Julian's previously published books and papers, referenced throughout the workbook. Unlike the workbook chapters, these are finished, publicly available work.
Julian Fairfield's 2002 Management Novel Levels of Excellence argues that high-performing organisations need both formal accountability and authority and informal cooperation, trust and shared behavioural values; neither approach works well on its own. It uses Elliott Jaques’ levels theory and the Seven-S model to show that legitimate hierarchy depends on managers adding value through higher levels of problem-solving capability, while people remain individually accountable for both results and behaviour. Organisations improve first by removing unnecessary complexity and mismatched levels, and then by lifting critical functions one level above competitors through stronger capability, skills and organisational design.
View →Who Is in Control of Your Brain? explains how human behaviour is shaped by the interaction of DNA-driven survival predispositions, fast emotional responses, slow rational thought, habits and culturally acquired “felt truths.” It argues that consciousness gives us a “third observer” through which we can examine those forces, draw out our positive predispositions, restrain the negative ones, and gradually reshape our habits, character and choices. The book extends the same logic from the individual to society: greater self-knowledge can improve relationships and personal fulfilment, while better cultures and institutions can constrain exploitation and create conditions in which more people can live better lives.
View →This extended biography describes how Julian Fairfield’s career has moved from factory floors and industrial operations through McKinsey, major organisational redesigns, government work and international development, giving him direct experience of how leadership, hierarchy, culture and institutional design affect performance and human outcomes. His later work brings that experience together with decades of study of the brain, levels theory and AI, leading to the central proposition behind Hope Before Chaos: that better visibility of ourselves, our leaders and our institutions can help people and societies recognise problems earlier and deliberately change course.
View →Levels theory reflects the holonic structure of reality, in which higher levels integrate lower ones into larger wholes with greater complexity, broader purpose and longer time horizons. Applied to business, this means that strategy and organisational capability can move through distinct levels, with the largest gains coming when critical functions are deliberately shifted upward in a coordinated way rather than merely improved within their existing level.
View →The 2005 Eritrea Framework Document argues that leadership, political institutions, social conditions and economic development evolve through linked stages, and that durable progress depends on those four systems developing in reasonable alignment rather than one moving far ahead of the others.
View →The Wisdom Machine presents a recursive architecture for settling human paradoxes by redesigning the structures around competing goods rather than simply choosing one side over the other. It shows how tools such as conversion, compensation, time, boundaries, truth-seeking, deliberation and governance can lift civilisation to higher-level settlements, while warning that the same machinery can run in reverse — with AI capable of accelerating either direction.
View →Examines the counterintuitive principle that well-designed constraints create rather than limit productive freedom — and why this matters for AI control architectures.
View →Illustrates the book’s central idea that physical abundance creates room for relational abundance, as everyday acts of skill, care, trust, contribution and reciprocation generate belonging and meaning beyond what the transactional economy can measure.
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