Why
Connecting the dots.
The purpose of Brad's work is to build a holistic view of how humans function — and how we raise our capacity. Not one field's answer, but a systems view: the patterns that connect brain and body, meaning and behaviour, self and team.
The map
One field of work, many fields of science.
Every field below holds a real piece of the puzzle. Psychology has one vocabulary, neuroscience another, contemplative traditions a third — and most of us only ever meet them one at a time, as a book, a workshop, a buzzword. The result is fragments: a breathing technique here, a personality type there, a purpose statement in a drawer.
FLAME exists to connect the fragments. Five dimensions — Belonging, Purpose, Agility, Mindset, Vitality — organise more than two decades of research, teaching and technology into one working map of human capacity. Hover the constellation to explore the fields it draws on, the people whose work anchors each one, and the connections between them. Like the brain itself, the map is more than its nodes: the intelligence is in the wiring.
Belonging· The people side: safety, trust and connectionPurpose· Meaning, values and directionAgility· Updating, adapting and acting under uncertaintyMindset· The predictive brain and the stories it runsVitality· Energy: the body that funds everything else
BelongingThe people side: safety, trust and connection
PurposeMeaning, values and direction
AgilityUpdating, adapting and acting under uncertainty
MindsetThe predictive brain and the stories it runs
VitalityEnergy: the body that funds everything else
Hover a node to explore it. On smaller screens, tap a concept to expand it.
The concepts on the map
Belonging: The people side: safety, trust and connection
- Psychological safety
- The shared belief that you can question, admit error and take interpersonal risks without punishment. The single strongest predictor of team learning — and the precondition for almost everything else on this map. Leading voices: Amy Edmondson.
- Collaboration
- How trust, healthy conflict and commitment actually compound into team results — and why dysfunction usually starts at the base of the pyramid, not the top. Leading voices: Patrick Lencioni.
- Behavioural styles
- The lenses — DISC and its descendants — that give teams a shared language for difference. A lens is not a verdict; it's meaning laid over data. Leading voices: William Moulton Marston.
- The need to belong
- Belonging is not a nice-to-have: the drive to form stable, caring bonds is a fundamental human motivation, and its absence shows up in body and mind alike. Leading voices: Roy Baumeister, Mark Leary.
- Workplace culture
- The assumptions a group stops noticing it holds. Culture is what actually governs behaviour when nobody is watching the values poster. Leading voices: Edgar Schein.
- The Collaborative Way
- A practised discipline of working together — listening generously, speaking straight, being for each other — treated as a skill set, not a vibe. Brad worked closely with its creator. Leading voices: Lloyd Fickett.
Purpose: Meaning, values and direction
- Purpose & meaning
- The through-line that makes effort coherent. Meaning is not found once; it is constructed and reconstructed — and it is one of the strongest predictors of a life that feels worth the cost. Leading voices: Viktor Frankl, Michael Steger.
- Values
- What matters most, made usable: values as decision fuel rather than poster words. Brad's own research base — the Values App and the Global Values Report — lives here. Leading voices: Shalom Schwartz, Brad's Global Values Report.
- Strengths
- The inversion that changed development: identify and invest in what is strongest instead of endlessly repairing weakness. Leading voices: Don Clifton.
- Gratitude
- The most practical of the meaning practices: deliberately noticing what is already good measurably shifts wellbeing, sleep and relationships. Leading voices: Robert Emmons.
- ACT
- Acceptance and commitment therapy: stop wrestling the mind, make room for discomfort, and act on your values anyway. The goal is psychological flexibility — not feeling good, but living well. Leading voices: Steven Hayes.
- Polynesian wayfinding
- Crossing thousands of kilometres of open ocean by stars, swells and birds — a living masterclass in reading weak signals and holding direction when nothing is fixed. Proof that orientation doesn't require instruments. Leading voices: Mau Piailug, Nainoa Thompson.
Agility: Updating, adapting and acting under uncertainty
- Antifragility
- Beyond resilience: systems — and people — that gain from disorder. The question is not how to avoid volatility but how to be shaped well by it. Leading voices: Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
- Curiosity
- The motivational state that makes uncertainty feel worth investigating — and, in Brad's framing, the core capability of the intelligence age: the willingness to update. Leading voices: Todd Kashdan, Celeste Kidd.
- Creativity
- Where new value comes from: the conditions — intrinsic motivation, safety, slack — under which people combine what exists into what doesn't yet. Leading voices: Teresa Amabile.
- Behavioural science
- How humans actually decide — shortcuts, biases and all — and how to design choices and environments that work with the grain of the mind rather than against it. Leading voices: Daniel Kahneman, Richard Thaler.
- Micro-habits
- Change that survives contact with real life: shrink the behaviour, anchor it to something existing, let identity follow action. Leading voices: BJ Fogg, James Clear.
- Decisiveness
- How experts decide under pressure — recognition over deliberation — and how values clarity collapses decision time without collapsing decision quality. Leading voices: Gary Klein.
- Polarity thinking
- Some tensions are not problems to solve but polarities to manage — structure and freedom, candour and care, stability and change. Brad learned to look for both sides of every event from Dr John Demartini. Leading voices: Barry Johnson, John Demartini.
- Ecology of mind
- Bateson's challenge: mind is not sealed inside a skull — it is a pattern of relationships spanning person, team and environment. The reason this map has edges, not just nodes. Leading voices: Gregory Bateson.
Mindset: The predictive brain and the stories it runs
- The predictive brain
- The big idea underneath FLAME: brains don't passively perceive the world, they predict it — and experience is the model, updated by error. Change the prediction, change the experience. Leading voices: Karl Friston, Andy Clark, Lisa Feldman Barrett.
- Positive psychology
- The science of what goes right: wellbeing, flourishing and the conditions of a good life, studied with the same rigour once reserved for disorder. Leading voices: Martin Seligman.
- Emotion regulation
- Emotions are constructed, and they can be re-shaped — by reappraising the story, shifting attention, or changing the situation itself. Regulate state, then shift story. Leading voices: James Gross.
- Mindfulness
- Trained, non-judgemental attention to the present moment — the contemplative technology that modern psychology spent forty years catching up to. Leading voices: Jon Kabat-Zinn.
- Attention & focus
- The raw material of every capacity on this map — and the most contested resource of the age. What fragments it, what protects it, what deep focus actually requires. Leading voices: Gloria Mark.
- Consciousness research
- The frontier: how subjective experience arises at all, and what altered and contemplative states reveal about the mind's construction of reality. Leading voices: Anil Seth, Steven Laureys.
- Agency & self-efficacy
- The belief that your actions can produce meaningful change — the difference between effort and learned helplessness, in individuals and whole teams. Leading voices: Albert Bandura.
- Stoicism
- The original operating system for equanimity: focus on what you control, rehearse adversity before it arrives, hold judgements lightly. Modern therapy quietly rebuilt itself on these foundations. Leading voices: Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca.
- CBT
- Cognitive behavioural therapy — the workhorse of modern psychology: thoughts, feelings and behaviour form a loop you can intervene in, with a lineage that runs straight back to the Stoics. Leading voices: Aaron Beck, Albert Ellis.
- Narrative therapy
- You are not your problem: re-authoring the story you tell about your life changes what the predictive brain projects next. The 'shifting our story' half of FLAME's core idea. Leading voices: Michael White, David Epston.
Vitality: Energy: the body that funds everything else
- Resilience
- The trainable capacity to bounce, grow, connect and flow under pressure. Brad's home ground: a decade inside the science, 50 factors, tens of thousands of assessments. Leading voices: Sven Hansen, Lucy Hone.
- Sleep
- The keystone habit nothing else survives without: memory consolidation, emotional repair, immune function and next-day capacity all run through the night. Leading voices: Matthew Walker.
- The body budget
- The brain runs the body like a budget, predictively spending and saving energy. Mood, focus and willpower are downstream of whether that budget is in credit. Leading voices: Lisa Feldman Barrett.
- Allostasis
- Stability through change: the body doesn't defend a fixed set-point, it predicts demand and adjusts ahead of it. The technical spine beneath the body-budget metaphor. Leading voices: Peter Sterling, Bruce McEwen.
- Movement
- Exercise as brain fertiliser: the most reliable, most under-prescribed intervention for mood, learning and long-range cognitive health. Leading voices: John Ratey.
- Polyvagal theory
- A map of the nervous system's states — safety, mobilisation, shutdown — and why co-regulation with other humans is a biological need, not a soft skill. Leading voices: Stephen Porges.
- Hormesis
- The dose makes the medicine: the right amount of stress — exercise, heat, cold, fasting — triggers adaptation that leaves the system stronger than before. Biology's version of antifragility. Leading voices: Mark Mattson.
- Flow
- Full immersion where skill meets challenge — and its counterfeit, the compulsive busyness Brad calls shitty flow. The difference is where sustainable performance lives. Leading voices: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
See the map live on stage.
Brad's keynotes walk audiences through the connections — from nervous system to meaning to Monday morning.