On the other side of the planet, when Europe is sound asleep, Amber is sitting down to lunch alongside her colleagues in the public service. Amber always picks the table with the younger public servants. She likes it this way, they are more fun she says. "I usually sit with the younger public servants during lunch," Amber says, "While I'm much older, I feel more at home with them, they are still curious and questioning. A few weeks ago they showed that curiosity by asking me this question: "You've been a CEO and stuff, and you are still, well you. Does that mean we can be ourselves and rise up the ranks too?" "BINGO," I replied. "that's the only way things change."

Amber Guette (pen name, pronounced ambiguity) · talking truth to power · Dear Minister · Creative Bureaucracy Festival · LinkedIn

Amber Guette is one of the people I'm building this club around. She radiates energy and, contagiously, argues that silence is a choice with consequences and assures me that effectiveness beats volume. She has been laughing at bullies since the age of ten, invented a whole new book genre (Public Service Faction: fact + fiction), and wrote the genre's first book, centering it in the fictitious land of Hooseland (pronounced: who's land). She has shown up in her life as a peace warrior, teacher, CEO and public servant and is a co-founder the Creative Bureaucracy Festival Hub for Australia and New Zealand. On LinkedIn, she is still officially ten. I mean, come on – Meet Amber!

Whizz back a few years, until you reach 2013: Amber wrote a paper that year called Talking truth to power for the Intelligence Professional – feeling the fear and doing it anyway! Her assertion that intelligence hinges on truth-telling, and that this is what prevents disasters, has only grown stronger (and stronger, and stronger).

2026? Yup, a stress test. Our present in a 🌰🐚: high-intensity armed conflicts span the globe, our fractured global economy is running rampant, heatwaves are suddenly scarily real for Europeans, while AI and social media seem to be outrunning our real-life laws. Come tomorrow, we can probably add a new thing to this list. In this world, the value of intelligence is precisely telling leaders facts or implications they don't want to hear: her whole thesis on point. 

Growing up with an abusive father, Amber learnt at age ten that power can actually be disarmed with humor + wit. "I realised early on that if I could make him laugh it stopped his anger." she tells me. "He was a bully. It worked." In her paper she draws similar connections from the workplace and names it the “boss effect”: the higher up power sits, the less likely it is to be told the truth by people worried about their standing.

This is how power and incentive work worldwide. And the citizen version is the same: the social cost of being the person in the cafeteria saying something uncomfortable, the career risk of having a public opinion, and above all the quiet voice inside our heads that says my one voice changes nothing … so why? I’ve been digging around the polycrisis literature and this feeling has a name: pluralistic ignorance. When we each think we’re the only one, we stop saying it out loud. Most think we are the exception. We’re not.

Amber’s paper reframes what silence is. She leans on the philosophical point that truth-telling is a "positive obligation": a duty to do the right thing, not merely to refrain from doing wrong. Tolerating what we believe to be intolerable, isn't neutral in her framing; it's the absence of a positive act, with consequences. It does dissolve the comfortable idea that not-speaking is the same as doing no harm.

Her tactical advice is "how to be effective rather than merely loud," which is exactly the nut a lot of us are trying to crack open. In permacrisis most of us aren’t silent because we chose silence over action; we are choosing it over ineffective, exhausting action.

Amber’s point is that there's a third option. She admits, almost in passing, that talking truth to power first requires access to power. A public servant often has that access built into the job (a boss, a memo, a briefing exist). A citizen usually doesn't. Our truth has no memo. The last few years have shown that when the receiving end is the problem, individual reasoned voice mostly gets absorbed, eaten up by the algo-aligators and forgotten.

But here’s the twist ⚡️ we are actually in a better position than her public servant. And this is where our hope comes in. Mine, Amber’s, yours.

The public servant is trapped inside a hierarchy with almost no lever except courage. We have the levers the public servant lacks: association, organizing, voting, showing up somewhere in a body of other people. The honest extension of her paper for us isn't "be a braver individual truth-teller." It’s not the cherry on the cake, but the CHERRIES as the whole friggin’ tree: individual voice is necessary but low-leverage, the leverage is collective and structural. For us it's that a hundred people saying the quiet thing AT ONCE.

Amber has a formula for this as well: You can’t be what you can’t see.

“Have you ever heard the story of the lone nut?” Amber asks me and shares a link of Derek Sivers' well-known How to Start a Movement talk, which analyzes a video of a shirtless man dancing alone at a festival. A lone nut. “Look at him, he is having fun” she continues “he is willing to look ridiculous. But the real catalyst is the first follower, who takes an equal risk by publicly joining. He proves that the lone nut was never alone. This is why personal discomfort is really important when it comes to enabling collective change”

Amber started out as a lone nut herself. Her first book Dear Minister, Letters from a Public Servant tells the story of Amber, a public servant who is tired of all her colleagues whispering in corridors and crying into their beers at night, so she decides it’s time to talk truth to power herself: perhaps if even just one Minister (who seemed to care) was no longer in the dark things might change - she just had no idea how much... And guess what? Not only did many readers recognize the bad and the good from their experiences in the public service (or other large organizations), someone she met along the way is now also centering his book in Hooseland. And Amber has just finished the sequel, Dear Minister – Dystopia to Utopia. nut ▶ strategy.

If movements depend less on leaders than we assume, because the leader is merely the flint and the followers are the sparks, what does this mean for us in the permacrisis? Fear as strategy has already grasped this fire-building technique. Despite the infrastructure they now own, neither Peter¹, Sam² nor Elon³ are that important on their own, so who’s burning down the house?

Hold tight, wait 'til the party's over
Hold tight, we're in for nasty weather
There - has - got - to - be - a - way

BURNING DOWN DA HOUSE!

▶ Enter Amber: “If you give up, you let the bastards win”

I’m so relieved that you’re still reading this. You’re me, you’re Amber. A stubborn, wild wisdom inside you is yelling MY HOUSE!!!

You’re not ready to give up on the world. I’m not. Amber isn’t. WE AREN’T !!! 89% of us, worldwide, want real change. Not frigging incremental fixes!! We still think we’re alone in this.

You heard Amber. Be whoever you already are.

A spark.

^{Written by a human. Unpolished. On purpose.}