Why
Connecting the dots.
Human capacity is under strain at exactly the moment we need it most, and the knowledge for rebuilding it is scattered across a dozen fields that rarely talk to each other. The numbers below aren't edge cases: they describe the average modern workplace — and every one of them is trainable. That's why this work exists.
The connection crisis
24%
of adults worldwide feel lonely
The WHO now treats loneliness as a global health threat — and among 19–29-year-olds the figure rises to 27%.
Source: Meta-Gallup, 142 countries, 2023 · WHO Commission on Social Connection
The engagement gap
79%
of employees are not engaged at work
Gallup prices low engagement at US$8.9 trillion a year in lost productivity — roughly 9% of global GDP.
Source: Gallup, State of the Global Workplace
The meaning crisis
9 in 10
would earn less for more-meaningful work
On average, people would trade 23% of their future earnings — about US$21,000 a year — for work that always feels meaningful.
Source: BetterUp · Harvard Business Review, 2018
The mental health crisis
12 billion
working days lost to depression and anxiety every year
301 million people live with anxiety and 280 million with depression — costing the global economy US$1 trillion annually.
Source: WHO · ILO, mental health at work
The crisis of focus
47 sec
average attention on any one screen
Down from 2½ minutes in 2004 — and every switch costs far more time than the interruption itself.
Source: Gloria Mark, University of California, Irvine
The burnout epidemic
1 in 4
employees report burnout symptoms
Consistent across all 15 countries studied. Toxic workplace behaviour is the biggest predictor — those exposed are 8× more likely to burn out.
Source: McKinsey Health Institute, global survey
The how
One field of work, many fields of science.
Psychology has one vocabulary, neuroscience another, the contemplative traditions a third — and most of us meet them one fragment at a time: a breathing technique here, a personality type there, a purpose statement in a drawer. Brad's work is connecting those fragments into a systems view of how humans actually function. Five dimensions — Belonging, Purpose, Agility, Mindset, Vitality — organise the fields below into one working map. Hover the constellation: like the brain itself, the intelligence is in the wiring.
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, Ian Hutchinson.
- 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, The Values Institute.
- 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.
- Evolutionary biology
- Adaptation is life's oldest algorithm. Evolution explains why every capacity on this map exists at all — why we predict, bond, explore and cooperate — and why environments that changed faster than organisms always won. Leading voices: David Sloan Wilson.
- Tiny experiments
- Swap rigid goals for small, reversible experiments: commit to a trial, collect the data, keep what works. A working method for curiosity — from a researcher Brad has interviewed. Leading voices: Anne-Laure Le Cunff.
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: The Resilience Institute, Sven Hansen.
- 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.
The what
The dots, connected — in practice.
The map becomes useful when it leaves the page. Everything Brad makes is the same work in a different vehicle:
See the map live on stage.
Brad's keynotes walk audiences through the connections — from nervous system to meaning to Monday morning.