I've been excited all my life by the tension created in any system that works like this: I know about the players, but I can only imagine the game that's about to unfold.

I want to tell you a story about myself as a kid - and how I have now set up systems for my grown-up self (and others) to get business value out of the same types of games I played when I was young. It brings me a lot of joy.

When I was a kid, I made paper and dice games where the lines on a sheet of paper were tunnels in a dungeon. I'd draw different monsters that could only be defeated by rolling a number higher than their number, and I navigated through the page to escape the dungeon.

Then I made baseball games where each player had strengths and weaknesses and I'd roll the dice to see how each play would unfold. After an hour of keeping score, the game would end - sometimes with dramatic, surprising conclusions. I loved the narrative arc of it.

That unfolding mix of the known and the unknown inspires awe in me still. I look for it every day, in fact.

Now as a consultant and researcher, I first determine the sources I'm going to listen to on a given topic, but I don't know what they're going to say next.

Listening to My Networks

When I'm monitoring the organizations working in the watershed I live in, like the local utility company, environmental nonprofits, big industry, I scan over everything they announce about their work. Right now that's less than 10 items a day from local watershed groups.

But there are far more updates each day across all the networks I monitor:

* prospective consulting clients whose work I'm watching for opportunities to engage

* green tech and climate VCs whose new investments I'm tracking

* my digital supply chain of technology vendors I use for my work

* trade publications writing new trend pieces

* Indigenous organizations whose political and cultural struggles I support

* The network of professionals in the RegenIntel Cosmos

* and more.

My tracking system finds hundreds of updates from those organizations every day. I'm sitting at a coffee shop at 9am on a Saturday right now and there are 68 fresh updates just this morning.

Pre-2024 Marshall might have quickly scanned over all 68 of those, or all 500 on a weekday, and intuitively paused at headlines that I suspect warrant deeper reading.

But now, I can outsource that first scan to the cognitive power of AI. I do still scan the full river of updates at random to see what unexpected things I might find - but it's not the first thing I do.

The first thing I do, and honestly the thing I want to do more than anything all day, is this: I push a button my team and I have built that filters all those network updates for relevance to my current priorities.

My Priorities, and Yours

Here is what I have entered as my priorities right now: "My thesis is that monitoring your network systematically can surface important opportunities and risks, including things you can share responses to online to market yourself. That is true of any networked environment, whether it's the electric grid or my network of business stakeholders and related organizations."

Our system tells me which of the updates from the network we're monitoring are of high and medium relevance to that thesis.

Some of our clients use their filters to find announcements in their networks (which we mapped for them) of potential buying signals at target accounts, or of thought leadership pieces they can reshare with their own talking points. You can filter for anything and the system does a pretty good job of finding any updates from your monitored network that are relevant to your priorities.

First we identify and learn about the best sources to monitor on a topic, then we set up systems to see the most relevant events that emerge from that network of sources. 10 year old Marshall is very happy.

Ok, thanks for taking the time to read that. Now I'm off to send newsletter subscribers 10 picks just for each of you, selected using a similar system, from across a network of 1,000+ sources we're monitoring.