Flow in Public Policy

In this envisioned future, we’re focused on making an impact in environments where everyone is fighting for attention. Traditional methods—PowerPoint slides, dashboards, and anecdotal stories—fail to break through the noise.
Anecdotes, while compelling, don’t carry weight anymore. Even when people agree a story is true, it often ends with a shrug: “That happened to one person. Who cares?” This doesn’t move anyone to action, nor does it shift their understanding of scale or urgency.

The question becomes: What actually moves the needle in someone’s mind?
Flow is built on the understanding that brain science can influence how people create mental models—specifically tapping into visual cortex processes and the hippocampus to help them form new ideas they haven’t seen or interacted with before. This is not superficial engagement; it’s about building durable memory and comprehension.

There are, of course, barriers to entry: hardware friction with glasses or headsets, the novelty of spatial computing interfaces. It’s not all effortless. But when the stakes are high enough, those barriers are worth crossing.

The Critical Meeting
In this scenario, imagine a policymaker is preparing to walk into a critical meeting. This could be with a U.S. congressional subcommittee, an internal American government working group, a United Nations body, or a consortium of major donors.

He knows he has only 30 minutes to drive home what is happening to tens of thousands—or millions—of people. He plans to share a few personal anecdotes to humanize the issue, but he doesn’t stop there.

As he tells each story, he places it into context: each anecdote becomes a dot anchored in a large-scale Flow visualization. The dots accumulate, revealing that these aren’t isolated incidents. This is a systemic reality affecting populations at scale.

This is the moment where the old model—slides disappearing into memory gaps—breaks down and a new model takes hold.

The presenter can say:
“I’m going to hand you one of these.” He takes out smart glasses.
“Put this on for a moment.”

For the next ten minutes, the participant is immersed in data floating above the conference room table. They can see spatial relationships, trends, clusters, outliers. They’re standing in the data. They can look around, understanding with clarity and immediacy that what’s happening is not anecdotal—it’s a pattern.

That five-minute experience changes the way the person thinks and remembers. It does what no slide deck or dashboard can do: it creates a concrete, spatial memory anchored in both visual and conceptual understanding.