Most people run one their whole life without naming it. Here’s what happened when I finally did.
Three separate stories. Three different Sundays. Three different angles on what I thought were three different things.
In one, I wrote about the tagline. See What You Think. A phrase from a Wavefront ad campaign, sometime between 1989 and 1991, that I didn’t write but that became the title of my TEDxFargo talk years later.
In another, I wrote about the five-step method. Breath, Discover, Cluster, Map, Go. The recipe I’ve used my whole adult life to solve problems and think big.
In a third, I wrote about realizing I’d been running that method unconsciously for decades. On Wavefront in the eighties. On a project I pitched to National Geographic in the nineties, called MONDRIAN, that never got built. Before I had the language for any of it.
Three stories. Three Sundays. Three different angles.
It took building EVERYWHERE Studio to see they were the same story.
The phrase
I’ll keep this part short because I’ve told it before. If you’ve been reading these Sundays for a while, you know the shape. Someone more creative than me wrote the tagline See What You Think for a Wavefront ad campaign sometime between 1989 and 1991. Our customers were product designers, film directors, game developers, industrial designers, animators. People who had to see a thing before they could commit to it. The line did two things at once. See the thing you’re thinking about. Then see what you think of it once it’s in front of you.
I didn’t invent the phrase. I just lived inside it for 35 years.
The method
I’ve written the five steps before too. If you haven’t come across them, they are: Begin with the Breath (accept the challenge is yours to solve), Dive In and Discover (unstructured, everything on the table, sticky notes, mind map, whiteboard, just get it out of your head), Cluster the Chaos (find the themes, draw boxes, one word per box, move things from the messy side of the board to the structured side), Make a Map (decide where you want to end up, work backwards), and Get Up and Go (take a step, commit to another).
I named them in 2017 when Kymberlee and I spent seven weeks walking Shoreline Park on Sunday mornings, looking for the one idea I could build my TEDxFargo talk around. The first six ideas didn’t hold up by the end of the first lap. Week seven, on the walk, what surfaced wasn’t a new idea at all. It was the tagline I’d been living inside for 26 years.
Seeing it was the work. Naming it was the relief.
The history
I’ve also written about this part. In Come Back in 10 Years I looked back at a project I pitched to National Geographic in my early thirties, after I’d left Wavefront. I called it MONDRIAN. It was a visualization dashboard of their global productions in process. Every documentary, every expedition, every magazine feature, every research project, rolled up into a view where anyone at the organization could see what was happening across the whole map at once. It never got built. I was told I was ten years ahead of my time, which turned out to be close to accurate. But the method was already running by then, on the work of trying to shape the pitch itself. I was diving in and discovering what the dashboard needed to show. I was clustering production types. I was mapping user flow, figuring out what mattered to an editor versus a field producer versus an executive. I was taking steps, some of them in the wrong direction. The five steps were active. I just had no name for them and no way to see they were the shape of how I worked.
So that’s the three-story background. The tagline. The method. The unconscious history. Individually, each one has been a Sunday Story. If this is your first one, welcome. The back catalog has more context if you want it.
What I didn’t see until now
I have no idea how much of what I teach is actually me solving my own problems in public. I suspect most of it.
The three stories are the same story. I had the tagline in 1990. I had the method named in 2018. I spent 2024 and 2025 building EVERYWHERE Studio. A tool I told myself was just a thought partner, just a way to help me get my Sunday writing out of my head and into the world.
Sixteen months in, I’m looking at what I’ve built, and here’s what it is. What a whiteboard session really is, at the start, is the first listener at work. Someone asks what else do you know, and someone else answers, and the first listener keeps asking until they’re both out of questions. I played that role with my client downtown. I’ve played it for myself a thousand times.
So I built Reed first. Reed’s job is to be the first listener. What else? What else? What else? A conversation goes on until we’re both out of questions. That’s Dive In and Discover made external. The same thing I do at a whiteboard with a client, except now Reed runs on my phone in a doctor’s waiting room, on my laptop around 7:30 in the morning, on a walk if I have my earbuds in. Patient. Never tired. Asks the question I’d ask next if I were the coach in the room.
The next function takes all the raw material from the Reed conversation and structures it. Finds the themes. Draws the boxes. Puts one word in each and sees what clusters show up. I called that Structured Intelligence.
That’s Cluster the Chaos made external. The right side of the whiteboard, automated. Themes I would have eventually seen on my own, surfaced faster, organized cleaner, sitting in front of me in a form I can actually work with instead of a pile of notes I’d have to transcribe.
The first two steps of a method I’ve been running since my early thirties, now running in software. The software is the method. The method was always the point. The tool is a delivery mechanism for something that existed in me before I knew how to name it.
I didn’t set out to build the method into software. I set out to solve my own Sunday writing problem. The shape of the solution turned out to be the shape of the thing I’d always been doing.
The tool is the method’s hands. The method still needs a head.
The recursion
I’m using EVERYWHERE right now to help me write this piece about EVERYWHERE. The externalized version of my method is helping me describe my method. Reed asked me what the story was. I started talking. Reed asked what else. I answered. Reed asked what else. At some point I noticed I was running Dive In and Discover on the question of whether Dive In and Discover had been externalized correctly.
That’s either proof the tool works, proof the method is real, or both.
What’s strange about the recursion isn’t that it happened. What’s strange is how ordinary it felt while it was happening. I wasn’t thinking look, I’m using the method on the method. I was just writing a Sunday Story the way I write every Sunday Story. Talking to Reed. Getting questions back. Answering until there was nothing left to answer. Watching the themes cluster themselves into sections. That’s the work. The fact that the work was also the subject of the work didn’t register until I’d already done it.
The other three steps stay with the human. Breath, Map, Go. The acceptance that the problem is yours. The decision about where you’re trying to end up. The willingness to take the first step and then the next one. Those can’t be built. Those have to be lived. A tool can help me surface what’s in my head and sort it into clusters, but it can’t decide what matters to me, where I’m going, or whether I’m willing to move.
That’s not a flaw in the tool. That’s the design. The part of the method that the software handles is the mechanical part, the part that benefits from scale and speed. The part that stays with me is the part that requires a person to decide what the work is for. That distinction matters. It’s why I’m not worried about the software replacing me. It handles the work that scales. I handle the work that decides.
The client who held the mirror up
Last year a client of mine, a woman with multiple degrees and a lifetime of study behind her, hired me to help her stop being a forever student and start being a thought leader. The coach’s coach again. We met at a whiteboard downtown. Two sessions, three hours each.
Dive In and Discover. I asked what else do you know for most of the first session. She answered. We filled the whiteboard. Cluster the Chaos. We moved to the right side of the board. Big boxes. One word per box. The themes came up on their own once we let them. Make a Map. She told me who she wanted to be in six months. We worked backwards from there.
Somewhere in the middle of the second session she stopped talking, looked at the whiteboard, and said, “Now that I see it, it’s a lot.”
That’s always the moment. Not because the whiteboard is magic. Because when you finally see the shape of your own thinking laid out somewhere outside your head, you realize how much of it has been there the whole time. You were just too close to it to notice.
She’s seven months in now. No ambiguity about what she’s about, how she runs her workshops, what she focuses on. She did the work. I just helped her see what she thinks.
Which is the tagline. Written by someone else. About software. Thirty-five years ago. Still the thing I’m doing, with a whiteboard and a client downtown, with Reed and Structured Intelligence at 7:30 in the morning, with Kymberlee on a two-lap walk at Shoreline Park.
Same method. Different tools. Same question underneath it all.
What I learned from writing this
Three things about the synthesis, since this piece exists to pull the threads together.
The first is that I have no idea how much of what I teach is actually me solving my own problems in public. I suspect most of it. I suspect most of it is for anyone who teaches anything. You spend decades figuring out how to get unstuck, and at some point the getting-unstuck becomes the curriculum. It’s not fraudulent. It’s just what expertise actually looks like when you look closely enough at it.
The second is that I’ve been running the same method my whole career, on different kinds of work. Wavefront was software that let visual creators see what they think before committing to it. That one shipped. MONDRIAN was my pitch to National Geographic after I’d left Wavefront. I couldn’t get it built. A decade ahead of a market that wasn’t ready for it. Even in not-shipping, the method was still the method. TEDxFargo was a talk about the phrase as a method, on a stage. That shipped too. EVERYWHERE Studio is software again, but this time the user is me, and what the software helps me see is the shape of my own thinking. Same pattern. Different decade. Different outcomes. Some shipped. Some didn’t. The method doesn’t care. The method is what you do while you’re finding out which kind it’s going to be.
I didn’t notice I was doing this. I didn’t sit down in 1985 and plan a career arc where every decade I’d build a different version of help people see what they think. I built what the market wanted at the time. I went where the work was. I said yes to things that felt interesting and no to things that didn’t. I had a pitch, MONDRIAN, that I believed in and couldn’t get anyone else to believe in with me at the time. Looking backwards, the pattern is so clear it looks deliberate. Looking forward, I couldn’t have named it if you’d paid me. That’s how methods work. You can’t see them while you’re inside them. You can only see them when something forces the whole shape into view, which in my case took walking Shoreline Park seven weeks in a row, writing 80+ Sunday Stories, and building a piece of software that turned out to be a mirror.
The third is that I didn’t set out to do any of this on purpose. That’s the part that still gets me. The coherence is only visible looking backwards. Walking forward, I just kept solving the next problem in front of me, and the problems kept having the same shape, and I kept using the same approach, and the approach eventually had a name, and the name eventually had a tool, and the tool turned out to be the method made external.
If you’ve been doing something that works for a long time and you’ve never stopped to name it, you probably have a method too. Most people have at least one. Most people never write it down. Most people never build the tool that would give it away.
You don’t have to build software. You just have to be willing to stop for long enough to see what you’ve been doing.
If you want to see what yours is, it usually starts with a walk and a friend who’s willing to ask the next question seven weeks in a row.
Have you named your method yet, or is it still running unseen? I’d love to hear what surfaces when you look back at the work you’ve already done.
