Orientational Intelligence · Artefact 01
The Lens.
One question. Every scale.
Where am I, relative to what I know, what I do not know, and what the system is doing to me? OI asks this before action. Before execution. Before you delegate to anyone, or anything.
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Sensemaking before execution. At every scale.
OI asks: where am I, who are the actors, what is unresolved, what do I need to understand before I move? It is the missing layer between information and action. The one that must exist before anything else runs.
What will happen?
What should I do?
What is wrong?
Where do I stand?
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Which world are we quietly building?
Every AI deployment reinforces a direction of travel. OI makes that direction visible, before it becomes infrastructure.
Automation-First is not a conspiracy. It is the default current. Efficiency metrics erase what they cannot count. Power flows downward. Humans become the compliance layer at the base. The Rehumanized alternative requires deliberate counter-force. OI is the diagnostic that shows which world you are already building.
When a platform is designed without asking who loses, you live inside that answer. OI makes the invisible cost of design legible. For anyone on the receiving end of a system, this is survival intelligence.
- Most AI programmes serve Automation-First by default, not by deliberate choice
- The direction of drift is legible, if you know how to read the current
- Rehumanized World requires active, sustained counter-design. It does not happen by accident
- OI names the direction before it hardens into the architecture of the next decade
Are we oriented before we deploy?
The AI layer is expanding across the organisation. The floor below it is losing visibility. Nobody drew the map before shipping.
AI systems execute into organisations that have no map of themselves. The actors, incentives, power flows and human consequences of a deployment: nobody named these before the agents went live. The floor below the AI layer goes dark. Quietly. OI is the orientation layer that must precede deployment, not follow the damage.
If your role just changed because of something AI-related, and nobody explained why: that is an OI failure at organisational scale. The missing layer was not technical. It was cartographic.
- Who are the real actors inside this deployment, named and not assumed?
- Where does the AI layer touch human work, and where does it make human work invisible?
- What incentives are already baked in that nobody has articulated?
- Whose work becomes lighter, and whose disappears from the map?
Where do I stand in my situation?
Your life runs across multiple complex situations simultaneously. No single system holds the full picture. OI does.
Each open situation in your life has actors, evidence, timelines, obligations and unresolved questions. OI is the capacity to hold all of this clearly: who is involved, what has happened, what remains unclear, what needs attention next. Sensemaking, before any system acts on your behalf.
If you have ever had five things going on at once and could not clearly explain any of them, a health appointment, a visa, a landlord issue, a tax deadline, you already know what OI addresses. Not organisation. Orientation. These are not the same thing.
- Establishes position: what happened, what changed, what stalled, and when
- Reveals structure: actors, rules and pathways, without deciding for you
- Surfaces constraints: deadlines, gatekeeping, the invisible rules that matter
- Preserves ambiguity: what is contested, unproven or genuinely unknown
OI does not pick the world. It makes the direction of travel visible.
Automation-First is the default current. Rehumanized requires deliberate design. Most organisations are building the first while claiming the second. OI shows the gap between what you say and what your deployments actually do.
The floor below the AI layer goes dark. Nobody drew the map before shipping.
AI systems execute into organisations that have no map of themselves. Actors, incentives and human consequences: unnamed, before the agents went live. OI is the orientation pass that must precede deployment.
Sensemaking before action. In your own life, at your own scale.
Each open situation orbits you simultaneously. OI is the clarity layer: who is involved, what has happened, what remains unresolved. Before you act, or before anything acts for you.