The practitioner, not the guru — this book is a field report, and it
matters who was in the field.
Each idea rang true alone. The picture that held them all at once was
the thing I could rarely find.
Marcus Norrgren has spent close to two decades building technology, in
Malmö, Sweden. He's built things and sold things — co-owner of a SaaS
company he helped grow from its first client onward, and today leading a
data and AI consulting practice, standing between a strategy on paper and
what a team can actually ship.
The forests read from orbit are not a borrowed illustration — he led much
of the work that came after the earliest detection, turning it into a
model that finds bark-beetle damage across a forest in satellite images,
and other remote-sensing work. He's stood on the business side
too, where a bet is struck
and paid for — deals that mattered, and some that made sense on the slide
and didn't survive the room. This is a field report, and he was in it.
Why this book
I have always been drawn to technology — to the question of purpose, of
the why, and to exploring ideas. There is a lot of research about it, but
I rarely see it put into practice.
A few pieces stuck, and wouldn't leave. The near-magic of strong,
empowered professionals given something real to build. The idea that the
deepest innovation is a shift in meaning, not just a better feature. That
concept and knowledge are things you can work deliberately — steering not
only what gets built, but when to be radical and when not. And through all
of it, purpose as the thing that could get strategy, discovery, design,
and delivery pulling in the same direction instead of apart.
These ideas have names, and a literature behind them — Verganti, C-K
theory, and others the book leans on — but the names were never what
gripped me. Making them work together was. Each rang true alone; the
picture that held them all at once was the thing I could rarely find. And
the frustration of watching them stay separate, in rooms where they could
so easily have worked together, is a good part of what put me here.
That, combined with a curiosity to be up close with one of the stronger
frontier models, led to this book. In a way, it's an experiment — a way to
learn, a way to see how far I could take this, based on research and best
practice — and a way to find out what happens if I simply accept synthetic
intelligence without trying to define it, and just work with it.
Fun has been a big part of how this book happened, too.
The work is still going, in the open. The field notes from the project
live at raisond.tech — where the
thinking shows its working.