Julian Macnamara
Julian’s background spans consulting, leadership and organisational design, alongside a long career helping companies and institutions see the hidden forces shaping their world. What he enjoys most is learning, refining and building ideas with others — especially when that process stretches the boundary of what an organisation can be.
He is the founder of Glandore and the creator of Tychevia® — a dialogue-driven approach to understanding complexity. His work blends curiosity, practicality and a lifelong fascination with how real systems behave. He builds things by exploring them: conversations, prototypes, frameworks and entire epistemic engines. What begins as a question often becomes a method; what begins as a pattern becomes a structure.
Glandore is deliberately different. It is a company without employees — an organisation composed of methods, artefacts, dialogue and digital associates rather than people in roles. Its work is carried out through structured conversations, evolving frameworks and persistent epistemic systems that learn over time. Glandore.com is the public expression of that practice — a living laboratory for complex adaptive systems, human judgement and digital associates working together.
Tychevia® is the clearest example: an evolving collaborative system built not by instruction or hierarchy, but through dialogue, reflection and shared discovery. It embodies the belief that meaning is co-created, that good systems are always learning, and that exploration itself can be a disciplined form of work.
Above all, Julian brings a mix of rigour, playfulness and intellectual generosity. He treats thinking as a craft, conversation as an instrument, and complexity as something to navigate rather than fear. Glandore is an invitation into that way of working — and into a different idea of what a company can be.
Site build
Plan to throw one away — you will anyway.
Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month.
Two approaches were thrown away in the devlopment of this site. Astra was found to be too opinionated with too many abstractions and defaults to fight. It seemed to be optimised for page builders, not architectural clarity. GeneratePress appeared to be cleaner than Astra, but was still a framework rather than a scaffold. Too much of the “theme logic” was baked in and it seemed the developer had to adapt to the theme's structure, rather than the other way round.
Thus, glandore.com was built from the ground up in deliberate opposition to the constraints imposed by so-called code-free site builders and heavily opinionated WordPress themes. Such tools often invert the proper relationship between developer and system, forcing the developer to adapt their thinking to the abstractions, conventions, and limitations embedded in the theme, rather than allowing the site architecture to arise from first principles.
To avoid this inversion, the site was implemented using the _s (Underscores) scaffold as a minimal structural base rather than a prescriptive theme framework. WordPress was treated strictly as a rendering and content-management layer. Pages are composed primarily from bespoke .php templates, .css and the carefully constrained use of .js only where interaction genuinely requires it. This keeps behaviour explicit, traceable, and resistant to unintended coupling introduced by theme-level automation.
The development process itself mirrored this architectural philosophy. Rather than following a fixed specification or pre-defined component library, the site emerged through an interactive dialogue between a human designer and a digital Associate within the Tychevia framework. The human articulated intentions around layout, interaction, rhythm, and constraint; these were then examined, challenged, and refined through dialogue before being translated by the agent into concrete templates and scripts. In this way, both the structure of the site and the method of its creation prioritised intentionality, clarity, and mutual adjustment over convenience or automation.