Series

The Subjective Era

In the Objective Era, we placed our faith in government, media, and science. With faith in these systems collapsing, what happens next? In this series, I explore what The Subjective Era looks like - and how leaders and organisations can adapt.

Opinionated

If you’ve ever been called “opinionated,” it probably wasn’t a compliment. Opinions, we laugh, are like assholes: everyone has one. Inherited from our families, absorbed from our environment, or learned from hard-won experience, we all have ideas about how the world should be.

In the Opinionated series, I explored the origins of our beliefs, ran a live workshop (recording available) and produced a handy toolkit to help you interrogate your opinions.

24 Days of Unpopular Opinions

In December 2025, I published an advent calendar of "unpopular opinions" tackling leadership, decision-making, thinking, culture and society, communication and personal development. It was, ironically, very popular.

The Ambition Recession

In 2025, I had a hunch that ambition was on a downward curve. That somewhere between the pandemic, the recession, Gen-Z irony, existential crises, news oversaturation and liberal guilt, we lost the will to strive.

Curious about what that looked like, I dove in, publishing pieces on tall poppy syndrome, how women's ambition is treated, the dangers of undervaluing creative work, and the role of shifting grand narratives.

McKayPedia

While on holiday, I enjoy on-the-spot research to produce rapid summaries of place, politics and philosophy. Check out my 2025 series travelling through Greece.

Taking the Boot out of the Public Sector

In 2024, I published a four-part series to bust common myths about the public sector. We tackled the difference between inefficiency and complexity, explored why the public sector operates differently to a business, cautioned against the public opinion trap, defended bureaucrats, and took a stab at political rock-throwing.

Future Proof your Dreams

Our hopes, dreams, and plans live in an unpredictable future. We need plans to channel our time, energy, and money, but we have no idea what will happen in the next few years or how well our ideas will work.

In my experience, there are a few things people do poorly when planning for the future: over-plan (and under-strategise), wait too long to review, and assume stability. This three-part series tackles each challenge in turn.

Find your Why

In 2022, I suffered a traumatic blow - a trusted advisor betrayed me and blew my business and plans apart. In the wreckage, I worked through a process to find my way back to purpose, and took my subscribers with me. For 10 days, I sent out a daily question to trigger introspection and reflection.

You can read the original article and the two updates here.