✦ Community
Continuing the inquiry
Borrowed Mirrors will develop through challenge as much as agreement.
The community around the work is not intended to become a constituency of believers. It is a network of people willing to test the question through research, practice, cases and institutional experience.
Ways in
Ways to engage with the work.
Readers
For people who want to engage critically with the argument on their own terms: read the book, follow The Reckoning and send thoughtful questions.
Discover the BookReading Circle hosts and members
For people who want to read and discuss the book with others, whether by starting a circle or registering interest in joining one.
Explore Reading CirclesInstitutions
For boards, universities, foundations, civil society institutions, corporations and public institutions interested in examining the frameworks informing consequential decisions.
Host a ConversationResearchers and Critical Contributors
For scholars and practitioners willing to examine the claims, challenge the evidence and contribute credible cases or research.
Register Research Interest✦ Reading Circles
Read together. Question together. See differently.
Reading Circles let people take the book and its questions into their own settings without waiting for another official gathering. A circle can be a few friends, an existing book club, a student group or a leadership team. Participants do not need to agree with the book, only to be willing to examine the questions it raises.
Start or Join a Reading CircleContribute a Case
Bring what complicates the argument.
A useful case may support the Borrowed Mirrors proposition, but it may also challenge it.
We are interested in situations where a framework appeared to miss something consequential, and in cases where the framework was initially blamed but closer examination showed that its judgement was broadly right.
Both can strengthen the work.
Research Circle
For researchers and scholars interested in questions of measurement, institutional judgement, legitimacy, organisational behaviour, knowledge and context.
The Research Circle is intended as a working space for critique, emerging research and serious exchange rather than a general mailing list.
Register InterestPractitioner Interest
For advisors, facilitators and practitioners interested in how the questions behind Borrowed Mirrors might inform institutional work.
A formal practitioner pathway remains in development. Registering interest does not constitute accreditation or permission to represent oneself as a Borrowed Mirrors practitioner.
Register InterestInstitutional Conversations
For boards, foundations, universities, networks and organisations that want to host a serious conversation around the frameworks shaping their own decisions.
Host a Conversation✦ Institutional Conversations
Host a Borrowed Mirrors Conversation
Borrowed Mirrors is intended to travel into the places where consequential decisions are made.
A hosted conversation can bring the inquiry into a board, institution, university, foundation, leadership community or professional network, creating space to examine the frameworks shaping how people, capability, evidence and progress are being understood.
These are not standard keynote sessions or off-the-shelf workshops. Each conversation should be shaped around the context, questions and responsibilities of the people in the room.
Convenings
Borrowed Mirrors is interested in what happens when the argument enters a real room.
Convenings create space for leaders, practitioners, researchers and institutional actors to examine the frameworks shaping their own judgements, bring competing experience into the conversation and test where the proposition holds or becomes more complicated.
Nairobi 2026: The Founding Gathering
12 October 2026 | Nairobi
The Nairobi Founding Gathering was the first public convening around Borrowed Mirrors. More than 140 people from six countries and across multiple sectors came together to examine how frameworks shape what institutions are able to see, recognise and legitimise.
The gathering was designed around inquiry rather than consensus, and marked the public beginning of a conversation that now continues beyond Nairobi.
Explore the Nairobi GatheringFuture conversations
Further gatherings are being considered and will be announced only once they are confirmed. The intention is to protect the quality of inquiry rather than reproduce a standard event format.
The Reckoning