How do you maintain enough structure to function within larger systems while preserving enough autonomy to live authentically?
That question plays out everywhere—in James C. Scott's peripheral peoples evading state control, in the middle manager navigating impossible organizational dynamics, in the systematic design of your own health protocols. The patterns are fractal: governance operates at every scale, and finding the equilibrium point is always the same art.
This site is a repository of research into those patterns. Not answers—maps. You still have to navigate your own terrain.
Over four decades of studying systems—from surveying land to mapping organizational dynamics to investigating harmonic structures in nature—three questions keep surfacing:
How do complex systems coordinate without crushing individual agency? From murmuration dynamics where starlings move as one yet each bird flies free, to Scott's "art of not being governed" where hill tribes maintain autonomy at the edges of state power, to organizational fields where middle managers find their equilibrium point between upward demands and downward loyalty.
Nature finds sweet spots through geometry. The φ-ovoid appears everywhere—in atomic structure, planetary mechanics, biological forms. These aren't accidents. They're stable solutions to the same problem: how to maintain coherent structure while allowing dynamic response. Your role in any system is finding your φ-point.
Theory means nothing without practice. This is where the maps meet lived experience: the 77:17 body composition framework tested daily for years, middle management reimagined as conscious craft, systematic health protocols that serve rather than constrain. The test is always: does it work?
I'm Stephen, a 64-year-old independent researcher currently living in a solar-powered aluminum trailer on a Canterbury farm. Bachelor's degree in surveying, MBA, 30 years living with Anthroposophy, author of Flying Blind: 10 Critical ROI Blind Spots. I practice Muay Thai, walk 5km daily, track my health metrics with the rigour of a scientist and the curiosity of someone who's discovered his body is a laboratory.
I've consulted with organizations, yes—but I was never comfortable with the consultant's promise to solve your problem. I'm better at seeing patterns across domains and making them visible. Cartography, not navigation. You decide where you're going; I just make the territory legible.
All research here is published freely under CC BY-SA 4.0. Take it, use it, build on it. The goal isn't to monetize insight—it's to map terrain that helps people find their own equilibrium between autonomy and order.