Take a stance
from the
outside in.
Each fortnight, Bystance gives you a lens — a company or organisation — and a principle to consider from a policy perspective. Shape your policy suggestion to address the principle through the lens of that company. In the week that follows, you encapsulate someone else's response to the same prompt in a concise slogan.
The challenge isn't having an opinion. It's inhabiting someone else's.
Thinkers from
Three steps. Each week.
Creative insight.
Get your lens × challenge
Each Wednesday you receive a pairing: a lens (a company or organisation) and a principle along with a request to propose a policy solution through that lens. Primers help orient you to the values, capabilities, and constraints of the organisation and the context of the principle.
For example: Meta × The return of the Elgin Marbles
Share your take
Submit a short response addressing the principle through your organisation's lens. How would Buck approach efforts to expose transnational corruption? What would Sea Shepherd propose to combat AI-fueled disinformation? Would Taylor Swift set minimum rental property standards? The challenge is to adopt the lens of the organisation and come up with an approach to the policy question.
Submissions close the following Tuesday.
Bumper sticker slogan
The following week, a proposal created by another participant is shared with you. Your challenge is to develop that perspective into a concise slogan, headline or tagline. Can you communicate someone else's idea in a way that captures its essence and inspires others to support it?
When you submit your slogan, you'll see the other submissions made in this cycle.
Blackwater (now Constellis) is known for high-stakes logistics, tactical intervention, and private forces on deployment in conflict zones.
Blackwater proposes that social extraction units are deployed to apartment blocks to identify people who live alone. They run 4-week intensive civic cohorts where residents are contracted to complete missions to plant trees and install recording devices in public spaces. Failure to engage results in a loss of social credits, while success leads to veteran status within the neighbourhood network.
Earn your neighbourhood.
One lens.
One principle.
Infinite takes.
The challenge isn't just to have an opinion. It's to work through the logic of an different perspective.
How would Blackwater, Blackstone or Brunello Cucinelli think about increasing tendencies to spend time alone? Randomised lenses are allocated against a common principle. Participants are invited to adopt the values and recognisable characteristics of the organisation and apply them to a policy challenge. What emerges might be sharper than your own instincts.
That's the point of Bystance. To expand the way you think about the questions that shape society. It is a structured exercise in practising contact with outside viewpoints. Bystance helps people engage with policy questions with engaging primers and an invitation to suspend reflexive self-expression, and rehearse thinking through different lenses.
A commuter ritual for civic minds.
One issue at a time.
“ Good judgement requires you to think from other positions, not just about them ”
Hannah Arendt on enlarged mentality
Thinking about the social issues of our time asks us to develop a point of view and to consider the perspectives of others. Considering the influences that shape those views is another challenge. Echo-chambers can distort our perceptions of common ground.
Bystance is a weekly exercise in creative perspective-taking. You're not asked what you think. You're asked what you think someone else with different values, constraints, and capabilities might think.
The game borrows from policy deliberation, design thinking, and the kind of broad strokes engagement systems that invite you see the check-in differently. It takes a few minutes to play. The insights may tend to last a little longer.
Whether you work in a field that asks you to think in client frames, are engaged in policy-making, stakeholder analysis or organisational empathy, Bystance invites you to get creative and think in sync with this commons.
The next issue drops Wednesday.
Sign up and we'll send you the challenge when it drops. No spam — just one prompt and one vote, weekly.
Join