I published my 300th Strategist article last week, marking 10 years of writing, arguing and reflecting on Australia’s security, resilience and place in the world. That body of work is more than a stack of commentaries; it’s a decade-long conversation with a nation under strain. It tracks how our strategic imagination has matured as the world shifted from discrete threats to continuous, concurrent and cascading risks. And it marks, sometimes uncomfortably, how the public arena in which we debate these issues has become more fragmented, more emotional and, at times, nastier.

When I began, the national security conversation was still largely civil. It could be intense, but it was evidence-driven, principled and focused on ideas rather than identities. It had the cadence of an early West Wing episode: fast, idealistic and grounded in a belief that argument could be constructive. Over time, the soundtrack changed. The tempo sharpened, the tone hardened and too often the exchanges now feel closer to Succession: loud, personal and driven less by substance than by point-scoring.

I’ve been called everything from a warmonger to a naive idealist, sometimes within the same hour, and on occasion I’ve received explicit threats. That isn’t debate; it’s an attempt to dehumanise and push people out of the public square. If we want to preserve a space for reasoned disagreement, we need to confront that behaviour and reinforce the norms and institutions that protect contributors rather than reward their vilification.

In the early years, my writing was diagnostic—highlighting capability gaps, blind spots and the need for reform—anchored in a belief that evidence could persuade and that institutions could adapt. But as crises multiplied—a pandemic, coercion, climate shocks, cyberattacks—that faith was tested. The work shifted from critique to synthesis, from cataloguing the ‘what’ of risk to understanding the ‘how’ of systems. The aim became to reveal the hidden links between supply chains, social cohesion, critical minerals and deterrence, to make sense of the network rather than the node.

Yet, as analysis became more systemic, public appetite for complexity diminished. We became a nation craving certainty in an age defined by ambiguity. Strategy can’t deliver certainty; it offers coherence amid chaos, and that message struggles in an environment that increasingly prizes conflict over comprehension. But the demand for coherence has only grown as the world has become more volatile.

Across this evolution, three themes emerge clearly. First, systems matter: our vulnerabilities lie in the seams between government, industry and community. Second, risk now arrives with increasing velocity, variety and volume. Third, imagination is no longer a luxury, but a strategic resource. Imagination is what allows us to move from reactive policy to proactive design, from fear to foresight. It turns disruption from something suffered into something shaped, and it gives democratic societies the confidence to act rather than simply brace.

Looking back, I can trace an arc from control to adaptation. My early work assumed risks could be reduced; later work accepts they must be managed in motion. Across these 300 pieces is a map of Australia’s uneasy strategic coming of age—shifting from comfort to consequence, from stability to interdependence. They reflect a lesson shared by both artists and strategists: coherence is not the absence of chaos; it’s the discipline of creating meaning within it.

If there’s a soundtrack to these 10 years, it has moved from Coldplay’s optimism to Nine Inch Nails’ dissonance, with the occasional burst of Taylor Swift’s honesty to remind us that emotion still matters. The world has grown louder, faster and harsher. Yet our task is constant: to listen, to connect and to imagine. Strategy today must sound less like a military march and more like jazz—improvised and responsive, willing to find structure in uncertainty.

The age of simple narratives is over. We no longer live in a world where linear explanations suffice; resilience now comes from adaptability, connection and meaning forged through pressure. And perhaps that’s what this decade of writing has really been about: finding a thread of purpose in the noise, helping Australia hear not just the discord but the deeper patterns beneath it.

So, what will the next 300 pieces bring? Likely fewer certainties and more questions; a deeper recognition that strategy is as much about empathy as it is about power; and a renewed determination to write not from outrage but from curiosity—to keep searching for coherence in a world that rarely offers it. Because while the debate may grow harsher and the risks heavier, the act of thinking and writing remains fundamentally hopeful. And in the end, that quiet, persistent hope—creative, stubborn and human—is what will always matter most.