February 2026: cooperation, complexity, and code

Following on from January's roundup, this month felt like finishing things and starting others.

The biggest news is something I've been processing for a while now: We Are Open Co-op is closing on 1st May, which will mark our 10th birthday. WAO has shaped how I think about work, about trust, and how to run an organisation. I wrote about it in The next chapter.

My cooperative principles won't be disappearing with the end of WAO, of course; they're woven into everything I do from here and build next.

Thinking and decision-making

February began with the conclusion of a writing project I'd been working on since January. The “How to be less wrong in a polycrisis” series comprises three posts which I then collated into a slightly revised and expanded ebook:

• How to be less wrong in a polycrisis — the opening post, on epistemic humility and the stories we tell ourselves about our own decisions.
• Building a 'thinking system' to help you be less wrong — how the tools we use shape the thinking we're capable of, with a McLuhan-inspired audit.
• Why some organisations learn to be less wrong (and others don't) — five structural characteristics that separate organisations that can update their models from those that stay stuck.
• New ebook: How to Be Less Wrong in a Polycrisis — a more refined and cohesive version of the series, with updated imagery, stronger connections between chapters, and new material not in the original posts.

There's also a post that didn't quite fit the series but feels related: Ambiguity, legibility, and working in the open. The focus of this post is on the tension between making your work understandable by others while preserving the kind of “productive ambiguity” that lets ideas develop.

Technology and resistance

With WAO winding down, I'm thinking and experimenting about the kind of work I want to do next.

TechFreedom is the culmination of something that Tom Watson and I have been talking about for a while. We'll be launching it properly in March, but it's based on things I've been writing about this month.

Your data might be in Europe but your risks are not makes the case in a straightforward way. Most organisations I work with assume that physical data location is the main thing to think about. But it's only part of the story: the legal jurisdiction of the company providing your tools matters more, and that's rarely on the first page of a vendor's pitch.

It hasn't been a full month yet since Claude Opus 4.6 was launched but there's already been an explosion of activity. I've used it to start building CalAnywhere, which I discussed in I needed a scheduling tool that respects privacy. So I built one.

It's a project that grew out of migrating from Google to Proton. While Proton's encryption is exactly what I want, it's also makes their calendar offeriny incompatible with every existing scheduling tool.

While I was on holiday, I didn't publish anything here or at Thought Shrapnel. I was still thinking about blog posts, though, and reading a collection of short stories and essays by Jorge Luis Borges led to perhaps my favourite post this month.

The (AI) lottery is already running draws on three of Borges' stories to think through how AI adoption happens in organisations. There are analogies galore: the way things shift from being “optional” to being (in effect) compulsory; how information environments can get noisier instead of richer; and what happens when platform's logic starts to overwrite how organisations think. The post ends with a diagnostic question for mission-driven organisations: where do your decisions end and the algorithm's begin?

The weeknotes

I've got more of a structure to my week notes this year's which makes things a bit easier:

• Weeknote 05 covered a trip to Glasgow with Aaron Hirtenstein for a strategy facilitation workshop, my Pixel Fold came back from warranty repair, and our daughter being named Player of the Match (again).
• Weeknote 06 shared news of a medical diagnosis I'd been waiting over a year for. I also wrote about experimenting with MCP servers, and my daughter's callback trial for the England talent pathway.
• Weeknote 07 was written from Edinburgh Airport, where I was headed for Barcelona and Madrid with my wife and daughter. Work-wise, Nate and I found out we were successful with our Skills Development Scotland digital badges bid, WAO had an important co-op day, and Tom and I soft-launched TechFreedom. I also shared extracts from the consultant's letter about my diagnosis.
• Weeknote 08 is possibly the shortest weeknote I've ever written: a photo collage from Barcelona and Madrid, and a note that I absolutely love Barcelona and would move there in a heartbeat.

Looking back, a lot has happened this month. But, as my Dad always says: “onwards and upwards!”