One Year of Deep Dives

Some reflections

Amsterdam has some weird and fun street art. I’m unsure why I feel the need to use this one for this post, but I do. So there we go.

Happy Wednesday, everyone! My apologies for the lack of posts over the past couple of weeks. The cold my toddler caught, which I mentioned a few weeks ago, made its way one by one through the family, knocking me out right before we headed off on a family vacation to the Netherlands and Belgium to celebrate my wife’s and my fifth wedding anniversary.

We spent most of the time there with family and friends who had moved from Toronto to the Netherlands earlier this year. Our daughter and their eldest are the same age and were in the same daycare class for a couple of years. It was so fun to see them play together in this stage of crazy, chaotic, fun, almost-four-year-olds.

While away, September 26th also marked the first anniversary of the Deep Dives newsletter. Over the past year, I’ve published 110 posts, written well over 100,000 words, and gained almost 500 subscribers. All quite mind-blowing numbers, to me at any rate.

Writing the newsletter has been an interesting exercise. In my first post, I wrote, “The newsletter will be a place to explore how we can build a more inclusive, prosperous, and innovative society and economy. It will include a mix of longer essays on topics such as industrial policy, inclusive innovation, place-based policies, and technology adoption, as well as shorter pieces sharing interesting articles and resources and my thoughts on them.”

It has certainly been an exploration for me, and one that has gone beyond the confines I expected.

I’ve mentioned a few times that I am someone who thinks through the act of writing. I rarely approach writing one of these posts with a clear outline or a crisp argument that I want to get down. I may have small ideas or quotes from sources that I want to look at, but in practice, once I get down to writing, I often go in quite a different direction than I had initially expected. By putting words on the page, I clarify what I think.

Over the past year of writing this, I have come to see the newsletter less as a place for brand promotion for my consulting work and more as a place for often unvarnished writing, a place for thinking in public about the world we live in.

Part of the value of leaving my last role and starting my own consultancy has been enabling the freedom to think independently and to express those thoughts in the world. I have tried to lean into that freedom and overcome some of the shackles of self-censorship I had placed on myself.

What has come with that, which has surprised me to a fair extent, is a dissolution of professional, political, and personal boundaries in my writing. I don’t think it needs restating that we live in grim times in so many ways, and that reality seeps into all aspects of our lives. As a result, over the past year, my ability to silo my policy thinking from my wider thinking about the implications of the state of the world for me, my family, and others has broken down.

I think that is as it should be. Context matters. When I initially worked with a branding expert to help launch Orbit Policy, one of the main pieces of my value proposition they identified was that I “seek out—and seek to understand—the vast range of differing interests, perspectives, and uncomfortable truths that are intertwined with any public policy question.” I’m not sure I fully understood where that journey of seeking out context would take me.

I hope the resulting writing adds some value to those of you who read it. We live in an age of information overload, with more newsletters and hot takes heading our way than anyone could ever come close to consuming. Just today, over 75 newsletters from individuals and organizations landed in my inbox. I’m sure it’ll be over 100 before the clock ticks over to tomorrow, and I am certain it is similar for all of you, too.

So, my real, deep and genuine thanks to all of you who take the time to read my work. The fact that you take the time out of your days for this means a lot. I hope my writing over the coming year continues to interest you and be worth your time.