The sources behind this site are unusual. They include a 2002 animated television series about leaderless social movements. A 1946 survivor’s memoir from Auschwitz. A 1936 guide to interpersonal influence. A 1995 cyberpunk film about what makes a mind real. A 2009 leadership book. A 1927 silent film about a manufactured demagogue. They sit alongside submarine command decisions, Cold War diplomatic exchanges, and a philosophical fable about a pottery master.

This page explains what we do with all of that — and, as importantly, what we don’t do.

Three kinds of source

Fiction, film and dramatisation — novels, films, animated series, comic books — are used as analogy and cultural analysis, never as evidence for real-world claims. When Dune illuminates something about how institutions deal with the people who understand them, that illumination is real and useful. But Arrakis is not evidence that any real organisation works this way. The fiction shows us a shape; the shape is the useful thing; the evidence comes from elsewhere.

Historical dramatisations — films based on real events — are used the same way, with an added layer of care: dramatic invention separates the work from the historical record, and where it matters, we say so.

Non-fiction books are used as frameworks and supporting material, attributed to their authors, carried with their honest limitations. A leadership fable is not the same as a peer-reviewed study. An anecdote-based framework is not the same as validated causal theory. A researcher’s originating findings carry more weight than a journalist’s synthesis of other people’s findings. We try to say which is which and carry the appropriate caveat throughout — not as a disclaimer buried at the bottom, but as a structural part of how we use each source.

Cross-source analysis — where multiple sources converge on the same idea from entirely different registers — is the work this site most wants to do. When a 1946 memoir, a Cold War film, a psychology textbook, and a 1995 space mission documentary all describe the same irreducible human capacity from four different angles, that convergence is the thing worth pointing at. No single source produces it; the register produces it.

The caveat scale for non-fiction

The non-fiction sources in this project vary considerably in how much weight their claims can carry. Rather than treating all books as equally authoritative, we use a graduated scale that emerged naturally from the range of sources here:

Illustrative figures. Some books offer compelling quantitative claims — “a 1% improvement compounded becomes this” — where the figures are illustrative of a mechanism, not empirical constants. We use the mechanism; we do not treat the figures as measured results.

Fable, not research. Some widely-used frameworks are explicitly presented by their authors as leadership fables, not research reports. A causal model that came from a narrative, not a controlled study, is still useful as a diagnostic vocabulary; it is less useful as proof of a mechanism.

Anecdote-based frame. Some frameworks are built from a small number of favourable examples, pattern-matched rather than systematically tested. They can be sharp as lenses; they should not be cited as causal proof.

Mechanism solid, effects contested. Some originating researchers have produced frameworks whose underlying mechanisms are well-evidenced, but whose popular application — “teach this and outcomes reliably improve” — has run ahead of the evidence. The mechanism can be cited; the strong version of the intervention claim requires the caveat.

Headline claim retracted by the author. At least one source in this project has a central popular claim that its own author has since walked back. We carry the correction, not the original claim.

The highest sensitivity. One source — Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning — is witness testimony from the Holocaust. It is treated with the full weight that requires. It is never used as a management metaphor, never treated as illustrative material for a productivity piece, and never accompanied by absurdity of any kind.

The attribution chains we preserve

Some of the most quoted lines in this project are quoted wrongly in most places. We try to get these right:

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how” is Nietzsche’s, quoted by Frankl — not Frankl’s own words.

The finite/infinite game distinction is James Carse’s (from his 1986 philosophical work) — developed for business and leadership contexts by Simon Sinek, who acknowledges the debt.

“Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable” is Eisenhower’s (from a 1957 speech) — paraphrased by Sutherland in his Scrum book.

Where a secondary author applies a primary thinker’s insight, we try to credit both.

The manipulation line

One commitment runs through every piece on influence, persuasion, and leadership communication: we mark the line between sincere influence and manipulation.

Carnegie’s tactics for interpersonal influence are useful and largely true to human nature. They also describe exactly what hollow, instrumental charm looks like when the “genuine” is absent. We use these techniques as examples of sincere influence, and we always name the point at which the same technique becomes manipulation. The distinction is not incidental — it is the editorial commitment this category of content rests on.

The live-domain discipline

Some sources here — a film about genomic pre-judgment, a series about predictive pre-arrest, an anime about AI consciousness and state surveillance — resonate directly with real systems that exist or are being built now. We keep the parables as parables. When we want to say something about real predictive policing, real AI, or real surveillance architecture, we source it from the world where those systems actually live, not from the fiction that anticipated them.

What this produces

Source-led writing that is honest about what it can and cannot know. Careful about where the evidence is strong and where it is thin. Precise about attribution. Direct about its editorial commitments. And genuinely interested in the cross-source shapes — the ideas that only become visible when very different materials are held up to the same light.