Gautam John

Author: gkjohn

  • The Future Will Be Grown, Not Built

    The future is unlikely to be designed and built. It will be grown.

    As the year closes, this idea has kept surfacing – partly because I want it to be true, and partly because it keeps turning up in what I’m reading, in conversations and in the ether.

    I had these two pieces open – one a working paper on Rewilding Civic Life (drawing lessons from the UK’s Big Local experiment) and the other an essay on systems transformation moving from “big pushes” to “a thousand small shifts”.

    Big Local is a story about what happens when you protect space long enough for people to act together, get things wrong, learn, and try again. And with real power and a long horizon, and without demanding that everything justify itself on a quarterly reporting framework.

    Kattel zooms out to say that this is what development looks like now because the systems that matter shift through the accumulation of many small experiments that change the relationships inside and between systems. Less architect and more gardener.

    Either I’m trapped in a well-curated filter bubble, or there’s a slightly eerie coherence in what a lot of people are independently noticing. I genuinely don’t know which.

    But if the future is grown rather than built, it changes what we should reward. It changes what leadership looks like. And it changes what philanthropy is for; less “funding the solution”, more “funding the conditions”.

    If that’s even roughly right, what kind of leadership do we need, and what should funders stop doing so that the growing can actually happen?

    PS: There’s also the work on relational state capacity, which argues that what we call “capacity” is incomplete without relationships. That a society’s ability to act depends not just on institutions or infrastructure, but also on the texture of everyday interactions between citizens and those who act in the name of the state.

    And evidence from rural communities showing that trust, agency, and belonging don’t grow primarily through dialogue (even dialogue across difference) but when people do things together that matter. Action seems to create the relational surplus that trust later draws from.

    Originally written for LinkedIn on 22 December 2025. View original →

  • Geography Is Connection, Distance Is Abstraction

    Maybe geography is connection, and distance is abstraction.

    The Internet was supposed to make geography obsolete. “Everywhere yet nowhere.” The promise was that it would cross borders, break down barriers, and destroy distance. And it did, but what we lost in the process was place.

    Place is where homeostasis happens. Where the boy can work and still care for his widowed mother. Where neighbours can meet face-to-face. Where trust accumulates through repeated encounters.

    The interesting pattern: both Blue Dot and Roundabout are using digital infrastructure to restore geography as a constraint. The 15 km radius, the neighbourhood and the local steward who knows the context.

    They could choose to scale globally, but connection at scale without place becomes… what we have now? Feeds that feel extractive. And metrics that are hollow but claim abundance.

    Is the future of healthy digital infrastructure less about conquering distance and more about serving proximity?

    PS: Check out https://www.areawise.app/ from Amit Bansal Areawise

    Originally written for LinkedIn on 2 December 2025. View original →

  • When Abstraction Serves Connection: The Dharwad Story

    Yes, I often lament about abstraction winning over connection. But here’s an example of abstraction actually serving connection, and it’s worth understanding why.

    In Dharwad, Karnataka, an employer who needed 20 welders was 800 metres away from an ITI full of trained welders. Neither knew the other existed. The district didn’t have an unemployment problem as much as it had an invisibility problem. All the supply and demand in the world, and nothing moving because the relational tissue was too thin.

    The Blue Dot (ONEST) project uses digital infrastructure (tools of abstraction! Maps! Protocols! Verified credentials!) to make local jobs and local job-seekers visible to each other. Students see openings within 15 km of home, and employers see verified candidates across the road. Simple enough. But what makes it different from most tech “solutions” is what it chose not to do.

    It removes the wrong friction, neighbours who never meet, while preserving the right friction: locality, human verification, placement officers accompanying volunteers door-to-door, nightly calls to fix what broke, trust built face-to-face.

    Most platforms replace relationship while this one restores it. Most systems optimise for scale without limit, while this one has a built-in boundary radius of 15 km as a choice.

    There’s a moment in the piece where a boy feels relief, realising he can work nearby and still care for his widowed mother. That’s what it looks like when technology remembers what it’s for.

    Heavy social infrastructure. Light technology. A container, not a platform.

    Abstraction doesn’t have to disembed, extract, and scale indefinitely. It can re-embed people into local relationships. This is rare, but it is possible. And we should study it closely.

    Story in the comments by Pankaj Mishra from a couple of months ago. Gaurav Gupta EkStep Foundation

    Originally written for LinkedIn on 1 December 2025. View original →

  • What We Lose When We Optimise

    Two pieces, read together, make a case I want to sit with.

    Damasio on what education is for:
    “Hunger, thirst, satiation, pain, heat, cold, well-being, pleasure, malaise. All of these are feelings and all of these… indicate to you, in no uncertain terms, something about the state of your life right now.”
    “The ultimate practical goals of education are very simple: reduce harm to the individual, enhance the individual’s welfare.”

    WIRED on Alpha School:
    “She told her mom that staff at the school said she didn’t earn her snacks and wouldn’t get them until she met her learning metrics.”
    “She broke down and sobbed that she’d rather die than keep going.”

    Education evolved to serve life. Here, life serves metrics.

    Originally written for LinkedIn on 27 November 2025. View original →

  • Three Ways Abstraction Defeats Social Change

    Abstraction defeats social change in at least three ways.

    1. Natasha Joshi shows the epistemological abstraction: lived understanding > quantifiable data > “impact metrics.”
    The push to express care in market terms, losing what matters in the translation. We devalued what we couldn’t measure (Loss of quality).

    2. Deepak Varuvel Dennison shows the knowledge abstraction:
    embodied, local, oral wisdom > documented institutional knowledge > digitised corpus > AI training data.
    Whole worlds of human understanding are simply absent. We digitised only what was dominant (Loss of diversity).

    3. Jocelyn Skillman shows the relational abstraction:
    village care > professional therapy > AI companion.
    Each step trying to solve the scarcity created by the previous abstraction. We automated the empty shell that remained (Loss of humanity).

    We’re at the point where LLMs trained on incomplete, abstracted knowledge are being used to deliver care that’s already been abstracted twice, measured by metrics that can’t capture what matters.

    This is what late-stage abstraction looks like. We’ve repeatedly chosen abstraction over connection across every domain, building a technological future that’s systematically ignorant of most human wisdom and structurally incapable of providing what humans actually need.

    The promise was abundance. Is the reality a hollow simulation?

    Originally written for LinkedIn on 24 November 2025. View original →

  • From ‘How Many?’ to ‘How Deep?’: Aniket’s Question

    Fabulous conversation with Aniket Doegar from Haqdarshak and Archana Pillai at NSRCEL this afternoon.

    Aniket talked about how he began obsessed with numbers — the validation of “How many?” that all of us in India grew up believing was the definition of scale. And then, over 10–15 years, he realised something quieter and more durable: that the deepest impact he ever made was with the 95 children he taught in his first two years as a Teach For India fellow. And that the problems worth solving take a decade of listening, patience, and course-correction, not a quarterly sprint.

    Scale need not be a race to big numbers and can be a long, meaningful apprenticeship to the problem. Staying curious, building a culture that can hold the weight of growth, and being willing to learn from the field rather than from fixed plans.

    Originally written for LinkedIn on 21 November 2025. View original →

  • The Leadership Contradiction No One Talks About

    The leadership contradiction no one names clearly: we ask leaders to embody uncertainty while designing systems that punish them for it.

    First: McKinsey & Company’s study of Fortune 500 CEOs. Superficially, enlightened language: “curiosity,” “learning mindsets,” leaders who “admit they don’t know everything.” But read it again. Even the celebrated vulnerability, “bring your worst self”, is nominally a strategic problem-surfacing to maintain the machine. And even McKinsey can’t quite hide that it’s breaking people.

    Second: A piece by about poker players that, inadvertently, maps our entire leadership moment and points out that when the game is life and not just numbers, connection matters more than optimisation.

    I return to the tension of connection versus abstraction (again and again, SORRY!) because we need frameworks to see patterns, but when abstraction becomes untethered from the actual people, places, and histories, it loses what makes systems real.

    Do we have it backwards?

    The wisdom isn’t in doing more, faster, with greater optimisation, but in knowing when the framework helps and when to let it go. The heroic paradigm is collapsing under its own weight. Do we have the language and practice ready for what comes next?

    Originally written for LinkedIn on 18 November 2025. View original →

  • The Grid and the Body

    Notes on training as integration.

     

    Something shifted in my training over the last few months, though I didn’t quite see it at first.

    I’d signed up for HYROX; a fitness race that combines running with functional movements like sled pushes, rowing, wall balls. It meant my training had to integrate everything: running, strength, conditioning. But somewhere along the way, the goals changed me.

    I started noticing things I’d never paid attention to before. How I felt hungry differently after different kinds of runsL some days wanting protein immediately, other days nothing for hours. How my heart rate variability told me things about readiness I’d been ignoring for years. How the quality of my sleep changed my power output in ways I couldn’t will my way through.

    I’d spent decades training for marathons, for Olympic lifting, for strength. Each phase had one primary dial: pace, load, progressive overload. You knew what “better” meant. You hit the numbers or you didn’t. This was different. I wasn’t just integrating different training modalities but learning to read my whole system—physical, nervous, metabolic. This is also the first time my training mirrors the repatterning I’ve been doing in other parts of my life, learning to feel signals I used to override. Training stopped being about targets and became about coherence.

    And then I realised what had changed wasn’t just my training. It was my relationship to my body, to effort, to what excellence even means.

    This weekend I saw a thread about Shohei Ohtani, the baseball player, and something called the Harada Method. When Ohtani was in high school, he created a 64-cell grid with his goal in the centre: become the #1 draft pick. Surrounding it, eight pillars broken into specific daily practices.

    The pillars weren’t just technical: body, control, speed, pitch variance. There was also: personality, karma, mental toughness. Under “karma”, his daily practices included: pick up trash. Show respect to umpires. Be positive. Be someone people want to support.

    This high school kid trying to become a professional baseball player had built “pick up trash” into his training framework. Not as some motivational add-on. As an actual pillar of excellence, equally important to throwing speed.

    I texted a friend: “Not identical, but feels very much in the same PIN code. True excellence is always ecological. Even in pursuing individual mastery, we can choose frameworks that embed us in relationship rather than extract us from it.”

    Their response was immediate and sharp: “I cannot imagine having crystal clarity on what I want in 10–20 years, wanting it so much that I’d follow a method this regimented, and closing myself off to all the other wonderful things that might come along the way. It feels deterministic—an external, objective definition of success versus a fluid, subjective, internal one.”

    They were right to push back. The Harada Method does look deterministic. Goal in the centre, 64 cells radiating out, daily checklists, measurable tasks. It looks like everything I thought I’d moved beyond. The kind of rigid goal-orientation that treats life as an engineering problem and looks like the opposite of emergence, of responsiveness and of the listening I’d been learning through my training.

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  • What Wants to Emerge: Notes from Manotsava

    I’ve been thinking about the question the (amazing!) team started with at Manotsava – National Mental Health Festival: not what can we build here, but what wants to emerge here?

    Over two days, we watched more than 6,000 people—families, students, practitioners, and friends—show up for a mental health festival. Not a conference, not a campaign. A festival.

    Thirteen thousand had registered, seven hundred ideas were submitted, and it all found its own rhythm. People filled walls with dots and post-its, strung threads across ideas, and wrote down small joys that made them smile. It all felt coherent, as if the festival itself knew what it wanted to become.

    The numbers, encouraging as they are, weren’t what stood out. It was the way people arrived, curious, and left connected. Strangers stood in front of a board about grief or loneliness and realised they weren’t the only ones marking the same line. This quiet recognition is hard to design for, but you know it when you see it, more so when it is felt.

    Maybe that’s what this moment asks of us in the mental-health field. To build less from blueprints and more from attention. To notice what’s trying to surface when people are given space, time, and safety.

    Manotsava – National Mental Health Festival grew because people made it their own, and it reminds us that emergence isn’t something we manage but something we make room for.

    Originally written for LinkedIn on 10 November 2025. View original →

  • Funding the Future — Quest for Better Futures, Episode 11

    A conversation with Namrata Agarwal on Quest for Better Futures, the QUEST Alliance podcast.

    In Episode 11 of Quest for Better Futures, Gautam John and Namrata Agarwal discuss how we can move beyond seeing young people as passive recipients of change and instead recognise them as active co-creators of solutions. How can we build a culture of active citizenship in India? How should institutions evolve to support this?

    Transcript

    This transcript was generated with AI-assisted transcription and may contain occasional transcription or speaker-attribution errors.

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