Marcus Ellery

The gap was never about intelligence. It was always about structure.

Marcus Ellery spent most of his thirties inside large organisations, first as a strategy analyst at a mid-sized infrastructure consultancy in Bristol, then as head of planning for a public-sector body in Edinburgh that was, during his time there, going through a reorganisation that nobody had quite planned for. He read a lot during those years. Mostly philosophy of mind, some organisational theory, a great deal of history. He kept noticing a gap between the quality of thinking that the people around him were capable of and the quality of thinking that actually made it into decisions. The gap was not about intelligence. It was about structure, and about the absence of any space in which to think slowly.

In the autumn of 2018, Marcus left the Edinburgh role and spent several months doing very little. He walked a lot, mostly in Northumberland and later along parts of the Camino in northern Spain. He read Simone Weil on attention, and Iain McGilchrist on the divided brain, and a battered paperback copy of Eliyahu Goldratt's The Goal that someone had left in a hostel in Burgos. He started writing, first for himself, then in longer pieces that he shared with a small group of former colleagues. By early 2019, three of those colleagues had asked whether he would work with them directly. Vault Mind CoreShift began, without a name for several months, as those three engagements.

Marcus Ellery trained as a strategy analyst and spent over a decade inside organisations in Bristol and Edinburgh before leaving institutional life in late 2018. He walked parts of Northumberland and the Camino Frances that winter, read more than he had in years, and began writing long memos to former colleagues about the thinking problems he kept seeing. Those memos became the first engagements of what is now Vault Mind CoreShift, founded in 2019. He is currently working on a long essay about the relationship between institutional memory and bad decisions, and is reading his way through the complete works of Simone Weil. He lives somewhere between London and the Northumberland coast, depending on the week.