The Top 40 Posts page lists the most-read articles on Humanistic Systems. But readership figures can become popular for all sorts of reasons that I never imagined, such as being featured on a widely-read website. (Even the Top 40 page means they are self perpetuating – ‘success to the successful’, so to speak – so I may remove it.)
There are other posts that concern less familiar subjects, or take a different route into questions about work and life. Some of these posts concern topics that are particularly important or interesting to me, and approach topics from a less conventional angle.
So here is a set of lesser-read posts that do not feature in the readership-based Top 40, grouped into four themes. They range from professional blind spots and organisational culture to theatre, helping, trauma, and Celtic folklore. I’ll add to the set, or change it, every now and then.
Updated 10 October 2026
Seeing our own blindspots
1. Déformation Professionnelle: How Profession Distorts Perspective
What has your profession trained you not to see?
Our professions help us understand the world, but they also shape what we overlook. The labels we use for people, the problems we notice, and the solutions we favour all reflect our training and experience. This post explores how expertise can become a source of partiality, distortion, and even trained incapacity. I can’t help but see this in so many people in so people professions that I work with, including my own. It’s a source of endless fascination.
2. The Safety-fication of Everything
Does putting ‘safety’ in front of everything help?
Safety culture, safety leadership, safety learning, safety moments… I started noticing the safety-fication of ordinary words. The resulting A–Z raises questions about the purposes of professional language, how others receive it, and whether it can separate safety from the work and life it is meant to support.
3. On the Spread of Ideas: Four Roles and Four Traps
How do useful ideas become entangled with ego?
Implementers, promoters, innovators, and critics all contribute to the spread of ideas. Each role also has a shadow side. Drawing on Benjamin P. Taylor’s ‘ego traps’, this post considers enthusiasm, oversimplification, guru behaviour, and antagonistic criticism. I invite reflection on the roles we adopt ourselves, as well as those we recognise in others. LinkedIn is a showcase for this post.
Seeing work through stories
4. ‘Are We the Baddies?!’ Symbols and Organisational Cultures
What do the symbols around us say about our organisation?
A Mitchell and Webb sketch provides a way into the meaning of organisational symbols. Uniforms, buildings, offices, titles, logos, and slogans can reveal assumptions about identity, values, and power. They can also become so familiar that we stop noticing them. What might we discover if we looked afresh? Are we the baddies?
5. The Curious Incident of the Runway Incursion in the Night-Time
What happens when a safety intervention makes work more difficult?
Following a runway incursion, a change intended to prevent recurrence created additional workload and confusion. Further changes followed, along with local adaptations and, eventually, a collaborative solution. This story explores unintended consequences and the importance of understanding work with the people who do it. I interviewed two air traffic controllers for the content and enjoy this form of writing.
6. Human Factors at the Fringe: Nuclear Family
What can interactive theatre offer human factors?
Nuclear Family follows Joe and Ellen, nuclear plant workers who are also siblings. This post explores a piece of interactive theatre through a human factors lens, bringing work and relationships into the same frame. It is also an entry point into the Human Factors at the Fringe series. After seeing this play, with two or three other audience members, I proposed the play for use with aviation, legal and judicial professionals. My manager and Head of Safety Tony Licu commissioned Fever Dream productions, resulting in five shows around Europe in conferences and events, followed by discussions of the concepts and issues in the play. A proud moment in bringing art to new audiences, and new audiences to artists.
Seeing with love, care and connectedness
7. Mental Health and the Helping Octagon
What kinds of help can we offer, seek, and accept?
Helping is more than listening. This post describes eight roles: healer, alongsider, educator, researcher, regulator, organiser, advocate, and connector. Some support people directly; others shape the conditions of their lives. Each has possibilities and limitations. Reflecting on these can help us consider whether the help we offer is the help that is needed. This is a post that has been practically useful to me in dealing with neurodivergence, mental health, chronic illness and dynamic disability.
8. On Living and Dying: 1. Eulogy Virtues
What do we spend our lives pursuing, and what will people remember?
Walks through a rewilding Edinburgh cemetery, and memories of my grandparents Alice and Jack, prompted this reflection on achievement and character. Drawing on David Brooks’s distinction between résumé virtues and eulogy virtues, it asks how the qualities we reward in life relate to those we most cherish in the people we love. A post that reminds me of the virtues that really matter.
9. On Living and Dying: 2. The Simple Thing Wrong With Us
What are we putting off because we think we have plenty of time?
There may be something important we need to say, a relationship we need to attend to, or a change we keep postponing. Drawing on experiences of loss, a passage from Carlos Castaneda, and a poem I wrote – one of 20 or so that I wrote in a few weeks of a PTSD crisis – this companion to Eulogy Virtues reflects on mortality, regret, and the hesitation to act on what matters. How might we turn a vague intention into a first step?
10. Laughing Boy: Love, Justice and Drops of Brilliance
How can art help us see the person behind a story of institutional neglect?
A visit with my daughter to see Laughing Boy prompted this reflection on Connor Sparrowhawk’s life, his death, and his family’s pursuit of justice. The play brings Connor’s humour, relationships, and hopes into view, alongside the failures of care and the collective action that followed. It explores how theatre can reach us in ways that reports and headlines may not. A very important experience and post for me.
Seeing experiences that are hard to see
11. PTS(D) and Me
What can remain hidden behind achievement and an appearance of coping?
In this personal account, I describe my experience of post-traumatic stress disorder, its emotional and physical effects, and what helped me towards recovery. I reflect on the pressure to remain silent, the difficulty of accepting help, and the role of friendship, therapy, nature, and poetry. It is also an invitation to give others the opportunity to help and to listen beyond the first assurance that someone is ‘fine’. A profoundly personal post concerning something from which I have now mostly recovered, much which leaves its mark.
12. PTSD and the Multiple Hourglass Metaphor
What if being ‘in the moment’ does not mean being in the present?
This short post offers a metaphor for the experience of trauma. Alongside the hourglass of chronological time, imagine others in which memories, emotions, or physical states remain caught. The metaphor offers a way to communicate an experience that can be difficult for others to understand. The hourglass metaphor helped me work out that I lived in the moment, just not this one.
13. Invisible Worlds: Celtic Folklore for Living with Chronic Conditions and Dynamic Disability
Can an older language help us understand invisible experiences?
Celtic folklore describes parallel worlds, thresholds, changing rhythms, and unfamiliar rules of time and energy. This introductory post connects those ideas with living with chronic conditions and dynamic disability. It opens a series exploring experiences that may be familiar to those living them, yet largely invisible to others. The series, still in progress, relates to my experience of post-Covid ME/CFS.
For more ways into the back catalogue, explore the Humanistic Systems Collections: The Albums & EPs, or browse the Top 40 Posts.