Tending to Our Fire

Innovation was never just a spark. It was the work of keeping it alive.

About a million years ago, fire left traces deep inside a South African cave. Hundreds of thousands of years later, repeated hearths, worked stone, and birch tar preserved clues to what ancient people could make, learn, and carry forward. But the evidence leaves a harder question unanswered: How did human capabilities survive beyond the people who first developed them?

In Chicago, developmental neuroscientist Dr. Ayo Malu discovers an unusual pattern buried in research records that a screening algorithm has dismissed as noise. Her first experiment fails. A student uncovers a timing error. A clinic worker recognizes that what researchers call missed appointments often reflects the realities of families' working lives. And a promising research initiative encounters funding pressures, institutional rules, and an automated threshold nobody thought to question.

As Ayo and her colleagues learn to see what their systems have overlooked, they confront a deeper problem: how easily organizations can lose knowledge, exclude important voices, and extinguish capacities they once helped create.

In Tending to Our Fire, David S. Morgan brings together documented archaeology, developmental neuroscience, organizational research, and the ethical questions surrounding algorithmic decision-making. Through an explicitly fictional scientific storyline, he explores the conditions that allow human beings to notice, question, experiment, learn, and preserve what matters.

At the center of the book is the Dual Loop Innovation Model, an interpretive framework for understanding how individual inquiry, collective conditions, and the transmission of knowledge interact. The model is offered not as a proven scientific law, but as a way to examine innovation and the responsibilities that accompany it.

Drawing on more than three decades of leadership experience, Morgan offers a sweeping, humane exploration of creativity and organizational life, from the earliest archaeological traces of fire to a future increasingly shaped by intelligent machines.

For readers of big-idea nonfiction, leaders, educators, researchers, and anyone interested in the human capacity to create and adapt, Tending to Our Fire asks a consequential question:

What will survive what we build, and who will know how to carry it forward?