Origins · 22 chapters
The Making of a Question
Twenty-two short chapters, each told in slides, on where the questions behind this work began.
Every question I have worked on started somewhere specific. The first one started in a house in Madrid.
Chapter 01: The house of four businesses
Chapter 02: A coach at fourteen
Most organizations do not have a training problem. They have a transfer problem.
Chapter 03: An association called Siddhartha
Public policy treats happiness as a sum. Contemplative traditions treat it as a path. I have been standing between the two since university.
Chapter 04: A letter that said no
Being born in Spain gives you a bone-deep understanding of what a civil war is.
Chapter 05: Lancaster, 1995: studying peace on a farm
In 1995 I spent my days on two very different scales.
Chapter 06: What lies beneath conflict
The conflict you can see is rarely the conflict you are in.
Chapter 07: Peace can be learned
If peace is a skill, someone has to teach it. That was my first job.
Chapter 08: The observer, 1997
In 1997 I served as an international observer in Prijedor, in the former Yugoslavia, two years after finishing my MA in Peace Studies.
Chapter 09: Israel, 1998: the compass
After weeks of listening in Israel, our compass came down to one sentence.
Chapter 10: The internal diplomat
I left national diplomacy after my peace studies. Years later I was a diplomat again, without a flag.
Chapter 11: The green dot
My first dissertation was about how symbols divide. My corporate career asked the opposite question: can a symbol include?
Chapter 12: Three passports
A single visit gives you an impression. Twenty-five give you a relationship.
Chapter 13: A classroom that travelled
The most useful classroom I sat in kept moving.
Chapter 14: Brands & Rousers and the 6 Rs
Every way of working rouses something in other people: energy or fatigue, courage or caution, trust or self-protection. The only question is whether we notice what.
Chapter 15: 2004: a foundation in my mind
Organizations begin long before they are registered.
Chapter 16: Miami, 2016: the first room
An idea becomes real the first time other people walk into a room because of it.
Chapter 17: San Miguel, 2017: the community named her Felicia
Some of the most durable things an organization owns were not named by its leaders. They were named by its community.
Chapter 18: UPEACE, 2018: Gross Global Happiness
Every organization has a sentence for "we are doing well". The interesting part is what that sentence is counting.
Chapter 19: Taktsang: the name Fundamental Peace
Some concepts are built at a desk. The one my work now rests on arrived in meditation.
Chapter 20: Dharamshala, 2025: keep going
In May 2025, in Dharamshala, I shared the mission of the World Happiness Foundation with His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
Chapter 21: The lifeguard and the breath
Most of us only notice our breathing when it fails us: before a difficult presentation, in an argument, at three in the morning.
Chapter 22: Anchors for the system