Every week, we distribute an internal email about what we’ve been reading. As you’d expect, the topics are quite diverse but almost all of them have some connection to our work here. Every week, we’ll share it with you as well. 

We talk a lot about helping clients cope with ambiguity. There’s an interesting note from John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and their collaborators at the Deloitte Center for the Edge about Coherency in Contradiction. They focus on contradictions in people, organizations, and ecosystems, with an emphasis on finding opportunity in contradictions. It’s provocative stuff on making sure the future doesn’t just “happen to you.”

A while back, we discussed Scott Berkun’s The Year Without Pants, about his time as a manager at WordPress. The book left some of us hungry to learn more about how WordPress’s parent company Automattic does business, and the Fast Company listicle Automattic’s Unorthodox View on Productivity Tracks Output, Not Appearance offers a brief distillation of Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg’s views: allow for experimentation, surround yourself with a great team, and permit autonomy. You can see the full talk that generated the piece here.

Speaking of talks, we’re getting ready to rev up the machine for TEDxBoston 2014, and we’re going to try living by the rules that ace event curator Sarah Milstein advocates in Putting an End to Conferences Dominated by White Men. You may find it useful for any event you’re putting together.

And now we leave you to start the week by pondering the biggest question most of us have about the future.