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Theory of Change gives busy-but-thoughtful leaders one clear, practical framework each week to move their work forward in uncertain times. This edition takes 4 minutes to read. If you’re new here, why not subscribe?

The longer you lead, the more you realise:

What matters most isn’t what you already know. It’s your relationship with what you don’t.

In my short time on this spinning rock, I’ve gleaned that true expertise is not about the accumulation of answers. It is a disciplined curiosity about open questions.

And yet, most professional environments reward closure, not exploration. Mastery is prized. Ignorance is hidden. In the nonprofit and social change sectors especially, there’s enormous pressure to present as certain, definitive, and prepared.

But what if we took a different stance?

What if we treated our ignorance not as a liability, but as a key organisational asset?

That’s where the concept of the antilibrary comes in - a term Nassim Nicholas Taleb borrowed from Umberto Eco’s towering personal collection of 30,000 mostly unread books.

In Eco’s view, a library’s true value lies not in what has been read, but in everything it holds open for future discovery.

Recently, reflecting on this idea, I noticed the books quietly gathering dust on my desk: Ishiguro, Anderson, Han Kang, Epstein, Erpenbeck, Tarantino.

Unread, partially read, waiting for a moment of relevance, serendipity, or sudden need.

They are not a sign of failure. They are scaffolding for future thinking. Each unread book is a wager: There will come a time when I need what this book can unlock.

In today’s edition, we’ll explore how individuals and organisations can operationalise this mindset, not as an indulgence, not as a “someday” pile, but as a deliberate practice of staying intellectually expansive and strategically humble.

Let’s begin.

📚 THE ANTILIBRARY 📚

Coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (inspired by Umberto Eco’s legendary private library), the antilibrary is a curated collection of unread books, papers, or resources.

It’s a working infrastructure for what you need to explore next.

An antilibrary deliberately maps unknowns (both personal and collective!) offering a constant reminder that the most important work lies not in defending what you know, but in navigating what you don’t.

For individuals, it is a discipline of staying curious. For organisations, I’ve found it invaluable as a strategy for avoiding calcification, complacency, and groupthink.

How it works

The first step is to dismantle this as a metaphor, and turn it into a working practice, a daily and organisational discipline: curating the unknown, engaging with partial knowledge, and normalising intellectual humility.

For individuals

• Read for discovery, not completion. Skim, dip in, annotate. Partial reading is legitimate exploration.

• Maintain a curiosity queue. Keep a living list of books, ideas, and questions you’re not yet ready to tackle (and review it monthly).

• Schedule uncertainty. Block regular time to engage with new domains, without demanding immediate application.

• Model public ignorance. In meetings, openly name areas you’re actively learning about. Curiosity signals strength, not weakness.

For organisations

• Visible ‘to-learn’ lists. Track emerging fields, gaps, and adjacent movements—and revisit them during strategy cycles.

• Open, unfinished learning spaces. Create forums where staff share resources or questions they’re exploring, without needing to ‘master’ them first.

• Plan from questions, not only data. Begin strategic discussions by identifying uncertainties, not just extrapolating trends from a futurist’s latest LinkedIn carousel.

• Fund speculative learning. Allocate time and budget, where possible, for exploration unconnected to immediate outputs. Ask funders to support this. (Their response may surprise you!).

An operational antilibrary isn’t just about reading more. It’s about thinking expansively, planning adaptively, and leading humbly.

When to use it

• When facing high uncertainty: New funding landscapes, technological disruption, demographic changes - antilibraries thrive where old playbooks fail.

• During strategic planning cycles: Use your collective antilibrary to identify future shifts, not merely react to immediate challenges.

• In community practice settings: Reinforce that advocacy, journalism, consulting, and coaching are fields of exploration, not finished sciences.

• In leadership development: Cultivate leaders who are as proud of what they are learning as of what they have mastered.

Why it works

In my experience, whether working with nonprofits, networks, or community-led initiatives, the organisations that thrive over time aren’t the ones with the most polished strategies or comprehensive expertise.

They are the ones that design for incompleteness.

The antilibrary mindset works because it directly supports systems thinking principles. It makes blind spots visible, treating unknowns as design inputs rather than risks to manage. It expands optionality, broadening the range of future responses by curating adjacent fields and half-formed ideas. It decouples ego from learning, preventing expertise from hardening into dogma and keeping organisations flexible. And it resists the lure of false simplicity, disciplining leaders to hold complexity without rushing to premature conclusions. All wins for any purpose-led organisation.

Get started

If you’re serious about operationalising an antilibrary mindset, it helps to have the right infrastructure. Here are five specific ways to start today, using accessible tools and workflows:

1. Create a dynamic curiosity tracker

Use Notion, Obsidian, Airtable or similar to set up a simple database called Curiosity Queue.

Capture every book, article, podcast, or paper you encounter but haven’t yet explored. Tag entries by theme, priority, or adjacent projects. Use a Kanban board view (“To Explore”, “In Progress”, “Abandoned”, “Read”) to visualise your antilibrary in motion).

2. Set up an “unknowns” kanban for your whole team

Create a shared board using Trello or Airtable titled What We Don’t Know Yet.

Invite colleagues to log trends, topics, or frameworks that feel important but underexplored. Use labels like Emerging Field, Policy Shift, Tech Trend, Movement Building to categorise the unknowns.

3. Curate a digital antilibrary shelf

Use Readwise or Pocket to collect long-form essays, research papers, and articles you haven’t yet read.

Sync Readwise highlights directly into Obsidian or Roam Research to build a web of future ideas.

4. Schedule “antilibrary time” on your calendar

Block out a recurring 30–60 minute session each week simply titled Antilibrary Exploration. No targets, no productivity goals—just deliberate exploration of something unfinished.

5. Build an anti-resume or learning map

Use a visual tool like Miro or Figma to map your active fields of ignorance - topics you are intentionally exploring but have not mastered.

This can double as a leadership development tool or an organisational onboarding artefact. Try creating a “Known Unknowns Map” for your organisation’s next strategy session to surface hidden learning edges.

6. Host incompleteness circles

Host regular gatherings where staff or community members share half-baked ideas, incomplete reads, and lingering questions (without judgement!)

🔮 FUTUREPROOFING 🔮

We’re not into toxic productivity here at Theory of Change HQ. There are risks to this approach. In my experience, the biggest challenges are over-collecting without engaging, turning exploration into a performative exercise, or accidentally reinforcing fear of ignorance within teams.

Unchecked, these dynamics can overwhelm individuals, alienate colleagues, and quietly dismantle the very culture of curiosity you’re trying to build.

Sustainability, therefore, comes from treating the antilibrary as a living system:

• Prioritise small, regular engagement over hoarding.

• Create visible, low-pressure spaces for unfinished thinking.

• Normalise that curiosity is part of the work, not a distraction from it.

• Hold psychological safety as a precondition for sharing open questions and unknowns.

Done well, antilibrary practices build organisational resilience and relational trust, making your team not just smarter, but more adaptable and creative..

🪁 PARALLEL PLAY 🪁

• What does child-centred, expert guided, emotionally absorbing, labour intensive and financially expensive parenting look like today? Anne Helen Peterson has the answers.

• Meet Icon, your AI CMO that automatically plans, creates, & runs 1000s of winning ads end-to-end. (Part of me think this might be an elaborate joke).

• Run The Song a book about running and music. What’s not to like? (Two weeks till my half marathon PB attempt 😬)

🌊 WAVE GOODBYE 🌊

My short film about the International Journalism Festival is on YouTube. It’s an ode to thinking both fast and slow in an espresso-and-ideas conference that delights and exhausts in equal measure.

If you get any value from these newsletters at all, could I ask that you head there and drop a like on the video and subscribe to the channel? It makes a huge difference.

And feel to reply to this newsletter to let me know what’s in your antilibrary right now.

Thanks for being here.

Adam

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