🌀🗞 The FLUX Review, Ep. 215

November 13th, 2025

Nov 14, 2025

Episode 215 — November 13th, 2025 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/215

Contributors to this issue: Wesley Beary, Neel Mehta, Dart Lindsley, Erika Rice Scherpelz, Jasen Robillard, MK, Boris Smus

Additional insights from: Ade Oshineye, Anthea Roberts, Ben Mathes, Justin Quimby, Lisie Lillianfeld, Robinson Eaton, Spencer Pitman, Stefano Mazzocchi, and the rest of the FLUX Collective

We’re a ragtag band of systems thinkers who have been dedicating our early mornings to finding new lenses to help you make sense of the complex world we live in. This newsletter is a collection of patterns we’ve noticed in recent weeks.

“Do you know the difference between an error and a mistake, Ensign?” “No, sir.” “Anyone can make an error, Ensign. But that error doesn’t become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.”
— Grand Admiral Thrawn

⏱️🎭 The asymmetry of clock speed

When a company must seek acquisition to avoid shutting down, time warps in strange ways. For the acquirer, the process unfolds methodically—due diligence, approvals, financial models, risk assessments. For the company being acquired, days stretch toward eternity. Payroll looms. Morale dips. Both sides discuss the same deal, but they live in different versions of time.

Clock speed, based on the concept of how quickly a computer’s processor can run, describes how fast a system perceives, decides, and acts. In an acquisition, clock speed asymmetry becomes unavoidable. The acquirer’s slower pace reflects its need for precision and control. The target’s faster pace reflects its need for survival. Each side’s tempo makes internal sense, while the mismatch can distort communication and trust.

This dynamic isn’t unique to acquisitions. It echoes the Innovator’s Dilemma: established systems optimize for stability, while emerging ones race ahead in search of viability. Where systems with different time horizons meet—startups working with enterprises, local teams coordinating with global ones, or new initiatives trying to gain traction within established organizations—the same friction appears. Slower systems protect continuity. Faster ones seek adaptation.

Once you see this tension as structural rather than personal, you can start to work with it. The slower side might set up a “fast track” for decisions that keep the other side from stalling out. The faster side might use the wait to prepare for what’s next. Both sides can benefit from surfacing the speed gap: what truly needs to move fast, and what actually benefits from patience?

The asymmetry of clock speed tells you where the system’s real constraints lie. You can’t eliminate the gap—but you can learn to tune it.

🛣️🚩 Signposts

Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.

🚏🎸 An AI-generated song topped the Billboard country chart

An AI-generated country song titled “Walk My Walk,” ‘created’ by the fictional band Breaking Rust, hit #1 on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart after quickly racking up over 3 million streams on Spotify. Billboard confirmed that “at least six AI or AI-assisted artists” have debuted on Billboard’s charts of the most popular songs, spanning genres from rock to blues, including a surprising number of Christian and gospel songs.

🚏🌽 Farmers in Malawi are getting help from a chatbot that speaks the local language

An AI chatbot called Ulangizi, which means ‘advice’ in the Malawian language of Chichewa, is helping farmers in Malawi deal with droughts, pests, and other challenges. Farmers can ask the bot questions on WhatsApp, chat with it by voice, or send photos of problematic crops or livestock. The bot was built by a UK nonprofit that trained ChatGPT on government agriculture guidelines and traditional farming knowledge. The nonprofit disseminated the AI tool by training tech-savvy farmers, who could then help other farmers (including those unfamiliar with phones or keyboards) in their community.

🚏🏭 China’s CO2 emissions have been flat for 18 months

China’s carbon dioxide emissions have more or less plateaued since early 2024 after years of steady growth. Power demand in China continues to increase, but clean power sources are “covering all of China’s growth” thanks to a record build-out of wind and solar. China’s real-estate bust is also helping here by reducing demand for steel and cement. But despite all the progress elsewhere, China’s oil consumption is still increasing, driven by a boom in manufacturing of plastics, fibers, and various chemicals.

🚏🥐 A French gourmet restaurant offers meals to the needy for €1

A fine-dining restaurant in Marseille called Le République, founded by a former three-Michelin-starred chef, allows patrons of local charities to enjoy a gourmet three-course meal for just 1 euro thanks to subsidies from those charities. It’s one of many restaurants solidaires (solidarity restaurants) that’ve popped up in the seaside city: eateries founded as social enterprises that focus on helping low-income locals, homeless people, immigrants, striking workers, and anyone else who needs a good meal but can’t afford much.

📖⏳ Worth your time

Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.

Why Big Companies Keep Failing: The Stack Fallacy (TechCrunch) — Explains the Stack Fallacy, in which people believe that it is trivial to build the layer above, but very difficult to improve the layer below. Examples include browser engineers who ridicule web development and pure mathematicians who deride physicists as merely applied mathematicians.
TextEdit and the Relief of Simple Software (The New Yorker) [Archived] — Praises the “brute simplicity” of the Mac’s ancient TextEdit app, a bare-bones program that offers a blank white screen for writing and not much else. It’s low maintenance, with no AI features, accounts, subscriptions, redesigns, or cloud services. It gets out of your way and lets you write without imposing a particular format or “philosophy of organization,” which makes it “the closest you can get to writing longhand on a screen”—a refreshing change of pace from the overwrought software we’ve become accustomed to.
At a Loss For Words (American Public Media) — Highlights an alarming trend of American primary schools that are embracing the flawed ‘three-cueing’ method of literacy, which is giving children poor (or, in some teachers’ minds, nonexistent) reading skills. Compared to the traditional phonics-based method of ‘sounding out’ words, three-cueing trains kids to use context clues to guess what a written word says, leading to bizarre occurrences like kids seeing the word “horse” and saying the word “pony” instead, because they aren’t actually reading the letters on the page.
When Should You Pull the Goalie in Hockey? (Wage World / YouTube) — Develops a mathematical model for when sports teams should take ultra-aggressive moves, such as a hockey team replacing their goalie with another attacker. The core insight is that high-variance moves (even those with negative expected value) are a good bet when you’re losing with not much time left, since the goal is to win—not maximize your point differential.

🔍📆 Lens of the week

Introducing new ways to see the world and new tools to add to your mental arsenal.

This week’s lens: frame wizardry.

In a high-stakes strategy meeting, one exec frames the company’s failing product as a misstep, exposing the team’s pattern of avoiding direct customer engagement. Another exec challenges that, framing the failure as a signal from the market. A third steps in and weaves both frames together to chart an alternate path forward.

Frame-making is the act of defining a way of seeing. Often, whoever speaks first makes the frame. Frame-breaking disrupts that definition. It’s not just about disagreeing with the dominant frame; it’s about replacing it with something else (or at least attempting to).

Frame wizardry is the ability to stack, switch, and synthesize frames, often finding a third way in what may seem to be a binary tradeoff. Frame wizardry allows us to bend perception and escape the trap of any single worldview. It resists binary thinking, offering a “yes, and” where others see “either/or.”

Frame wizardry also reveals how many conflicts are really clashes of framing, Sensemaking is less about consensus than about designing better disagreements. Some problem-solving books, such as Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg’s What’s Your Problem? start from the assumption that framing is the most important problem solving skill.

Being a frame wizard doesn’t require magical brilliance. More often, it starts with a willingness to listen to the truth in the seemingly conflicting perspectives others already hold.

🌀🗞 The FLUX Review