In this episode, I reflect on artificial intelligence as part of a much larger pattern of technological change.

New technologies have always arrived with a mixture of possibility and fear. Railways, electric light, telephones, automobiles, television, computers, and the internet all disrupted the world people knew. Many of the concerns they raised were valid. But the deepest changes were rarely limited to what the technology itself could do.

The automobile didn't simply replace the horse, it reorganized cities, work, infrastructure, commerce, and everyday life.

I believe AI may represent a similar threshold.

Most current conversations focus on first-order questions:

- Will AI replace jobs?

- Will people stop thinking?

- Will truth become harder to find?

- Will AI become dangerous?

These questions matter. But they may not be the whole story. The deeper question I explore here is:

What happens when human thinking gains a new environment in which to unfold?

Many leaders, founders, researchers, advisors, and changemakers are not short of intelligence or ideas. They are short of cognitive room. They are trying to hold complexity, relationships, competing needs, history, uncertainty, and possibility all at once.

Used carefully, AI can become a place to externalize that complexity. It can help us hold multiple threads, identify patterns, test assumptions, translate across disciplines, and see the structure of what we are carrying.

The purpose isn't to hand our thinking over to a machine, it is to create more room for human judgment, discernment, connection, and action.

This is the thinking behind AI as a Thinking Partner, my six-week small-group course for people working with real complexity. The course is not primarily about prompts, software, or productivity. It is a practice for learning how to use AI to:

- externalize difficult or unfinished thinking;

- find patterns within complex material;

- explore questions without rushing toward answers;

- pressure-test decisions and assumptions;

- translate ideas into useful structures;

and develop a personal way of working with AI that strengthens human agency.

I am currently gathering interest for upcoming cohorts. Learn more through the link in the episode description, or reply and tell me about the complexity, change, or possibility you are trying to hold.

Perhaps the future will not be shaped only by those who learn how to make AI produce more. Perhaps it will also be shaped by those who learn how to create more room.Learn more here: https://notes.theaperturefield.com/s/ai-as-a-thinking-partner

What if purpose is not something we find, but something that becomes available when our lives align with who we are?

In this essay, I explore the difference between purpose as self-sacrifice and purpose as coherent participation. For a long time, I confused being useful with reducing my own ability to simply be in service of something greater. But I’m beginning to wonder whether that frame is backwards.

Perhaps our deeper work is not to become heroic, indispensable, or sacrificial, but to let the pattern of our living come into alignment with the pattern of our being.

Through the lens of the aperture, this piece reflects on clarity, coherence, availability, and what it means to participate in the evolution of a system without distorting ourselves in the process.

What makes a neighbourhood?

Through reflections on three very different communities (a prairie farming town, Vancouver’s Commercial Drive, and life in a dense urban neighbourhood) I explore how community changes as the places we live change.

As our cities evolve, so do the ways we connect, belong, and care for one another. Perhaps the greatest challenge of our time is learning to listen across different lived experiences while still finding ways to build community together.

I’d love to hear your own experiences: What makes a neighbourhood feel like home to you?The full essay can be found on Substack --> notes.theaperturefield.com

I recently found myself reflecting on one of my earliest attempts at empathy.

As a child, I once gave my younger sister a birthday gift that consisted of the contents of my bedside drawer: a worn charm necklace, a collection of charms, and some fake money. I was thrilled with my own thoughtfulness. She was… less impressed.

Looking back, I’ve come to realize that the lesson wasn’t about gift-giving. It was about perspective. At that age, I was trying to care for someone else using the only map I had available: my own.

Over time, I learned to understand other people’s worlds more deeply. I became fascinated with empathy, relationships, and the ways people make sense of their experiences. Later, Carl Jung’s work introduced another layer: the idea that our strongest reactions often contain information about ourselves.

But eventually I discovered that understanding myself wasn’t enough either.

In this episode, I explore the relationship between empathy, projection, shadow work, trauma, and boundaries. I share why I think many discussions of projection have become overly simplified, and why true integration may require holding three things at once:

1) My reaction contains information about me.

2) Their behaviour contains information about them.

3) The interaction contains information about the relationship.

We often talk about healing as learning to understand ourselves. We sometimes talk about compassion as learning to understand others. But perhaps maturity asks something more difficult: learning to hold both simultaneously.

Topics explored:

- Childhood lessons in empathy- Carl Jung and projection- Shadow work beyond simple projection- Trauma and emotional triggers- Restoring dimensionality in relationships- Compassion without self-abandonment- Boundaries rooted in understanding rather than condemnation

A reflection on what happens when we stop asking only, “What’s wrong with them?” or “What’s wrong with me?” and begin asking what the relationship itself might be trying to show us.

Systems move through rhythms. Growth, consolidation, release, renewal. Yet culturally, we often treat any pause, slowdown, or restructuring as failure rather than recognizing it as part of how living systems evolve.

In this reflection, I explore the cyclical nature of progress, from the seasons themselves to the long arcs of societal transformation, and consider whether we may be standing not at the end of progress, but at the end of a particular phase of it.

What if this moment is asking less for relentless expansion, and more for integration, maturation, and renewal?

Field Notes is an ongoing exploration of the patterns, tensions, and transitions shaping the world around us, and within us.

You can continue the conversation and find more reflections at The Aperture Field on Substack.

I have been spending serious time lately considering the role of empathy and emotional intelligence in the world today. Like many, I find myself astonished by what I’m seeing across the world - acts that seem to disregard the very principles we have spent centuries developing as a human species.

In my curiosity, I’ve been returning to the works of thinkers from the past, reading their original texts (there is no shortage of material here), from The Theory of Moral Sentiments to more modern works like Integrity, and of course Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, which helped bring the language of ‘EQ’ into the mainstream

As I followed the thread, I kept discovering something interesting: not only are these thinkers describing similar underlying dynamics through different lenses, but we have in fact, been circling these ideas for thousands of years. Empathy isn’t a new concept, it’s something continually rediscovered, reinterpreted, and renamed.

And yet, despite this long lineage of thought, it feels as though we have lost something.. perhaps our shared internal picture of what these ideas actually mean in practice. Each work I return to offers another fragment of that image that feels both familiar and strangely absent in how we engage with one another today.

So I’ve decided to follow that thread more deliberately.

This series is an attempt to piece together connections across centuries of thought and tradition, to revisit texts and ideas that have in many cases been reduced to soundbites or dismissed as outdated, and to see whether something essential may have been left behind in the process.

Some of the authors I’ll be exploring may be surprising, as often what they are remembered for today captures only a fraction of what they were actually trying to articulate.

I'm very interested in hearing your own reflections as this unfolds, whether they align, challenge, or take the conversation somewhere unexpected. So, with that, consider this an open exploration into the deeper question of how we perceive, relate to, and make sense of one another individually, collectively, and within an increasingly complex world.

What I can’t yet reconcile is why something so persistent keeps getting lost.. I suspect that’s where this needs to go next…

This is a short audio reflection drawn from a recent piece exploring a subtle shift in how we relate to inclusion, systems, and change.

After spending time with a group of senior women leaders and reading a piece by Katrina C. Foster, I found myself sitting with a different kind of question.. not only why it is changing, but on why it feels like the signal is becoming harder to see.

In this reflection, I trace a pattern I’ve encountered over time: How ideas emerge, become systems, and then slowly lose coherence as their form remains but their underlying signal thins.

I'm not adding another take on what should happen next, but I am instead attempting to make visible the moment we may be in: between systems, where the old is losing legitimacy, and the new has not yet fully formed.

You can read the full written piece here at The Aperture Field on Substack.

This is the audio version of the essay: The Villainous Hero

You can read the written version here: https://notes.theaperturefield.com/p/the-villainous-hero

The Aperture Field Notes are reflections on clarity, leadership, and systems in transition, exploring how people and organizations navigate complexity, change, and decision-making.

More at: https://notes.theaperturefield.com

This is the audio version of the essay: The Cost of Veiled Communication

You can read the written version here: https://notes.theaperturefield.com/p/the-cost-of-veiled-communication

The Aperture Field Notes are reflections on clarity, leadership, and systems in transition; exploring how people and organizations navigate complexity, change, and decision-making.

More at: https://notes.theaperturefield.com

Welcome to The Aperture Field Notes - audio essays and reflections on clarity, leadership, and systems in transition.

These recordings are the audio versions of written field notes published at:

https://notes.theaperturefield.com

The Aperture Field is a strategy and systems advisory practice focused on helping leaders and organizations find clarity, improve decision-making, and navigate complex transitions.

This publication is a place to think out loud about what works, what doesn’t, and why; across organizations, technology, society, and leadership.

- Kari LaMotte

The Aperture Field