There’s an island. It’s big enough to get lost in but small enough to be familiar. Here you’ll find three towns, each very different, and each with a jetty from where you can make “the crossing.” A trip that takes you to The Frontier.
The Frontier
You smell it before you see it.
Charcoal smoke, diesel, and unidentified morsels on sticks charring over an open flame. The sound hits you next, that dense symphony of human, horns, and machine that starts as overwhelming before habituating into the background. A thousand things are happening at once, all of them urgent. Mopeds are threading through gaps that don’t exist. Street vendors call out in languages you may not speak, but can intone. A huddle of ageing men fix an engine on the pavement, all with strong opinions and no tools.
The Frontier is busy building itself. Less unfinished, although it has that appearance at a distance, more bootstrapped. Sometimes the ingenuity is terrifying (electric wires intertwined like rubber band balls). In other areas, you marvel at the particular resourcefulness of people who couldn’t wait for someone else to do it for them. The market stalls are engineered from reclaimed timber and cable ties and corrugated iron, and they work perfectly. The logistics network runs on WhatsApp groups, motorbikes, and personal relationships built over years, moving faster than anything the mainlanders have designed. Someone is always building something.
The energy is electric in the truest sense, like the live wire dangling perilously overhead, with enormous potential and real consequences if you grab it in the wrong place.
The Frontier, for most of us, is genuinely impressive, not despite but because of the constraint. Its people have built something extraordinary with minimal materials, in a complex environment, with no safety net. The mainlanders travel here, recognising the opportunity and potential. The relationships that unlock it take time and trust to build. The channels to reach The Frontier shift with the seasons. The locals remember every visitor. They clock who came with respect, who came with attitude, who came once and never returned.
The Frontier is periodically (some say frequently) ravaged and infilitrated by bandits. The bandits don’t announce themselves, so you need to have your smarts about you; keep your valuables close and concealed, survey before turning down quieter back streets, and be wary of unsolicited offers. Some bandits are merely extractive opportunists, but others will end you.
Everyone on the adjacent mainland island knows about The Frontier. They know that staying at home and trading only inside the island, building only for the local market, is no longer an option. The question isn’t whether to make the crossing. It’s who you send, how they travel, and whether they come back.
Beaurock City
Population: technically fine.
You’ve been here. You know it before you arrive.
The queue outside the restaurant. The six-page form to order lunch with dietary requirements, allergen declaration, confirmation that you’ve read the allergen declaration, and a secondary form acknowledging the primary one. You’re handed a laminated information pack at the door. The food arrives, soullessly and with the same amount of joy and panache as the ‘breakfast’ on a red-eye flight in economy. Because the microwaved ‘wrap’ has similar properties to a thermo-nuclear reactor, you must again sign three forms, sanitise your hands twice at the mandatory stations, and use safety cutlery that struggles to penetrate the squash-ball-textured exterior. By the time all that’s done, there’s no time to discuss what you needed at the breakfast meeting.
The bank’s vault is impenetrable, including for most of those who require legitimate access. Three-factor authentication, biometric confirmation, a recorded phone call to verify the in-person appointment you are currently attending, and a follow-up letter sent to an address you gave them eight years ago with a code that expired a week before the letter arrived. The vault is an accidental fortress, or is it…
…the windows on the second floor have no locks. The fire escape on the east side opens directly into the back of the manager’s office, where the codes are kept on a desk. Nobody has connected these facts, but the committee for “Egress and access optimisation, integration, and synergistic holistic solutionization” will convene on Tuesday, in 2027.
The houses are uniform, regulation height, regulation width, regulation grey. You cannot paint yours without a 15-step application, and even then, the palette of permitted colours extends to brown-grey to slightly darker grey. You cannot enlarge or modify the property. You cannot remove the ornamental hedge that blocks your front window; the one approved by the Aesthetic Continuity Sub-Committee after four sessions and a seventeen-page report. The fifteen-digit entry code resets every Friday at 11.38:15, generously affording you a 60-second window to enter a new one. The heating runs on solar panels, which was a somewhat logical decision when it was made in mid-summer (no heat needed, plenty of light) and a regrettable one as winter looms, and the sun goes down at four, if it ever appeared. The gap between these two facts has been identified, escalated, logged, and is currently in feasibility review, scheduled for Wednesday, 2028 (data collection is needed, and rare orange hairy spiders nesting in the solar panels must be protected, you see).
The people of Beaurock City are not malicious. They are, solemnly, earnestly, and (often) begrudgingly compliant. They say the right things, have the right straplines on their social media bios, lest they offend anyone. Yet, in reality, they don’t stand for anything. Every decision is calculated to achieve ‘maximum biege’ (a term coined by a cynical breakaway group of wilful free-thinkers who live on the outskirts). Every risk is registered and catalogued in a forty-page risk register, colour-coded, in, you guessed it, shades of grey (not 50; that would be too beige, only five shades of grey are ever needed, the five that Microsoft Word permits). The register is updated regularly - every three years, by a committee that meets on Thursday.
When Beaurock City sends an expedition to The Frontier, it sends a convoy. Armoured vehicles, slow and heavy, ships festooned in consatina wire, with helicopters circling overhead broadcasting their presence to everyone within four miles (the audible range of the dry and dusty Frontier air). 7.3 chains of command, each with logistics sub-committees and an approvals framework to plan the plan to plan the route in triplicate, and save it onto thumb drives that bandit spies have become skilled at pilfering. By the time the convoy rolls out, the season has shifted, the kit of the frontline troops is inappropriate (wrong shade of grey), and the best relationships at The Frontier - the ones built on timing, presence, reciprocity - belong to someone else.
The bandits don’t attack Beaurock City convoys head-on; they wait at the narrows, where heavy vehicles with oversized and under-calibrated tyres get stuck. They study the schedules. But, really, they barely need to, as everyone can see, hear, and smell the convoy coming.
How did the bandits infiltrate, you may ask? They’ve been inside Beaurock City for years. They came as visitors, filled in the forms correctly with incorrect information (no one checked), and stayed.
Wingitville
Population: depends on the week.
From the outside, Wingitville looks like a great spot. The signage is excellent, the branding is snazzy. The menu in the window of the restaurant is succinct, curated, beautifully printed, seasonal, locally sourced, the kind of thing you photograph before you order.
You go around the back, searching for a restroom that appears to lie beyond the sign’s reach, and the chef is microwaving discount-code-festooned ready meals and plating them with microgreens and a drizzle of something dark and mysterious, a jus of unsettingly indeterminate origin. It’s not that the chef is lazy; it’s that the front of house told the visitors that the kitchen was fully operational before anyone checked whether it was.
The bank will give you whatever you need. No questions asked, at least not since 2008. The back door isn’t locked, as that would inhibit “free enterprise”. Bank notes move in the breeze off the water, and that’s mostly fine because there’s always more coming in. Until there isn’t, at which point there are no records, and the teller has hastily put up the “Back when Beaurock City bails us out” sign and legged it.
The houses are full of character. In one seemingly abandoned house, you notice a charging point in the shower and a faint smell of burned hair. The doors don’t quite fit the frames, so they’re mostly left open. Perhaps this reflects the community spirit, or an invitation, depending on who’s walking past. The fans are large, perilously reliant on gaffer tape, and have been gently rotting since the second summer as Wingitville’s residents failed to source the right wood. They waft fungal spores gently across the room.
Wingitville has produced extraordinary returns. The inhabitants are famed for creating appealing products and services of unclear provenance and utility, which look good and sound very clever (acronyms abound). Unfortunately, Wingitville has also lost extraordinary amounts, epitomised by the empty properties you begin to notice, slowly decaying behind glorious facades. The ledger is genuinely hard to read because the accounting was always a secondary concern, and the person in charge of finances has been three different people in four years.
When you ask a Wingitville founder how things are going, they say great with the conviction of someone who decided long ago that checking would ruin the moment.
When Wingitville sends an expedition to The Frontier, it sends riders. Fast, no armour, total belief, no map. They arrive first, every time, (not always in the right place), but they’re genuinely impressive in the room - charming, hungry, culturally fluid in a way that Beaurock City’s convoys will never be. The deals they make are bold, large, and often too good to be true.
The riders who go three times come back twice. The ones who return can’t always account for the route they took, or the people they agreed things with, or exactly what changed hands and where.
The bandits don’t raid Wingitville. They maintain a constantly negotiated detente, trading in items, favours, and lavish ceremonies. You’re reminded of the video where Kim Jong-un hands Putin a glass of something toast-worthy, and both look nervously at their own drinking vessel and furtively at the other’s. What’s a bit of poisoning between friends? The sort of alliance that it would be afforded the term “axis” if Wingitville and the bandits found a third wheel.
Canvas Town
Population: growing. Intentionally.
Canvas Town is on the southern shore, facing The Frontier across the water. It doesn’t look like much from afar, but distance is misleading here.
The people who built this place came with nothing except grit and a can-do mentality. They cleared this land themselves. Built the first shelters with what the island gave them. Started fishing, bartering, and trading in a market at the edge of a clearing, where people exchange what they have for what they need, and the social currency is trust, not paperwork. That trust is the most valuable thing here, and everyone who lives here knows it.
Building materials are available, including timber from the forest to the north, stone from the quarry to the east, and clean water from the river running through the southern edge. The topography works in their favour. The ground rises slightly toward the water, which means natural drainage, natural sightlines, and a clear view of The Frontier on a good morning.
The citizens of Canvas Town learned early (and the hard way) that sustainable development is not a nice-to-have. They practice regenerative agriculture, recycling, renewable energy, and prioritise efficient preventative medicine. The layout of the buildings and resources, while organic, shows intentionality. The waste products from the livestock fertilise adjacent crops, the turbines in the river sit downstream of the drinking water, and planting of saplings along ground carved out of the land (to build on) suggests a forward-looking recognition of subsidence, fire, and flood risks.
The Canvas Town market is thriving, and tent stalls are being slowly replaced with beautiful spaces using reclaimed, replenished, or reworked materials. Canvas Town’s citizens have an air of slight impatience, like they won’t wait for permission. As you near the shoreline, you see why. They’re building sleek, silent, yet modest catamaran boats to cross the water to The Frontier.
You, the Investor
You’ve done Beaurock City, earned your stripes, and escaped the death spiral of town hall meetings and virtual coffees. You’ve sat in the convoys, filed the forms, and wished it could be any other way. You know the rhetoric - impact, purpose, values - and what happens when you peel back the PR and find a governance structure designed to protect the institution rather than deliver the mission.
You may also have passed through Wingitville (a near miss, or maybe two). The first one looked extraordinary, with an electric pitch, magnetic founders, and a mouthwatering market. Eighteen months later, you may even have sat in a board meeting trying to work out which version of the financials is the one that reflects reality and which is artistically curated for a different type of impact.
On arrival in Canvas Town, you can feel the crackle of an understated dynamism, unpolished and sometimes obfuscated impact, a potentially unnerving transparency, and a community that talks to each other rather than performing at each other.
Because you’re a seasoned traveller, you understand that while Canvas Town is impressive, The Frontier is brutal, and the catamarans may not be equipped for the crossing. The channels are treacherous, and the bandits work both shores.
As you sit, feeling the fine sand under your feet, watching the sun fade to your right, looking out at The Frontier, you ask the question: “How do we get there and come back with what we went for?”
The Crossing
Navigating a seemingly small sea is where most people get it wrong.
Beaurock City sends the battle group. Reliant on communication equipment that’s unworkable on an island with no telecoms infrastructure, announcing itself from four miles out. Attack helicopters circle ahead, trying in vain to get visuals through dense tropical canopies. By the time the flotilla docks at The Frontier, every resident on the waterfront knows it’s there. As aggressive perimeters are established, and the small seaside vendors are squeezed out to make way for bulky equipment and supplies, any negotiations move into a context of suspicion.
Wingitville’s combinations of fast boats, total confidence, and no maps see them land on the wrong side of The Frontier more often than not. Sometimes the location and timing are perfect, and they come back with something extraordinary, and the story gets retold until it becomes lore. However, no one talks (openly) about the times when Wingitville’s citizens arrived and got played. Sometimes they don’t come back at all, or come back changed in ways that are hard to explain.
The crossing 2.0
Imagine this scenario:
Canvas Town picks its most seasoned operators. Those who have navigated uncertain terrain with skill and stealth. The silent boats work, mimicking local vessels, nothing that signals money or threat. The crossing happens at the right time in the right season because a small reconnaissance crew did the work to know the channels. They move through The Frontier the way seasoned operators navigate populated but potentially hostile zones - no angry armoured vehicles with.50 calibre turrets pointed at kids, no helicopter telling the city you’re coming. Windows down, engaging, using local vehicles, heads on a swivel.
When they arrive at a meeting in The Frontier, Canvas Town folk arrive as people who understand the context, culture, history, who’s in the room, what they actually need, what they’ve been promised before and how that turned out. The negotiation is different when you come with knowledge instead of capital alone. The terms are better, and the relationships last.
And when they return with what they went for, intact, with experience compounding for the next crossing, their home community benefits. The community gets stronger. The Thursday market becomes a proper exchange. Canvas Town becomes somewhere that people actively choose to be part of.
I make this imagined scenario happen.
I help the people in Canvas Town build the right base before they make the crossing. Help them understand the lay of the land, to read the context, build culture and controls into their ways of working, and be intentional in their journey (how, who, where, when, why).