Christian Jacobsen
Pattern finder
Thirty years spent working out how people move together. In culture, in companies, and in the systems that quietly decide how our days go.
Pattern finder
Thirty years spent working out how people move together. In culture, in companies, and in the systems that quietly decide how our days go.
That attention has taken a few different forms. Strategist. Creative leader. Founder. Now author. The thread never moved. How do people take part in something larger than themselves, and what happens when you design for that instead of designing around it?
I’m perpetually curious about how things actually work and where they’re heading, and most of what gets treated as settled was built to solve a problem that no longer exists. Nobody went back to check. So I take it apart. That’s where improvement lives, and it’s where anything genuinely new tends to come from.
I’ve seen hundreds of businesses from the inside. Their competitors, their internal dynamics, the problems they would only name behind a closed door. That is an unusual vantage point and I have never taken it for granted.
People tend to seek me out when something has stopped making sense to them. What they’re usually after is the bigger idea sitting inside it. I connect patterns across things that look unrelated, and I get to the essence of a brand or an idea or a business model without flattening it. I don’t take anything at face value. There is almost always a truth underneath the one being presented, and it tends to be the more useful one.
Strong vision moves me, and building one is most of what I do. Once a company can see where it could actually get to, the rest of it starts to look solvable.
It doesn’t switch off outside of work, and the useful move is asking what something means once you take it out of its own frame. A grip that fails the harder you tighten it. A team that loses with the better roster. Both taught me something I used at the office the following Monday.
My depth is in brands, positioning, new media, leadership, and participation.
I’m a co-founder of The Many, an independent creative company with teams in the U.S., Canada, and Australia, and a co-founder of The Many Studios, its content and entertainment division.
We’ve been named Ad Age Small Agency of the Year three times and Promax North American Agency of the Year, alongside international creative and media awards across the work. We’ve set three world records and produced more than twenty branded content series, in close to every category there is.
I share that as context rather than credential. The Many is where the models get tested, and where participation stops being a theory and becomes a practice.
I’m also behind the Participation Atlas, a public record of participation in the wild that anyone can add to. It is the part of this work other people get to build with me. More on that →
A murmuration has no leader. Each bird tracks about seven of its neighbors.
“Participation starts with connection. Everything that compels me turns out to be about that.”
I live in Malibu with my family. When I look at what I actually spend my life on, it all comes back to connection. To other people. To the water and the weather and whatever the day has decided to do. To the energy in a room. To the way an organization holds together, or comes apart along a seam nobody was watching.
I didn’t set out to study participation. I followed the thing I kept being drawn to and it led here, because you can’t take part in something you aren’t connected to first.
Out here I don’t get a say. I get to pay attention, and that is where every connection I have ever made started.
Malibu, most mornings
Thirty years of this. Brands, organizations, and a lot of unusually creative minds. It was always a version of the same job, which is to work out what is actually going on and then find a way through it. The industry rearranged itself around me the entire time and never stopped, so nothing I learned ever stayed true long enough to coast on.
I also trained as an executive coach at Berkeley, which changed how I run a room. Asking a better question moves more than having a better answer.
My writing pulls from behavioral science, philosophy, and whatever I got wrong recently. Wired to Participate comes out in October 2026 from Page Two. The Loose Grip follows it, and takes what the mat taught me about pressure and connection into the way we lead.
Bio
For panels, podcasts, board packets, and anyone who would otherwise write it themselves.
Christian Jacobsen is a co-founder of The Many and the author of Wired to Participate, out in October 2026 from Page Two. He lives in Malibu.
Christian Jacobsen is a co-founder of The Many, an independent creative company with teams in the U.S., Canada, and Australia, and of The Many Studios, its content and entertainment division. He leads The Many from its board. He has spent thirty years on brands, positioning, and new media. His first book, Wired to Participate, comes out in October 2026 from Page Two, followed by The Loose Grip, on pressure literacy, in 2027. He is a second-degree black belt in jiu-jitsu and lives in Malibu.
Christian Jacobsen is a co-founder of The Many, an independent creative company with teams in the U.S., Canada, and Australia, and of The Many Studios, its content and entertainment division. The Many has been named Ad Age Small Agency of the Year three times, Promax North American Agency of the Year, and a range of international creative and media awards. Over thirty years he has worked on brands, positioning, leadership, and new media with hundreds of organizations across close to every category, and what they come to him for is the pattern connecting things that look unrelated. He publishes weekly at The Participation Exchange and is building the Participation Atlas, a public record of how people are invited to take part. His first book, Wired to Participate, comes out in October 2026 from Page Two, and The Loose Grip, on pressure literacy, follows in 2027. He trained as an executive coach at Berkeley, holds a second-degree black belt in jiu-jitsu, and lives in Malibu with his family.
Conversations worth having
The conversations I get the most out of are the ones where curiosity leads and the ideas matter more than the performance. If you’re working through something that stopped making sense, or weighing a board seat, that’s the kind I mean.