What I'm Reading...

I just finished Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, and it is full of food for thought.

The book is ostensibly about why we've stopped building things in America—housing, infrastructure, clean energy, all of it. But the real argument runs deeper; we've become a society more comfortable saying "no" than saying "yes." Permitting processes, regulatory capture, NIMBYism, vetocracy—the mechanisms we built to prevent bad things have calcified into systems that prevent all things and serve as a barrier to change. Here's why it landed for me...I see the same dynamic in our industry.

We've spent decades building elaborate processes to prevent bad research. Governance. Methodological rigor. Quality control. Process. Process. Process. All valuable. But somewhere along the way, the machinery designed to ensure good outcomes became machinery that slows down all outcome. Clients now bypass agencies, not because they don't value rigor—but because they value speed more.

Klein and Thompson argue that the path forward isn't to dismantle the safeguards. It's to build new systems that achieve the same goals faster. That reframe feels right for research too. The question isn't "how do we protect quality?" It's "how do we deliver quality at the speed it is actually need?"

If you're wrestling with why transformation feels so hard, this book offers a useful lens. It's not a research book. It's better than that.