Perspective
Writing is one of the ways. Experiments and long conversations teach me just as much. I leaned into AI to find out what it could actually do, and I started writing software to find out what I could. I helped The Many work as a media company so we would learn the algorithms from the inside rather than from a deck.
Weekly since January 2026
This is where most of the writing lands. I publish every week, and it keeps filling in the places the book didn’t get to. Participation in marketing, in culture, in sport, in the environment, in the way an organization holds itself together.
The range is the point. Starlings, ants, crossword puzzles, prediction markets, a slime mold that outplanned the Tokyo rail network. If something works because people took part in it, it ends up here. Along the way I started publishing the frameworks too, which is how the thinking gets built in the open instead of announced once it’s finished.
Around thirty-five essays so far. Free to read.
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A new essay every week. Put your email in and it carries straight over.
Free. Hosted on Substack, so the last step happens there.
Where I think this goes next.
Read →Thousands of birds, no leader, no collisions.
Read →How to design the ask itself.
Read →What gets scarce when everything can be generated.
Read →Prediction markets, and skin in the game as a truth serum.
Read →The award-winning work, read for what it has in common.
Read →participationatlas.com
The public half of the research. Anyone can submit a case, every entry gets scored on how deep the participation actually goes, and the map draws the lines between them. It is the layer the book sits on top of, and it will outlast the book.
participationos.christiankjacobsen.com
This one started as training material inside the agency — the ordinary modules any company writes and few people read twice. I rewrote them against a single idea: that participation is the operating system underneath how an organization actually works, and that most companies are running a version nobody chose. Four modules, on leadership, management, teamsmanship and composition, looked at from underneath.
There are twenty questions in it too, about what did and did not happen in one team last month. Not what you believe about your company. What happened in it. I wrote them because the only useful version of this is the one about your own.
Published in full, including what it cannot see. Free, and no email.
Four pieces for Fast Company.
The short version, written a year before the book.
On staying useful when the org chart is the thing being optimized.
Comfort is the failure mode nobody puts on a scorecard.
A rule my industry stopped questioning a long time ago.
Coming October 2026 from Page Two
The books are where this gets fully worked out. Wired to Participate is the long form, and The Loose Grip follows in 2027.