We started with why she joined the Network First Manifesto in the first place. Her answer went back to her years as a facilitator working across sectors, watching the same pattern repeat: good intentions moving forward in the room, and an undertow working against them underneath. Networks were always the thing quietly running the show, whether anyone named them or not.

From there we got into something I think is genuinely underappreciated: the difference between hierarchy as it exists in nature, and hierarchy as most organisations actually use it. Hierarchies are real, Dawna argues, and demonising them has been convenient rather than accurate. What matters is whether you are running a centralised, autocratic version of hierarchy, or a dynamic, trust-based network where the real question is simply who you go to for what.

Vital Cartography is where the conversation opened up the most. Dawna built it on the recognition that the body’s eleven systems — endocrine, digestive, lymphatic, circulatory, and the rest — are treated by healthcare as separate, when in reality they are constantly talking to one another, shaped by context, emotion, and thought as much as by biology. The project scales that idea from the personal to the organisational — an organisation has something like a respiratory system, something like a cardiovascular system — and all the way up to the planetary, where the Amazon rainforest plays the role of lungs. It is now taking physical shape as an immersive installation: sound, colour, and interactive elements, built around five of the eleven systems most affected by stress.

Underneath the science sits something more personal. Dawna spoke about staying well as a non-negotiable when you are a single parent running your own business — nobody is going to pay you to be sick — and that is what pulled her into studying the actual mechanics of burnout. We also talked, briefly, about Steve Jobs, and the uncomfortable fact that even extraordinary success does not exempt you from the basic truth that health is the precondition for everything else you are trying to build.

That led naturally into decision making, which is where Dawna’s earlier work and this new project meet. She traced it back to a moment writing Decision Making for Dummies, being asked casually by strangers what the most important part of decision making actually is, and landing on one word: awareness. Self-awareness, and contextual awareness. As long as you are on autopilot, she argues, you are making decisions off assumptions that are usually not true.

We closed on the word that kept surfacing through the whole conversation: responsibility. Once you accept responsibility for the direction you are heading and the circumstances you are actually in, you can move forward. Dawna sees real potential for this to become its own layer within the Network First Manifesto framework — the human, embodied piece underneath the network science.

CHAPTERS 0:00 Welcome — what is making Dawna happy right now 1:46 Why she joined the Network First Manifesto 4:10 Hierarchy versus networks — why NFM has none 6:23 Vital Cartography — mapping health, complexity, and the planet 12:18 What Steve Jobs got right about health 14:34 Decision making, awareness, and getting off autopilot 17:57 Responsibility as the ultimate form of agency

One line to sit with: we become the shape of who we are with.

Nat

Network First Podcast is part of the Network First Manifesto. If this conversation was useful, send it to one person who needs to hear it.

She told me something early in our conversation that stopped me.

Happiness cannot be pursued directly. The more you chase it, the less of it you experience. What she chases instead is meaning — and she has engineered her entire life around finding more of it.

That framing matters because the rest of what she said follows from it.

Sarah founded the Network First Poetics Project — which is not about poetry. It is about paying close attention to language, and what happens when the words you use do not match the world you are trying to build. When she joined Network First, she noticed people using old corporate vocabulary without thinking about it. “All hands meeting.” “Project lead.” Borrowed from exactly the kind of hierarchical structure they were trying to move beyond.

Poetics changed that. “All hands” became “convergence.” “Project lead” became “catalyst.” Small shifts, but they changed how people thought about what they were doing together.

Her point is simple and I think most organisations have never once considered it. Language is not decoration. It is infrastructure. It builds the world inside you before it builds anything outside you.

We also talked about what happens when you get laid off. The email that arrives at four in the morning. Do not come back tomorrow. And with it, every relationship you built inside that organisation — gone, treated as though it had no real importance to anyone but you.

That is not an accident. It is the design.

The conversation is worth half an hour of your time.

Thanks for reading Future Proofed Leader! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Marketing professionals, social media managers, and execution-focused roles are disappearing at pace. When organisations reduce their workforces by forty to fifty per cent, the people who remain inherit the workload of everyone who left — and gain a surveillance layer as a bonus.

This is not a temporary correction. It is structural.

The Machine Behind the Curtain

The legacy corporate recruitment process was never designed around you.

Gatekeepers accept or reject you on arbitrary metrics, dictate your salary, and place you in a box they call a career.

The model also runs backwards. You search for a monetary outcome first, then find an organisation willing to help you reach it. That dependency on centralised decision-makers is a direct route to burnout — and, increasingly, to irrelevance.

Reversing the Framework

The Network First Manifesto begins with a single inversion. Put your community first. Let the financial and project outcomes follow.

Three pillars hold this philosophy together. Work on what you are genuinely passionate about. Collaborate with people who share your vision. Maintain authority over your own time and location.

This is not an anti-hierarchy argument. Francisco Marin, founder of Cognitive Talent Solutions, makes the point precisely: networks do not replace corporate hierarchies — they are the underlying structure that makes those hierarchies function.

How the Framework Operates

Within a Network First architecture, work flows through a transparent process. Members submit proposals anchored in their own passions. The community votes, ratifying the proposals that earn collective support.

Once a proposal is ratified, the member who brought it forward acts as a project catalyst — leading the initiative alongside anyone who chooses to join.

Intellectual property and monetisation are handled openly, with project creators retaining two-thirds of marketplace revenue and the remainder distributed across active contributors.

You are no longer executing someone else’s mandate. You are building something of your own, inside a community of peers.

The Window Is Narrowing

Over five hundred expert conversations — across government, technology, and business — have shown me the same pattern. Organisations automate the tasks first and forget to protect the humans who created the value those tasks were meant to serve.

You have a three-to-five year window before centralised machine networks consolidate their grip on organisational structures. That window is open now.

Stop waiting for a gatekeeper to discover your brilliance. Find your peers. Build your network. Let the outcomes come second.

The air feels different when you step into a room full of people who chose to be there — building something together because they want to, not because someone scheduled them in.

That is what Network First makes possible.

🎙️ This episode of the Network First Podcast explores the manifesto in full. Listen wherever you find your podcasts (we are adding more platforms each week!)

Subscribe to Future Proofed Leader — weekly intelligence for professionals building irreplaceable human advantage:

Learn more about MONDAY INFLUENCER® here.

With Nat Schooler & Deacon Larry Hiner, Ps.D.

The first episode of the Network First Podcast is live, and it opens with the question I have been sitting with for twelve years: what happens to people when the structure they trust disappears overnight.

I joined Deacon Larry Hiner to launch the Network First Podcast, a framework built on collaborative freedom rather than rigid hierarchy.

Twelve years ago, an IBM roundtable turned into a magazine editor’s monologue about how wonderful artificial intelligence would be. I caught the eye of the IBM lead across that beige conference table, and when my turn came, I said five words: I am deeply worried about this. I have spent every year since trying to be wrong about that.

For a long stretch, I was wrong. The early fear gave way to real excitement about lives reshaped for the better. Lately the worry has returned, because most organisations are still removing people rather than building the new roles the moment actually demands.

The Network First Manifesto does not strip out structure. It keeps a flat, collaborative shape where consultants, freelancers, and corporate teams move between projects on shared purpose rather than rank.

I co-created MONDAY INFLUENCER® the same way. A colleague in his seventies, a colleague in her twenties, and I work with no layer between us, and it holds together because the direction is shared, not assigned.

That is the hope inside episode one. Work where people have your back, where motivation outruns fear, and where what comes next gets built rather than survived.

Listen to episode one wherever you get your podcasts.

At the moment the podcast is audio only and we would appreciate it if you shared it with your friends and business connections.

Subscribe on substack for more on staying valuable as work changes: https://futureproofleader.substack.com/?utm_campaign=profile_chips

Free tools: https://natschooler.com/tools