Every magician knows the trick works because the audience watches the hands.
We apply the same tricks in marketing and PR. And we do the same with global politics. We follow the wars, the summits, the sanctions, the soundbites. And while we do, something else is happening: a slower, more consequential game played in the structural layer underneath. A patient contest over who depends on whom, and what that dependence is worth when the moment to use it arrives.
It started with a small detail buried in the news. A peace deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan, brokered in Washington. The headlines celebrated the handshake. What they did not cover was the clause establishing TRIPP: a 99-year transit corridor through the South Caucasus, managed by a US-controlled company. Not a road; a dependency relationship made physical.
The grammar behind TRIPP is the same grammar behind Starlink's role in Ukraine, Monsanto's grip on global seed supply, and Adobe's switch to subscription licensing. Different domains, different decades, different actors. The same sequence, every time.
Once you see it, you cannot unsee it. And you will find it everywhere if you care to look.
The first two articles in this series established a case: the brain is organised in layers, different neurotypes represent different configurations of those layers, and the frameworks we use to assess human cognition were built around a standard observer that describes few actual people. The cost is not only misread individuals; it is a systematically incomplete picture of human cognitive possibility.
This article draws out the research implications. Not conclusions, but orientations: the questions that become visible once you stop treating the standard observer as a ground truth, and start treating it as one configuration among many.
Those questions include: what does each neural configuration produce when it works with its architecture rather than against it? Where does perception end and interpretation begin, and does that boundary differ between neurotypes? What can music-based research reveal about cognitive encoding that standard testing cannot reach? What would neuroplasticity look like if the goal were calibration rather than correction?
We have decades of rigorous research into what non-standard configurations struggle to do in standard-observer environments. The complementary body of research, into what those configurations can do in environments designed for their calibration, does not yet exist. This article makes the case that building it is not an act of accommodation. It is an act of scientific curiosity.
In colorimetry, the Standard Observer is a mathematical model of the average human visual system; it’s a useful fiction that enables reproducible color measurement across industries. It describes almost no actual human being. Every real observer deviates from it: in cone cell distribution, in predictive model calibration, in the linguistic categories their culture uses to carve up color space.
This article extends that insight from color science to cognitive science, and makes the case that the standard observer running through psychology, education, and workplace design carries the same structural limitation. With significantly higher costs.
Drawing on neuroimaging research into autism, ADHD, dyslexia, and synesthesia, the article examines what those neurotypes actually look like at the level of brain architecture. Not as variations of deficit, but as structurally distinct configurations of the processing stack established in the first article; each producing characteristic difficulties and characteristic strengths from the same source, inseparably.
The argument is not that existing frameworks are wrong. It is that they were built to detect one type of signal, and are systematically blind to others. The patterns they read as absence are frequently the presence of something the instrument was never calibrated to see. Understanding that distinction is not just a practical matter. It is an epistemic one.
The brain does not wait for your awareness before making decisions. By the time any perception reaches consciousness, it has already passed through multiple layers of processing, each transforming the signal in ways we are totally unaware of. What you experience as seeing, hearing, or navigating is not raw input; it is the brain's construction of raw input, shaped by an architecture most people never examine.
This article builds the scientific foundation for the series. Drawing on Nancy Kanwisher's research into brain specialisation, Karl Friston's predictive processing framework, and evidence ranging from color perception to musical memory, it maps the brain's layered organisation: dedicated hardware regions for specific functions, broad distributed networks for higher-order cognition, and a predictive operating system running continuously beneath awareness.
The central argument is: perception is not reception. It is construction. And the architecture doing the constructing varies between individuals, between neurotypes, between brains whose processing stacks are configured differently at different layers. Understanding that architecture is the prerequisite for everything that follows in this series.
If you have ever suspected that the way you perceive the world does not quite match how others describe theirs, this article offers a structural explanation for why that is not only possible, but expected.
We need pro-inclusivity.
Not as a rebranding of anti-discrimination, but as a genuinely different question: not what do we want to stop, but what condition do we want to create, and how?
Because we seem to be losing touch. Not dramatically, not all at once, but steadily, in the way that parallel lives quietly become the norm. Different communities, different rhythms, different worlds; sharing a city without really sharing anything in it.
I was at a presentation at city hall recently, commissioned by the municipality to address exactly this. The research was careful, the intent was right, the alderman behind it clearly believes in making a difference. And yet the frame it reached for was the obvious one: discrimination as the problem, defined communities as the lens, policy as the answer.
And I understand why. It is the most visible starting point. I am not dismissing it, but I think it misses something fundamental about how inclusion actually works, where it comes from, and who it needs to reach.
I am sharing my perspective on that. On the paradox built into how we define the problem. On the people for whom no chair was arranged. And on what it actually takes to design a city where the encounter that hasn't happened yet becomes a little more likely.
We don't need to be best friends. We need to be good neighbours.
As of today, the clock tells me when it's time to go to bed, but my melatonin disagrees.
This happens every year. The clocks go forward, the "morning mafia" celebrates their extra hour of evening light, and roughly a quarter of the population stoically absorbs another week of biological jet lag they never booked and cannot return.
I'm a night owl. I wake at 09:00 without an alarm. My brain peaks late. And every spring, Daylight Saving Time quietly invoices me for a biological debt I never agreed to take on.
But this isn't just about me, or the 25% of the population whose chronotype doesn't fit the morning mold. It's about a system designed around a fictional average human, dressed up as common sense, and defended by people who've never had to fight their own biology just to make an 08:00 meeting.
The deeper argument is about a society still running on an industrial-age clock in a post-industrial world, and what it would actually take to fix that.
Let's stop pretending it's a minor inconvenience. Let’s stop the absurdity.
What happens when public perception is different from internal reality?
Most organisations don't suffer from a lack of intelligence, ambition, or expertise. They suffer from something far more ordinary: they stop seeing themselves as the outside world sees them. Not because they don't care, nor because they're incompetent. But because they've spent so much time inside their own story that the internal version quietly replaces the external one. And once that happens, even the most capable managers start making decisions based on a reality that only exists within their own bubble.
I've seen this pattern more than I thought possible: across industries, across organisations, and affecting managers that are genuinely good at what they do. The gap between internal reality and public perception is almost always larger than expected. And almost always, it's the last thing anyone inside the organisation can see clearly.
In this article, I explore how that gap forms, why it's so hard to close from the inside, and how you can tackle it by using the Perception Information Model.
I've been thinking about Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers and the concept of "capitalization rate" — what percentage of natural ability actually gets developed and used. Gladwell focused on poverty, geography, and timing. But there's another massive filter he only brushed against: cognitive conformity.
We've built institutions around a narrow band of neurotypical processing, then act surprised when they produce mediocre results. We focus on the outliers and try to reverse-engineer their success. It's compelling to believe opportunity follows a "success recipe”.
Meanwhile, we're missing a cornerstone factor that flips the narrative entirely: roughly 20% of the population represents unseen talent that never qualifies for the opportunity.
When 20% consistently struggles in your system, the system is sending a message.
Yet our response is predictable: we medicalize it. CBT for workplace anxiety. Medication for focus. Social skills training to "fit in."
We've made it cheaper to pathologize 20% of humans than to redesign 100% of our institutions.
If 15–20% of the population are neurodivergent, we’re not talking about exceptions; we’re talking about a substantial part of the human norm. Yet our systems still treat this fifth of humanity as “defective” or “atypical.”
This article explores the paradox: rising recognition of ADHD, autism, dyslexia, Tourette’s, and other forms of cognitive variation, alongside persistent skepticism and stereotypes. It argues that prevalence hasn’t changed, only our ability to see what was always there.
From packed lecture halls in Eindhoven to workplace reports across Europe, the evidence points to a systemic gap: we lack the infrastructure to support and leverage cognitive diversity at scale.
The piece calls for a Cognitive Diversity Enablement Hub — a practical, evidence‑based resource that moves beyond fragmented initiatives and begins designing systems for the 20%, not against them.
I made a sarcastic post about Spotify Wrapped last week. A friend asked why I use Qobuz instead. As I tried to explain, I realised I'd been making similar choices for years without recognising the pattern: Mistral over ChatGPT. Proton over Gmail. Local repair over replacement.
None of these felt like activism. They felt like common sense.
Then I wrote about war economics, and people asked: "What can I actually do? I'm not a policymaker or CEO."
Fair question. So I started mapping the alternatives: European companies turning "this is stupid" into "this could work."
It led me from Qobuz to Mistral AI. From The Ocean Cleanup to Carbyon. Then to Lightyear's solar cars and Notpla's seaweed packaging. Then to dozens of European companies I'd never heard of, all solving problems everyone else had accepted as inevitable.
Each one started with someone refusing to accept the default. I realised I'd stumbled into a pattern: small acts of defiance against extractive systems.
This article is my attempt to show you what I'm seeing. And to answer the question from my war economics piece: "What can we actually do?".
What hit me as I finished writing: I've spent 3500 words celebrating the cleanup crew.
So, it ends with an uncomfortable truth about what we're really celebrating when we praise these "innovations." That postscript is worth the read alone.
Can the EU Save Capitalism and Democracy at the Same Time?
Is there a better way to ensure Europe's investment and capital growth climate?
As Thomas Piketty states, the core engine of modern inequality is arithmetic: the return on capital (r) consistently exceeds the rate of economic growth (g). The structural outcome is an extreme concentration of wealth, threatening market stability and fueling political fragmentation.
Traditionally, this wealth inequality is addressed through taxation (or: re-distribution). But this approach is reactive, often gridlocked by politics, and meets considerable opposition from those who benefit from the current design.
What if we abandon this reactive struggle for a proactive, structural fix? What if re-distribution is changed to pre-distribution?
A "Pan-European Stewardship Statute" could allow for enterprises that do not follow the common corporate model of maximum extraction, but instead mandate worker ownership and protect long-term purpose.
In this article, I dive into the concept of a stewardship model that isn't a rejection of capitalism, but upgrades it to an ethical and sustainable option for cross-border cooperatives.
Is the person you're networking with even real?
What if the company contact you thought was genuinely connecting with you on a human-to-human level in a B2B setting simply does not exist?
This scenario is becoming commonplace. When a company creates a virtual persona and giving a complex system a full name, photo, and even a LinkedIn profile, they aren't just streamlining for efficiency.
They are engaging in a deliberate misrepresentation of professional identity, undermining every claim of authenticity. This form of deception exploits the very foundation of trust that platforms like LinkedIn are built on.
The deception lies not in the use of AI, but in the human decision to exploit the social contract. When a company can't put a real person forward, what does that signal about the value of their team?
The relentless pursuit of systemic efficiency is colliding with the ethical imperative of authenticity. Undisclosed efficiency is rapidly turning into a compliance risk (hello, EU AI Act).
In this article on Faux Human Ecosystems, we explore why and how companies must consider radical transparency over synthetic advantage.
I am upset. Agitated, if you will.
And normally I wouldn't share that here, but now I feel compelled to do so. It concerns a subject that I would never really address on a public and professional medium like LinkedIn.
It's about morality. And it's about politics.
More importantly, it's about systemic behavior. About how we, as individuals, but also in our work and with our companies, deal with morality. And what we allow to happen.
It's a critical reflection on how we, as a society, are sliding toward a sick world. I draw comparisons between business and politics, between systemic abuse and how far removed we seem to be from natural behavior.
So. I am upset. Agitated.
But at the same time, if you can believe it, not pessimistic.
Some people are driven by goals. Others by questions.
Most business frameworks only recognise the first group.
What happens when our systems misread motivation?
What if the person who keeps asking why is motivated differently?
We’ve learned to detect goal-driven energy: needs, emotions, actions. But there’s another level we rarely register: curiosity without a goal, exploration without urgency. So, it seems, our motivational models may be precise but incomplete. This is what “The Lateral Motive” explores: why our frameworks miss half the story, and what becomes visible when we start paving the desire paths people actually walk.
The Most Urgent Precision Work Isn't in the Cleanroom. It's in the Narrative.
Brainport's success is an undeniable miracle of engineering. But on an Austrian mountain top recently, I was reminded how fundamentally illegible this miracle remains to the world around us.
Simply explaining what Brainport is, and which companies are part of it, is not nearly enough. Certainly not in Europe, not even in the region itself.
People see ASML expanding with new buildings and they encounter foreign workers in daily life. They see the consequence. They do not see the Hidden Choreography of specialized firms whose synchronization enables the growth of an industry and the growth of a region.
This disconnect is more than a communication gap. It is a strategic failure of institutional maturity that carries an accumulating cost: the comprehension deficit.
If we, the architects of this technological powerhouse, cannot translate nanometer precision into compelling human consequence, we risk losing the community support and political stability needed to operate.
What we perceive isn't necessarily what is real; it's what our mind allows us to experience as real.
The recurring gap between what is promised and what is perceived, led me to develop a systemic framework I call the Perception Information Model — PIM for short, or 'Perceptie Informatie Model' in Dutch.
It is not just a marketing tool. It's part of a broader practice: a way to explore the distance between intention and interpretation. Whether applied to a brand, a public institution, or a hiring process, it extends into collaborative research and brand diagnostics.
It is less about managing perception and more about understanding it. It serves as a shift from projection to reflection.