An attempt to prove Gavin right.

I have loved history for as long as I can remember. I read History and Politics at university and wrote my master’s thesis on the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Then, in 1995, I went into business — and spent the next thirty years wondering what any of it had to do with what I was now doing.

The honest answer is that I couldn’t say. I had a vague sense that the way my mind had been trained was useful — that historical thinking helped me see patterns, hold complexity, resist the obvious explanation — but I couldn’t articulate how, and I found it quietly frustrating that I couldn’t bring my passion for the subject into my daily working life.

Then I came across Francis Gavin’s Thinking Historically, and something clicked. The habits of mind historians develop — the tools they bring to bear on incomplete evidence, uncertain causality, and contested meaning — are not academic abstractions. They are precisely what leaders of businesses need, and increasingly lack. This site is my attempt to prove Gavin right.