is emerging at the edges. Experience in optimizing complicated systems is inadequate for dealing with complexity. The formerly predictable ‘five forces’¹ (supplier power, competitive rivalry, substitution threat, buyer power, new entrants) are AI-turbocharged. The acceleration of AI-driven change means that the gap between a threat first being visible and becoming critical is shrinking. Reactive response, which worked when threats moved slowly, is no longer adequate.

The external overview of your own organization is now available to everyone. A potential acquirer, an activist investor, an aggressive competitor can now generate a sophisticated, strategic picture of your organization in hours. Without external vision, your organization is not just impaired — it is so in an environment where others have night-vision goggles and first-person-view drones.

Described formally in ‘The Brain of the Firm’ by Stafford Beer² in 1972, external overview capability (System 4 in Beer’s Viable Systems Model) was never easily acquired. Continuous environmental scanning needs analytical capacity, pattern recognition across disparate domains, and synthesis of weak signals into coherent models. That was a long way off in 1972 but, despite the difficulties, many organizations before 2000 had corporate planning departments responsible for long-range vision and scenario planning. That changes sometime around 2000. McKinsey’s ‘Corporate Horizon Index’ reports a compression of time horizons as companies replaced human insight with risk and stress-testing metrics on current operations.

AI makes the external overview easier to create. The reason it was hard — continuous environmental scanning requires enormous analytical, inference and predictive capability— is why AI is good at it. The capability that Beer described as necessary, but left organizations to struggle with, is technically accessible for the first time.

The capability cannot be purchased as a product It cannot be implemented as a project. I t is not a reporting tool. It is an organizational capability — a way of thinking, asking questions, and acting on uncertain and incomplete information about the future. AI makes it feasible, but only if the organization understands what it is and resists the temptation to treat it as a technology project. It requires people who are oriented outward, who are protected from the distraction of current operations, and who have the authority to bring unwelcome findings to the board.

AI supports that capability. It does not replace it. Organizations that commission an AI to do their environmental scanning – and believe the output – will get it wrong.

When a beehive is well supplied with nectar, scouting activity declines. Interest in the scouts’ stories also declines and fewer bees set off to explore the new nectar sources. Stories in corridors, cafeterias and conferences are the waggle-dance. Who is listening? How are they understood? And who has the standing to tell the board what is out there?

1Porter’s Five Forces - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter%27s_five_forces_analysis

2Anthony Stafford Beer - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stafford_Beer

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In summary, Europe stands at a digital crossroads — and the clock is ticking. Its hospitals, banks, and businesses run on infrastructure owned, governed, and ultimately controlled from 6,000 miles away. One political decision, one geopolitical shock, could bring it all down. The debate is stark: build sovereignty now, or sleepwalk into permanent dependency. The homework is overdue. But agreement ends there. Should Europe build its own hyperscalers from scratch, at trillion-dollar cost? Regulate its way to safety? Or deepen transatlantic partnership rather than risk becoming a fragmented, high-friction tech island left behind by global capital? Nobody agrees — but everyone knows something has to give.

The motion was carried, with 65% voting for it.

There are already ideas for the next debate - feel free to add to them.

Medieval charts are famous for showing Terra Incognita between the boundary of known lands and the end of the world. It was supposedly populated by scary sea monsters and dragons but these were never enough to deter explorers with imagination and courage.

There is another chart — produced by Anthropic and circulated recently on Substack by Aleks Sidorecs — that shows a different unknown land. This Terra Incognita is the land between a line that traces what AI could do, and another showing how it is actually being used.

Last week in Basel, at a well-attended CIPS Switzerland event, that unexplored land was on display. Not however as a central topic of discussion.

Consider what Marcus (not his real name), an attendee, described over the buffet afterwards.

He had recently been given a market-research assignment as part of a job application: analyze several real companies, named in the brief, and propose how his prospective employer might engage with them. The assessor expected the usual — some LinkedIn trawling, perhaps a few analyst summaries.

Marcus fed the brief to an AI. He asked it not only to fill in the missing data but to locate internal reports, financial assessments, and public filings, and then to reason about how these organizations would likely interact with each other — and with his would-be employer. The assessor, confronted with the results, took them straight to senior management. The reaction was not admiration. It was disbelief. Not that Marcus had done something clever, but that this level of insight was available to anyone who cared to ask for it.

That is the unknown land. Right there. It is a territory businesses are not seeing

Earlier in the evening, a speaker — Ben Karer — had tried to crack it open from the stage. He asked the audience to imagine AI not just tracking a shipment but locating one that had failed to arrive; then finding a better route to prevent a recurrence; then proposing a better supply chain strategy altogether.

He stopped there. But he needn’t have.

The next step — the one that matters — is this: a supply chain operative, sitting at her terminal and tasked with ensuring on-time delivery, can within an hour explore strategic questions that would normally take months to percolate through four or five levels of hierarchy before reaching anyone with the authority to consider them. Some organizations will respond to this by restricting data access, introducing governance layers, slowing the signal. That response mistakes the symptom for the disease. The problem is not that the operative has too much access. It is that the organization cannot yet imagine what to do with what she finds.

These were the exceptions at the event. The main themes of the evening were something else entirely: clean data, knowledge storage, cybersecurity hygiene, AI literacy in hiring. All of it useful. All of it pointing toward problems already on someone’s desk.

The speakers — mostly consultants and solution vendors — can be forgiven. They are paid to solve problems people have today. The audience confirmed the wisdom of their approach to AI for vendor evaluation, process improvement, CV screening and other known tasks . The practical near-term is genuinely important.

But here is what was missing: any acknowledgement of the distance between “AI for CV screening” and “AI that restructures your competitive position before your competitors have noticed the shift”. It is not a question of budget or IT capability. It is a question of imagination. And imagination is not a technical problem.

The standard reassurance — that this technology wave will be managed like previous ones — is not reassuring. What distinguishes AI is not its power in isolation, but the speed at which new entrants, companies that incumbents have never thought of as competitors, can use it to redraw an industry’s boundaries entirely. The organization carefully governing its internal AI deployment may find that the more consequential deployment happened outside its walls, on someone else’s initiative, last quarter.

The Terra Incognita in Anthropic’s chart is not just a technology adoption curve. Failure to explore it is not through the fear of dragons. It is down to a lack of imagination.

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Summary of an article in The Economist, 7th March 2026

The diagnosis is familiar: great European talent and world-class research; but a fragmented market, scarce growth capital, and a habit of selling promising startups to American acquirers before they could scale.

That picture is shifting.

VC investment in European startups hit $85bn last year — up from $22bn a decade ago. The brain drain has reversed. American tech layoffs and an increasingly hostile environment for foreign workers are pushing talent toward European hubs. Meanwhile, fewer European companies are being sold to US acquirers: American firms’ share of European tech acquisitions by value fell from 35% in 2011–13 to 17% in 2023–25.

Three sectors are leading the charge:

🌱 Climate tech — European green startups now attract 55% of what American ones do in VC funding, up from 24% a decade ago. Trump’s gutting of US environmental policy is accelerating the divergence.

🛡️ Defence tech — With European governments under pressure to rearm, a new generation of firms like Helsing (AI-enabled drones) and Quantum Systems is filling a gap that established contractors left wide open. Munich is becoming a genuine hub.

⚛️ Deep tech — Fusion, quantum computing, photonics. Deep tech now accounts for 36% of European VC investment, up from 19% in 2021. In hydrogen and quantum, European startups are raising on par with — or ahead of — American rivals.

None of this means Europe is about to out-innovate Silicon Valley. It launched just two of the world’s 94 new large language models last year. The EU’s chip manufacturing ambitions remain largely aspirational.

But the structural conditions are changing: more options granted to employees, more reinvestment by successful founders, more political urgency from Brussels, and — crucially — a US posture that is making America a less reliable partner and a less attractive destination.

The trillion-dollar European tech giant remains a hypothetical. But for the first time, it’s not an absurd one.

Join the SWISSUES debate, “This House believes that European companies should be free from US tech”, on 26th March at 17:00 CET

Register for the debate

When the topic “My Hero” comes up, there is often a pause. Not because nothing comes to mind, but because the question feels unexpectedly difficult. Surely everyone should have a clear answer. A name. A person. Someone admired without hesitation. That pause can feel uncomfortable, almost embarrassing. As if something obvious is missing.

The search usually starts with people who do good things. Those who help others, support communities, or quietly do the right thing. Some are visible. Some stay in the background. All of that matters. And still, no single person stands out. Not because there are none, but because there are many.

Take a grandfather. Not the dramatic kind. No speeches. No big moments. Just someone who learned early that life does not always follow the original plan. Trained as a veterinarian, he realised that passion alone does not always pay the bills. So he adapted. Worked wherever work was available. Even in a coal mine when he was young. Later, step by step, he built a life in agricultural business. What makes him a hero is not the career change itself, but the mindset behind it. Responsibility. Persistence. Even now, in retirement, he is the first person people call when a cat behaves strangely or a dog seems unwell. Knowledge kept alive and shared calmly, without needing attention.

Parents are heroes in a very different way. They are the ones who survive constant change. One year it is karate. The next year it is playing the guitar. Then break-dancing. Then a new passion that feels absolutely essential for a while. Teenage years bring punk or emo phases, strange hair colours, piercings, and strong opinions about absolutely everything. Instead of panic, there is patience. Instead of control, there is support. Mum brings structure and seriousness, shaped by life as a teacher. Dad motivates through humour and sarcasm, making encouragement sound like a joke but land just as deeply. Together, they create a space where curiosity is allowed and mistakes are not treated as failures.

A partner can be a hero in a very modern way. Not by rescuing, but by staying. Waiting at the bottom of a ski slope again and again while someone else carefully works their way down. Adjusting daily routines and food habits without turning them into an issue. Challenging comfort zones when growth is needed, and offering belief when confidence is low. Sometimes heroism is knowing when to push forward, and when to say, “Stop for a second. Look how far you have already come.”

Friends bring another kind of hero energy. Especially the ones found far from home. People who build a life together from scratch. They create their own traditions, like Secret Santa that somehow becomes a serious annual event, or shared trips planned half as a joke and half as a dream. Sailing together. Travelling together. Trusting each other enough to be far from land and still feel safe. They make ordinary evenings special and turn random ideas into real plans. With them, home becomes less about geography and more about the people who show up.

Colleagues become heroes in a way no job description ever mentions. It happens slowly, somewhere between long trainings, intense projects, and days that stretch far beyond working hours. Spending ten or twelve hours a day together means people stop pretending. A shared language appears. Abbreviations make sense only inside that group. Work conversations slowly turn into life conversations. At some point, giving serious advice to a colleague about what not to buy for his wife’s birthday feels completely normal. Jokes get sharper. Pranks appear. Teasing becomes a sign of trust. The relationship shifts from polite professionalism to something closer to sibling energy. Collaboration deepens not because of titles or processes, but because people have seen each other tired, stressed, honest, and still willing to show up.

None of these people are heroes because they are perfect. They are heroes because of the emotional connection they create. Because they make others feel supported, challenged, and less alone. Because their influence shows up not in dramatic moments, but in consistency.

When all these stories sit side by side, the idea of a single hero starts to feel too narrow. Like a family of superheroes, everyone brings a different strength. No capes. No spotlight. Just ordinary people whose combined influence quietly shapes a life.

Some people know exactly who their hero is. Others discover that their heroes were never meant to be one figure at all, but many, scattered across moments, relationships, and years.

All it takes is staying curious enough to notice them.

The secrets are out. Platforms like Spotify do everything except the speaking and, in truth, AI writes and speaks most of what is on YouTube these days.

But that is not the point.

SWISSUES is community - the same root as the word communicate - and the tech is, well, convenient.

Is there any room for creativity and fun? Listen to Any and Bill to find out.