About Attune
The story behind the mission.
The purpose of learning is not to accumulate knowledge.
It's to recover your capacity for direct, skillful engagement with reality.
You were born with adaptive intelligence—the natural human capacity for skilled, responsive engagement with your environment. Watch any child at play: they explore, adapt, discover, and learn without instruction.
Then formal education happened.
It didn't develop your intelligence. It replaced your natural learning capacity with rigid specialization and rote memorization.
The discovery
What 40 years of research reveals.
Ecological psychology—pioneered by James Gibson and extended by researchers like Nikolai Bernstein and Karl Newell—reveals a fundamentally different picture of how humans learn and perform.
The dominant "computational" model says your brain is like a computer: information goes in, gets processed and stored, then gets retrieved when needed.
But this model produces the "knowing-doing gap" by design. It's why you can understand something perfectly and still fail to execute it under pressure.
"Skill isn't stored in the brain like a file on a computer. It emerges from the relationship between you and your environment."
If skill emerges from person-environment relationships, then the goal isn't to prescribe techniques. It's to design environments where effective solutions emerge naturally.
Stop teaching. Start designing.
The mission
What Attune exists to change.
The research on ecological dynamics has been around for decades. But it hasn't reached the coaches, educators, and practitioners who need it most.
Most coaching education still teaches the storage model. Most practice design still isolates skills from context. Most feedback still tells athletes what to do instead of helping them perceive what's available.
Attune exists to bridge that gap—translating decades of research into practical approaches anyone can use.
Search over diagnose
Don't tell learners what's wrong. Help them discover what works. The best coaches ask questions, not give answers.
Emergence over storage
Skill isn't downloaded into the brain. It emerges from the interaction between person, task, and environment.
Context over content
Information without context is noise. We focus on creating environments where the right information becomes obvious.
Perception over prescription
The goal isn't to tell athletes what to do. It's to help them see what's available. Perception drives action.
The guide
About me.
I'm a coach, writer, and student of ecological dynamics. I've spent years studying how humans learn skilled actions—and why traditional approaches so often fail.
Through Attune, I translate decades of research in ecological psychology, motor learning, and complex adaptive systems into practical approaches for skill development.
I write the Signal/Noise newsletter, where I separate what matters from what doesn't in learning and performance. I offer coaching and consulting for those who want to go deeper. And I'm building a community of practitioners who are transforming how they approach learning.
The vision
The future we're building.
- Learners who trust their embodied perception-action systems
- Coaches who design environments rather than deliver instructions
- Athletes who play their way to mastery
- Generalists who thrive in a world demanding adaptability
- A learning industry transformed from information delivery to ecological design
Ready to begin?
Join the community of practitioners or subscribe to the newsletter. Both free, both designed to help you recover your adaptive intelligence.