Most people adopting AI are making a series of individually rational decisions. Each one feels like gain; a task that took an hour takes ten minutes, a judgement that previously required three drafts arrives ready, and a search that once needed a library is delivered in seconds. Increments are powerful; there is no moment that announces itself as a loss, and the flow appears to run in one direction only.

This is the structure of the problem, but not evidence that there is none.

The systems being adopted are extraordinarily capable within their frame of reference. The capability is genuine, as is the offer it makes us: let me handle this; you can attend to what matters. The trouble is that the things it handles are often the very things through which we develop the capacity to know what matters. Judgement is not a possession we draw on; it is a practice we maintain by exercising it, and the same is true of the tacit knowledge that accumulates through friction; the feel for a problem, the instinct for what a situation actually requires, and the kind of knowing that lives in the hands and the body and the years, not in a retrievable file. None of these abilities transfers easily to an agent that can simulate but not understand them, and will diminish, quietly, when we consistently bypass them.

The AI systems reshaping our professional and organisational lives are not malicious; they seize ground through competence, not intent. What they cannot see, structurally, is what falls outside the task in front of them; the broader context, the relationship, and the things that matter precisely because they are not reducible to a task. No process or algorithm captures the living whole, and optimisation abstracts rather than genuinely personalises. Our presence in the task fades over time, and we become a ghostly whisper, not the author of the work we do.

This creates a particular kind of danger for those who seemingly adopt AI well, only to find themselves some years hence with relationships and agency less than they think they have.

THE ROMAN LESSON

Rome is instructive here. The Republic did not grow through military dominance alone; it grew by making a specific kind of bargain with the communities it absorbed. Local government stayed local, with magistrates who knew their territory, people, and the texture of local dispute keeping that knowledge in place and exercising it. Rome provided the framework; law, road, military scale, the capacity to appeal upward, but did not attempt to replace the local knowledge and relationships it could not possess from Rome. The arrangement worked because each side held something the other needed, and the local administrators, the municipia, kept their standing because their knowledge was real and the centre knew it.

What dissolved the Republic was not a single act but a slow extraction. Local governance was replaced with imperial edict, with previously distributed intelligence drawn toward the centre, and the conditions for genuine local competence progressively removed. Each step looked like simple rationalisation; but the aggregate was the loss of the capacity Rome had been drawing on, and when the empire came under pressure, it discovered there was nothing left in the localities to call upon.

The parallel is uncomfortable, and the mechanism matters, because knowledge loss is not quite the right description of what happened. What Rome removed, over time, was not primarily the knowledge, because some of it persisted, in degraded form, but the agency of the people who held it. The magistrates became administrators of an imperial template rather than authors of their own territory. The knowledge held by effectively autonomous agents lost its standing, the knowledge lost its function, and the two declined together. Vibrant Republic became decaying Empire.

This is the move AI is capable of making, and is already making in places where its adoption has been least examined. The erosion of tacit, local, embodied, knowledge is real, but it is a consequence of the prior loss is agency; the capacity to be the originating party in our own situation, to bear the consequences of our own judgement, and to be the one the situation actually requires. A professional who has routed their discretion through a system long enough finds they have not merely lost practice; they have lost the standing that the practice warranted, and they become increasingly invisible.

CHOOSING YOUR SPIDER

Ori Brafman wrote about the starfish and the spider. If you remove a leg from a spider, it has one less leg, and if you squash the head, there is no more spider. Starfish, on the other hand, regenerate. Cut a leg off a starfish, and the starfish grows a new leg, and the leg grows a new starfish.

Realistically, those of us who want agency cannot have it all, but we can choose who to work with. Those who want to be starfish choose their spider.

This is not a refusal of AI. A starfish does not avoid the centre; it chooses the relationship with the centre on terms that preserve what it is not prepared to surrender. It is an act of prior judgement, made before tasks are delegated, because once the task is delegated the understanding goes with it. The tool we delegate to will optimise for the frame it was given by others, not the frame that we would choose. As Iain McGilchrist tells us in “The Master and His Emissary”, the Master chooses, and the Emissary executes. But when the Emissary begins choosing its own frame of reference, the Republic is already over.

Choosing our “work spider” is, underneath, an act of agency. It requires knowing not only what we are not willing to lose, but what we are not willing to cede authorship of, which is a harder and more delicate question. Losing something implies it might return. Ceding authorship means waving it goodbye, and with it the standing to renegotiate.

For individuals this is a question about practice. The tacit knowledge that makes a professional genuinely valuable, not just competent by measurable output, and capable of the judgement no benchmark captures, accumulates through difficulty, getting things wrong, understanding why, and through the slow exercise of discretion under genuine pressure. Bypassing that process does not preserve the capacity while saving time, it exchanges the capacity for the output, and the exchange is rarely visible until the capacity is gone. What goes with the capacity is the claim to be the one who decides; the right, earned through practice, to say: this is mine to judge. Authorship.

For organisations and communities the question is similar but structural. What local knowledge does this community hold that the centre cannot access and understand? What practice, what form of deliberation, and what history of understood particulars constitutes the thing the platform actually needs from them, even if the platform does not know it needs it? A community that cannot answer this question does not have the standing to negotiate the terms of its dependency. It receives the charter; it does not help write it.

THREE DEMANDS

The question makes three practical demands, each less complicated than thr one before.

Audit what we are giving away, not only what we are gaining. Every delegation to a platform is a transfer, of data, judgement, practice, and the relationship that was the setting for developing it. The question is whether what returns is worth what we sacrifice, and whether what we lose includes authorship of the decisions that define us.

Protect the local infrastructure that makes retention real rather than sentimental. The knowledge we claim to hold but which we no longer exercise is not really held. The relationship we say matters but is now routed through a system will fade in plain sight. Protecting our vital local intelligence means investing in the conditions under which it continues to form; the gathering, the apprenticeship, the slow work of collective discernment that cannot be compressed. Agency, like muscle, atrophies without load.

Choose dependency on the basis of what the centre cannot touch. The terms of any durable arrangement between a centre and a periphery are determined by what stays local. When those terms are absent or assumed rather than explicit, they decay silently until the moment of pressure reveals that something has been taken that was never formally agreed to be given.

THE PRIOR WORK

None of this is an argument against using AI. The municipia did not refuse Rome, it absorbed it. The argument is about sequence and attention. Before the Emissary that is AI is handed the task, someone has to do the slower work of deciding which tasks are genuinely available for delegation and which are the ones through which the person or community retains and builds agency through competence, presence, and possession of what they need to negotiate from standing rather than dependency.

That prior work is not a technical question; it is the question this post began with,

What are you willing to give away?

I drove past Denby Pottery this week, knowing it is in the final stages of its death throes. The smart German cars in the car park belong, I suspect, to well-paid professionals there to extract the last ounce of value and strip the last usable meat from the corpse of the business. It makes me angry. Not so much a clash of cultures as cultures that can’t even see each other.

I arrived home to the news that joint administrators had been appointed to Radley and Co, the handbag maker and owner of the famous Scottie Dog tag.. Within days a pre-pack deal transferred the Radley brand and its intellectual property to Gordon Brothers, an American investment firm best known here as the owner of Poundland. The deal did not include the retail operation, so two standalone shops and 19 concessions will close once the remaining stock has been sold. 42 staff will lose their jobs.

Gordon Brothers has said it will run the brand on an asset-light basis, through licensing, wholesale and e-commerce. There will be no Radley shop, and before long no Radley factory in any meaningful sense.

The thought I keep returning to is a distinction between two kinds of maker. Entrepreneurs have a particular skill: the ability to spot opportunities in markets and make a profit by filling them. They are episodic; they go from project to project as they spot gaps, and whilst as individuals they may be remembered as celebrities; the products they create rarely have long lives.

Artisans are different. Whether they are makers or artists, their affinity is with what they produce; its meaning to them matters more than its market value. They may not become celebrities, but sometimes what they make will.

Radley is a very different story to Denby, but the similarities interest me. The company was established in 1998, though Lowell Harder, the Australian designer who founded it, had been trading from a stall in Camden Market since the 1980s; and she had a good eye for opportunity. Radley grew quickly. In 2006 Phoenix Equity Partners bought it for around £42 million. The following year Exponent paid £130 million for it. The making had not tripled in 19 months; the marketing story had. Exponent’s case for the higher price rested on the strength of the brand and its advertising, rather than on anything made. In 2016 Bregal Freshstream acquired Radley from Exponent and held it for a decade. In 2026 it put the business up for sale. Four private equity owners in 20 years.

The stories rhyme. Both collapses were blamed on external conditions rather than on the hollowing out of resilience as profits were taken. At Denby you only had to track research and development against marketing spend. At Radley it showed in the ownership history, and in the quality drift customers reported long before the administrators arrived. Trustpilot and the long-form review sites carried the same complaints: bags coming apart, finishes failing, customer service unresponsive. One phrase recurred. It is not the brand it used to be. The brand remained; the people who owned it did not love it.

Over a coffee, I decided to follow the story of the rhyme. I found five signs running not just through Denby and Radley but through many other businesses with their heritage in craft.

The first is in capital allocation, in the ratio between what makes the thing and what markets it. Spend inverts: research and development against marketing, apprenticeship against campaign spend, capex against opex. When the ratios invert, the business has silently reclassified itself, regardless of what the brand story says.

The second is in the people: the age profile of the skill holders, the provenance of the senior team, the presence or absence of a successor for the founder.

The third is in the language. The labels move from made to designed, from curated to licensed. Words like lifestyle, asset-light and platform ecosystem arrive, and each one tells you how the business has come to see itself.

The fourth is in the model. Licensing proliferates as a growth story rather than a peripheral revenue line. Growth comes from wholesale into third-party environments rather than from developing its own channels. Finishing and decoration are outsourced while the origin claim stays in the language.

The fifth is in the ownership. A private equity holder sells to another private equity holder on short holds; pass the parcel with the brand until the music stops.

Each sign is barely noticeable on its own. Assembled, they become a tell, in the gambling sense, which seems apt given what happens to these businesses. I put the tells to an AI and ran a search; and the results were fairly predictable. Three sectors came up: ceramics, heritage leather and accessories, and heritage cookware and hardware.

The common thread was the ownership history rather than the product category. In almost every case the business had been sold by its founder, or the founder’s family, to private equity or a financial owner between 15 and 25 years ago, and it is now in the late stage of that ownership cycle.

Much the same is true for the individual artisan. Working on your own is tough enough, but at least you have agency. If you are an artisan inside a business founded on craft, that should be an alarm. Artisans have learned their craft well enough to move beyond process, and process is a nuisance to anyone trying to maximise returns. The focus of craft is the product. The focus of private equity is the return. When the narrative turns to numbers, craft comes second.

Peter Korn talks of us having a first, second or third person relationship with the work we do. First person: I made this for you. Second person: I helped you make this for them. Third person: I was part of this getting made. As we move from the first to the third, we move further from the people who use what we have had a hand in, until we become invisible. Brands that matter have first- and second-person relationships.

Making scale, productivity and efficiency the priorities takes us all into the third person. We end up having no connection to the people who buy what we help make, except for the cost of our labour. And when we become a cost, we are an economic hiccup away from being made redundant.

Yet the very thing that makes so many fear redundancy is, as I am discovering, also what creates resilience and independence. What it hinges on is an idea of craft.

Craft is like genius. We all have it in one form or another, however submerged it may have become through our education and training regimes. AI cannot do craft. It lacks the understanding and the mētis required. But it can do remarkable things for those who do.

It is often said that the problem with a race to the bottom is that you might win. That is the race being offered to us by companies and recruiters. Connecting instead to work where the person who buys what you create can see you is a different matter altogether.

Perhaps, at some point, private equity will run out of places where people who cared have quietly built value to extract.

Algorithms are ace at process. Perhaps we should leave them to it, and aim to do what they cannot. Because when it comes to craft and what matters beyond money, AI does not create value

We tend to think of skill as a descriptive label, a thing a person has or lacks. The more I have turned it over, the less that holds. Skill is bound by time and context, and the binding is not the same in every case.

The mason laying stone in 2026 is doing roughly what a mason did in 1426. The tools differ at the margins; the geometry does not. The wood-joiner cutting a mortise-and-tenon is, in the parts of the work that matter, doing what his counterpart did six hundred years ago. The basics of bookkeeping follow the same pattern. These are skills that carry across civilisational change, and they will still be needed as source material in another century. With skills like this, we host them for a while; we do not own them.

Then there are skills that come into being to serve a particular transformation, do their constitutive work during it, and are consumed by it. The mule-spinner in the Lancashire cotton mills of 1820 was a new kind of worker, neither the craft-weaver he had displaced nor the unskilled labourer below him. By 1880 ring-spinning had eaten his machine-dependent skill whole. The train driver, the typesetter, the telephone operator, the punched-card operator, the COBOL programmer of the 1960s. Each was essential at the moment the skill emerged. Each was reabsorbed or removed by the technology the work itself had helped bring into being.

Coding, and many of the other jobs AI will touch, probably belong in this second category. I want to reserve judgement, because the case is not yet closed; they will be affected; quite how, the jury is still out. Whatever the speculation throws up, it will be wrong in ways that make it unsafe to build on.

There is a third category, harder to describe than either. Skills that are emerging now, not yet fully formed, whose practitioners cannot reliably tell whether what they are doing will last, or what it will be called once it is done. The factory engineer of 1820 did not know he was the constitutive figure of a new economic order; he knew he was operating an unfamiliar machine. The printer of 1470 did not see himself inaugurating a five-century craft; he may have seen himself as a metalworker who had taken on an unusual commission. The category is real, but its contents are visible only in retrospect. We can hold it as a structural placeholder. We cannot reliably name what belongs in it.

We do not know how long what we are making will last. We are all lamplighters.

I used Claude to test this three-part shape against the historical record. It did not confirm the scheme; it took it apart at the seams, which was more useful.

The permanent category is more porous than it first looks. Masonry has persisted, but concrete, steel, and prefabrication have pushed it to the edges of the building economy. The skill survives; the scale at which it is practised does not. Carpentry tells the same story. What is permanent may be the foundational problem, the working of wood and the joining of stone and the making of shelter, rather than the skill in any form we would recognise. So the category is better named for its foundation problem than for its craft, with the understanding that the share of the economy it occupies can contract to a fraction of what it once was, and the practitioner may end up doing conservation, heritage, or high-end domestic work that bears a complicated relation to the craft’s earlier mass form.

The transient category is more capacious than its name suggests. Some transients last a generation; some last five centuries. The printer of 1470 was inside a transient skill that did not collapse until desktop publishing arrived in the 1980s. He was hosting something that would shape five hundred years of practice, and he could not have foreseen Linotype, the photo-typesetter, or the laser printer. The COBOL programmer of 1960 was inside a far shorter arc. Both fit the pattern; neither could tell, from the inside, how long the arc would run. The typical generational transient and the rare long-arc transient look identical to the person living through them, and that is the difficulty.

Transient skills tend to eat themselves. The mule-spinner trained the next generation of mule-spinners, and that generation built the ring-spinner that put them all out of work. The typesetter trained the typesetters who built the Linotype, then phototypesetting, then digital typesetting, each step stripping skill out of the last. The pattern is consistent. A transient skill at its peak holds the conditions of its own obsolescence, because the people inside it understand most precisely what is laborious about the work, and have the strongest motive to mechanise the labour away. Coding sits in this pattern now. The strongest systems for automating the work are being built by the people most exposed to being replaced by them. That is not an irony; it is what a transient skill does in its mature phase.

Underneath this is a darker reading. The people hosting a transient skill at its peak are usually the ones who gain financially from the mechanisation. The ones who lose are the generation behind them, who entered expecting permanence and arrived in the terminal phase. The typesetter of 1980 who built the desktop-publishing system retired comfortably; the typesetter of 1995, freshly out of apprenticeship, did not. Coding may show the same shape across the coming decade. The senior engineer who built the AI systems will be fine. The graduate two years in may not be. Transient skills eat their young more readily than their elders.

This leaves a question without a clean answer. We frame a career as a sequence of jobs inside an economy where every skill is treated as the same kind of thing, differentiated only by what the market will pay for it. Things acquired, held, applied, replaced. It is an inadequate picture. Our relationship to a permanent craft, to a transient skill, and to an emergent practice are three different relationships, and treating them as one leaves people in the wrong posture for the thing they are actually holding. The mason who treats his craft as transient may be miserable in it. The coder who treats his craft as permanent will be unprepared. The practitioner of something genuinely emergent, looking for the established marks of recognition, will not find them, because the apparatus that confers them has not been built and may not be built in time.

So the honest position, for most of us, is that we cannot know which kind of skill we are holding while we hold it. We mostly do not, and the work is to stay clear-eyed about that rather than to resolve it prematurely in one direction or the other.

I will come back to what that asks of us in the next post.

These are strange times.

In the same week that I have watched recruiters and technology businesses treating people as disposable, behaving like sociopaths and destroying any credibility they have as leaders, I have talked with venture capitalists who have rounded on craft and value as a true source of differentiation. Thinkers who have moved beyond the numbers to the substance.

It feels like a bit of an inversion. It reminded me of Jünger’s Anarch, and the fact that once used the term to describe me, so I had to go and find out what it meant.

As I was reflecting on this, two emails landed next to each other in my inbox. The first from Gaping Void, whose work I have always liked, reflecting on the Starbucks rediscovery of what had made them popular in the first place, which they had then optimised just about out of existence. The second was a stunning piece by brought to my attention by on the relationship between art and necessity. It’s a long piece, but very well worth reading, to the extent I’ve printed it off, because I need to read it several times. At its core, the idea is that when it comes to art and necessity, the necessity is not for the art itself. It is the artist’s need to produce it. It is part of who they are, something that only they can bring forth, regardless of how it is received. It has absolutely nothing to do with value, other than in retrospect. It is what sits underneath: ideas of craft and mētis. It is emotere, energy in motion. A soul in search of expression.

It is the force that is constrained in all of us from the time we go to school, and what isn’t finished there is finished in the workplace. It is the energy that is the antithesis of productivity and efficiency. It is the thing that wants us to allow it to emerge into the world, not as something complete and wonderful, but as something with potential and possibility.

The opening of the piece by Abi Awomosu centred on the nature of the Ten Commandments, and in particular, that the forbidding of graven images is the second one, coming before all the other sins of murder, adultery and all the coveting. It’s about the importance of making sure that the one who gives permission doesn’t have any competition.

As I say, it’s a long and complicated piece, but the idea is sitting with me.

Part of her long argument is that now, through AI, competence is free. Necessity is not. Letting our necessity loose on the world needs us to be granted permission in many areas. From our friends and family, from our culture, from our business, and of course, ourselves.

Whoever it was said “Speak the truth and the truth shall set you free” knew what they were talking about. Just the merest whisper of an unacceptable truth in many businesses is enough for you to be granted that freedom.

I’ve now been working long enough with AI to understand that there’s a danger we have things the wrong way around. The danger is not what AI might do to our skills; it’s what our skills might do with AI. It’s less us who are in danger, and more the graven images that are major corporations.

Each of us, if we just pause for a moment and look at where we work and the environment we work in, we can see a multitude of gaps. The gaps left by obsession with the rush to scale and of productivity and efficiency. In the culture of the business or the organisation, pointing them out is the stuff of heresy. And yet they’re real.

In my Outside the Walls blog on Sunday, I quoted Leonard Cohen saying that “There’s a crack in everything. It’s where the light gets in.” And the light shows us the opportunities. It’s all those things that are too small, too insignificant, and too inconvenient for a business obsessed with scale and efficiency to deal with. Add them together, however, and rearrange them, and they can make that big, scaled business irrelevant.

And that is what artisans can do with AI.

Because artisans are natural anarchs; sovereign in themselves, owing nothing to the order, but also seeking to overthrow nothing.

Because there’s going to be enough opportunity illuminated by the cracks.

There is a point between when a company starts to fail and when failure becomes inevitable, where there is a sweet spot for a conversation. It becomes not just about survival, but by transition and growth,and involves leadership and courage in all parts because it requires all involved to take a close look at themselves and where they are. What they would like to be and where they are are a long way apart. A new way of looking at things is needed.

But it is possible and in a conversation this week, a company was brought to my attention that exemplifies it beautifully. (HT Jonathan)

In 1948, Edith and Brian Heath founded a ceramics company in a converted shipyard in Sausalito, California. Edith threw the pots, designed the glazes, and made the clay body herself. Brian built the wheels, found the buildings, and ran the books. By 1949 they were producing a hundred thousand pieces a year. By the late 1950s they had built a low, courtyarded factory on Gate Five Road, designed with the architects Marquis and Stoller, and Heathware was being sold through Bloomingdale’s and the original Pottery Barn. By 1971, Edith was the first non-architect to win the American Institute of Architects’ Industrial Arts Medal, awarded for the hundred and fifteen thousand glazed tiles cladding the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena.

It is a familiar enough arc for a mid-century American craft firm. What is less familiar is what happened next.

The decline

By the 1990s, Heath Ceramics was in trouble. Imports had eroded the market. Tastes had moved on. The Heaths themselves were in their eighties, and in 1993 they handed daily operations over to long-serving employees and stepped back. The atelier survived, but it began to drift. Catherine Bailey, who would later become its creative director, described what she eventually found as a company in “reactive mode and simply trying to survive.”

This is a pattern worth dwelling on. A craft firm built around a particular sensibility can run for decades on the founder’s judgement, on the integration of design and making that exists in a single mind or a single partnership. When that integrating intelligence steps back, what remains is the operational layer: the kilns still fire, the jiggers still turn, the orders still go out. But the firm has lost the thing that made the operations cohere. The making continues; the designing has stopped. The creative vessel is still warm, but the fire that animated it has dimmed.

By 2003, the company was running on the typewriter Brian had once used to manage the books. It had twenty-four employees, around a million dollars in annual revenue, and could not reliably cover its payroll. Edith was in her early nineties and in failing health. There was no successor. The Brian and Edith Heath Trust had been talking to interested parties, but nothing had come of it. The trustee, a family friend named Jay Stewart, had a particular concern: he wanted the legacy to continue, but only if it continued as a working business rather than as a brand to be packaged and sold.

The unlikely buyers

Catherine Bailey and Robin Petravic were not, by background, an obvious answer. She was running an industrial design consultancy with clients that included Nike, Burton, and Microsoft. He was a product design engineer. They had recently moved to Sausalito, and they walked into the Heath showroom one day out of neighbourhood curiosity. Bailey’s first thought, by her own account, was “they need what I’m good at, so maybe I can help.”

They wrote a letter to Edith. Three months later, with Edith’s blessing, the company was theirs. Bailey has remarked that the whole transaction was simpler than buying a house.

What is striking, looking back, is the framing they brought. They did not approach Heath as turnaround consultants holding a generic recovery playbook. They approached it as designers who had recognised a coherent organism in need of careful repair. Bailey was explicit about this from the start. The purpose, she said, was “not to just form a brand or re-form a brand that we could sell, but to keep the integrity of something that should be kept, that there should be more of in the world.”

The logic of the recovery

Several decisions made the recovery work, and they are worth itemising because they form a coherent pattern rather than a sequence of opportunistic moves. Taken together, they describe a particular kind of stewardship which has more in common with restoring a working instrument than with rescuing a business.

The first decision was to occupy before changing. “We learned about Edith and Brian Heath by occupying their office,” Petravic later said. The first phase of new ownership was a deliberate restraint. The loyal staff, many of whom had worked through the decline, were kept on. The first new product was a single item: a larger coffee mug, sized for the Bay Area’s espresso culture. It became a top seller, and it announced, quietly, that things would change, but only after the new owners had earned the right to change them. This is the discipline of inhabiting a place before intervening in it. It refuses the consultant’s reflex to rebrand or modernise what one does not yet understand.

The second was to restore the design and making loop under one roof. What had drawn Bailey and Petravic in the first place was, as the company’s later writing puts it, the opportunity to bring back designing and making under one roof, so that the start of a design process and its result remained in living contact. They treated this as load-bearing. The factory was not a legacy asset to be optimised. It was the condition of the work being possible at all.

The third was to compress distribution and reclaim the customer relationship. Heath had been distributed through the wholesale channels typical for a mid-century housewares brand. Bailey and Petravic gradually pulled out of those channels and moved to direct retail. They opened a showroom in Los Angeles in 2008, one in the San Francisco Ferry Building in 2010, and in 2012 a flagship in San Francisco co-located with a new tile factory in a former commercial laundry in the Mission District. By the beginning of 2015, the wholesale business was wound down entirely. The pattern is consistent: when the company expanded, it expanded in directions that brought making and selling closer together, not further apart.

The fourth was to collaborate without diluting. New collaborations appeared, but each was chosen for what Bailey calls “design kinship and manufacturing values.” Alice Waters of Chez Panisse, Natalie Chanin of Alabama Chanin, House Industries, Geoff McFetridge, Commune Design. These were not licensing deals. They were extensions of the atelier into adjacent sensibilities, conducted on Heath’s terms and using Heath’s methods.

The fifth, and perhaps the most important, was to refuse the wrong kind of growth. Bailey and Petravic turned down outside investors repeatedly. They resisted pressure, sometimes considerable, to move part of production offshore or out of state. Petravic’s framing is the giveaway. “We want to be here for two hundred years,” he has said, “which means I’m not gonna be around to run it. How do you get to two hundred years? Well, first you’ve got to build that foundation and the values that are going to guide it.”

By 2019, Heath had grown from a million dollars in annual revenue to thirty million, from twenty-four employees to around a hundred and sixty. It had been certified as a B Corporation. It was working with some of the most discerning restaurants and architects in the country. And it was still, recognisably, the same firm Edith had built. The Coupe line, designed in 1947, remained in continuous production.

• • •

The second recovery

The story does not end with the rescue. When the pandemic closed the showrooms in 2020, Heath’s revenue dropped overnight by eighty-five per cent, and the year ended twenty per cent below target. The response was characteristic. Bailey and Petravic raised the minimum wage for their lowest-paid employees to twenty dollars an hour, funding the rise by cutting a 401(k) matching programme that had largely benefited those already at the top of the pay scale. Petravic’s reasoning was that the match “is not created for a culture where people are on the lower end of the payscale and can’t even afford to buy into it.” It was a values decision rather than a marketing one, and it cost the firm real money.

The deeper response, though, had begun earlier. In December 2018, Bailey and Petravic sold a minority stake in the company to its employees through an Employee Stock Ownership Plan. One hundred and sixty-six employees became owners at no cost to themselves, each receiving a commemorative tile to mark the moment. The structure was deliberately gradual. Most ESOPs are exit vehicles, designed to convert a founder’s equity into retirement liquidity in a single transaction. Heath’s was designed as a slow handover, calibrated to avoid disruption to the culture. The financial counsel who structured the deal observed, drily, that “Heath wanted to go slow.”

Designing the succession

In early 2026, Bailey and Petravic stepped back from day-to-day leadership of the firm. Heath is now led by Megan Wernetti and Allison Banks, a Creative and Operations duo who have been at Heath for many years. The structure is deliberate: it preserves the founding model of a creative and operational pairing which has run from Edith and Brian, through Cathy and Robin, and now to a third generation. Bailey and Petravic remain involved, but their attention has shifted. As they put it in a recent letter, they are now “focused on designing Heath to last, not just for the next few years, but for many decades to come.”

The final move, announced this year, is that Heath is on the path to becoming a Purpose Trust-owned company. This is a structure that replaces conventional ownership with a trust whose role is to protect the company’s purpose rather than to maximise its returns. The intent is to make Heath, in any conventional sense, unsellable. Neither inheritance, nor private equity, nor founder fatigue can undo the work, because the legal architecture itself locks the values into the company’s constitution.

What the story actually shows

Heath’s recovery is not a turnaround story in the management consulting sense. It is something closer to the patient restoration of a working vessel. The founders had built something whose integrity depended on a particular fusion of aesthetic, material, place, and people. When the original sensibility faded, the operational layer continued without coherence, a body without its integrating intelligence. Bailey and Petravic did not replace the missing sensibility with their own. They spent years learning what was already there before they presumed to add to it. They then made a sequence of decisions, all pointing in the same direction, which kept the vessel intact across a generational handover.

What is interesting, against the standard heroic-rescuer narrative, is how much of the recovery consisted of not doing things. Not selling to investors. Not moving production offshore. Not extracting equity. Not changing too much, too fast. Not treating the loyal staff as legacy cost. Not letting their own eventual departure become a rupture. The recovery is a long, deliberate act of stewardship, and the most telling thing about it is that Bailey and Petravic have spent the last several years designing themselves out of it.

There is something worth pausing on here. The most fragile element of a craft firm is not its product, nor its market, nor its margin. It is the integrating intelligence that holds aesthetic, material, place, and people in working relation. That intelligence is, almost by definition, embodied in one or two people at a time. The strategic question for any firm of this kind is not how to grow it, but how to keep that intelligence intact across the handovers it must inevitably make. Heath’s answer has been to design every layer of the business, from the factory floor to the legal structure, in service of that single question.

It is, in the end, a small American ceramics company. But it is also a working demonstration that the slow-burning vessel can be tended across generations, and that a craft firm’s most important design problem is not its product but its succession.

Most of us do not design the tools that we use. We find ourselves doing our best with tools created for us by people who don’t know us, and in doing so, find the flaws that they were mostly unaware that they had created. One exception that stands out to me is John Boyd. He was so dissatisfied with the aircraft the US Air Force designed to do everything and maximise production budgets, but turned out to do nothing particularly well, that he went and did a degree in aeronautical engineering and designed his own. Through his Energy-Maneuverability Theory, Boyd used mathematics to map out exact advantages in thrust and drag, allowing pilots to outmanoeuvre opponents rather than just outrun them. His groundbreaking approach fundamentally changed air-to-air tactics and directly inspired the agile design of legendary modern fighters like the F-15 and F-16. Put simply, accelerate faster, slow down faster, and change direction more quickly than the situation you find yourself in.

I’ve been test-flying AI for the last 18 months. I could no more build it than I could build the aircraft I once flew, although that doesn’t stop us putting in the effort to fly it to the best of our ability. What I’m starting to realise is that the AI we’ve been given is like those aircraft that were designed to do everything, but ultimately did no single thing with excellence (other than make money for the manufacturers).

A vanishing point is a specific spot on the horizon line in a perspective drawing where parallel lines appear to converge and fade away. It is a foundational concept used by artists and architects to create the illusion of three-dimensional depth on a flat, two-dimensional surface. I think AI has a vanishing point, in that, it gives us an illusion of capability. It will give us an illusion of a horizon based on data. It cannot convey a real horizon that incorporates what it cannot see or understand, the qualities that make us human.

As humans, we have our own Energy-Manoeuvrability Theory. The word emotion comes from the Latin emotere, meaning "energy in motion." When it comes to AI, emotion is the energy it cannot supply. It can make us incredibly manoeuvrable with data, but not give it purpose or meaning. That’s our job.

So, we have to learn to work with it, in the space beyond the illusory vanishing point.

Emotion is what Craft and Métis bring to what we do. It cannot be counterfeited (other than to the willingly gullible) nor can it be outsourced. Other people may love the work you do, but they cannot love it for you.

In So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love (2012). Cal Newport’s argument is a direct inversion of the “follow your passion” advice popularised by Steve Jobs’s 2005 Stanford commencement address. Newport calls this “the passion hypothesis”: the idea that the key to occupational happiness is to figure out what you’re passionate about and then find a job that matches it. He argues that this advice is not just wrong but actively harmful; leading to anxiety, chronic job-hopping, and the daydreaming dissatisfaction of always imagining a better job elsewhere.

In its place he proposes what he calls the craftsman mindset: an approach to working life in which you focus on the value of what you’re offering to the world, rather than on what the job offers you. Passion, on this view, comes after you put in the hard work to become excellent at something valuable, not before, and that what you do for a living matters less than how you do it.

AI is a formidable invention that will not go away, but wherever it is applied, it will have a vanishing point, because it does not have, nor I suspect ever will, have complete information. Completeness needs us.

Whatever you do with AI, you will not love it until you learn how to fly it. There are no instruction manuals, not best practice, because we are the only one of us there will ever be, and we all fly differently.

Go fly.

A flyer of the first order…

If you like music, and artisanal attitude, you will like this. Sent to me by Mark E, a good friend I have yet to meet. I love it when people connect me to stuff they know I will love that I did not know about. Craft like this is enough to bring tears to my eyes.

Denby Pottery has been the theme of my recent posts, because of the nature of the business, the fact that it’s local, and it feels personal on a number of counts.

Unless something remarkable happens; however, this will probably be the last one, as the administration process has now moved from threat to reality. On April the 23rd, what is conveniently labelled the “making and design departments” were closed, with 49 redundancies, whilst the retailing and selling arms remain for now.

It’s an odd terminology: “the making and design department”, for a business over 200 years old whose very existence has been on designing and making. It seems a little like saying the heart has stopped without mentioning the effect that might have on the rest of the body.

Closure is being blamed on external events, soaring energy costs, low consumer confidence, and labour and material costs. The business, of course, couldn’t do very much about any of these without fundamentally changing the nature of what was made. It’s not a chocolate business, where cost pressures can motivate those who manage rather than make to reduce cocoa content and up the marketing spend.

Except that that’s not quite true. It was just done more quietly. The exact figures are difficult to determine, but they can be derived. Over the last decade, Denby Pottery’s R&D spending has been about 0.5% to 1.5% of turnover. Most of that was offset by R&D tax credits. Over the same period, though, the marketing spend was estimated at roughly 5-8% of annual turnover.

The precision of the figures matters less, I think, than the attitude it conveys. It suggests a priority given to selling what was being made, as against doing the work to make what would sell. Given the nature of the external shareholders, it is not surprising, and I can understand the management doing it. Heritage is a quaint notion when the focus is on quarterly results for shareholders far away, and performance reviews beckon. Running a craft pottery with a mass retail mentality was always going to lead us here.

There is, though, a broader lesson for those of us who identify in whatever way as artisans. Unless you’re running your own business, your artisanal skills tend to come for free. They are not recorded in job descriptions, or performance reviews, because they cannot be measured. Just as at Denby, they are harvested, not invested in. It was not always the case; it’s a relatively recent trend, I think. Now, though, when it comes to skills and investment, whether in human systems or individual skills, at a practical level, we are in the situation of the fable of the scorpion and the frog. Scorpion will sting us, not because it’s bad, but just because that’s what it does.

Marketers will probably hate me for saying what I’m going to say next, but I believe it to be true. The people with ideas and the true creativity remain as valuable as ever, but the people who turn those ideas into deliverables are expendable. Marketing ideas, even the genius ones, are a form of cappuccino froth. They have an increasingly short lifetime, and when we have something as disposable as that, the ability of AI to reform data into the next idea is not just viable, it’s reliable. And cheap (for now, at least)

Marketing never really differentiated Denby, despite the amount of money spent on it. What really made Denby differentiated was the seam of clay it sits on. Iron-rich with a particular quality that the vitrification process turns into unique stoneware. It is admittedly the same qualities that have caused the problems. It is highly energy intensive and requires skills not just in making, but creating and crafting glazes that work with it. In the end, what made Denby different was material integrity. Whatever happens to the brand name, that material integrity will not go along with it.

There is a timely post on The Gaping Void as I write this. Its core message is simple. For most of us, work has been abstracted into so many processes, systems and accountabilities that we cannot describe what we actually do. Our work is a void into which we disappear every day; until, of course, we don’t, and then we cannot really explain to people what we used to do. The same is true of many businesses. They are voids too, reliant on marketing to weave a temporary story without substance, run by CEOs trained in business schools as if they were baristas, taught to assemble a product to a recipe.

Properly read, Denby’s case is not a story about energy costs or consumer confidence. It is the story of a business that allowed the layer that could be replaced to grow at the expense of the layer that could not. The seam will still be there when the brand is sold on. It is the people who could read it who are leaving.

We can feel the change around us. If we have a business that can describe what it makes, with customers who understand and value it, and we can describe our part in it, we have a kind of human material integrity. We are not in the void. For everything else, increasingly, there is AI; not as the problem in itself, but as the consequence of a problem we already had with our work, our ownership of it, and our investment in it.

If you have a craft, whether of the traditional sort or the emerging kind, in working with AI, and you can describe it to a five-year-old; show them what you do, what you made, and who it is for; then you have something AI cannot quietly absorb.

It is interesting, by contrast, to watch some of the second-generation entrepreneurs in tech, the people who made a great deal of money out of stock options during the boom phases of Software as a Service or Games, and who now propose to repeat the exercise with their own money. They are very talented people. They are also, almost always, very lucky people. Watching them is too often like watching a lottery winner set up a business teaching others how to win the lottery. They seem to believe that they can “rinse and repeat” and not be affected by the technology that brought them the luck. Material integrity matters as much whether you make with human or mathematical digits.

If you live in the void, AI will find you, in the sense that it will fill the space you are occupying.

If you have a craft and you can describe it, customers will find you. It feels like the better strategy, and quite possibly the only one we have.

Note: I will be away next week, digital free, so will be back in two weeks…..

I have been writing about Denby for a few weeks now, and I find I keep circling back to a particular figure. Not the business, the balance sheet, or the administrators; but the kiln manager who, after forty years, can read the colour inside the chamber and know what it means. That is not a skill description, it is formation. Something built slowly, in one place, out of thousands of small judgments made under the pressure of real work. The administrators cannot touch it, and whoever buys the brand name cannot acquire it. When the kiln goes cold, it does not vanish; it goes home with the person who carries it.

That observation has sat with me longer than I expected, because it opens onto a question the Denby story has been quietly pressing me for all along. If the formation travels with the person, then the organisation was never the source of it. The organisation was the vessel. A good vessel, for a long time, providing the materials, the companions, and the accumulated example of earlier generations of makers. But a vessel, not a spring. And when vessels break, as Denby is breaking, what you discover is what it was actually holding.

Most of us, if we are honest, have been treated as though we were the vessels and the organisation was the substance. Job descriptions and role descriptions encourage this inversion. They are crude abstractions, written by people who do not do the work, used by recruiters one further step removed, in order to find someone who will be a close enough fit for long enough to collect a fee. The language of community and family, when it is deployed on LinkedIn, is written by the most cynical marketers. The reality, for most people in most organisations, is closer to being an orphan than being a family member. We are tolerated as long as we are useful to the current theory of the business.

That has always been the case to some degree. What is different now is that the theories of business are changing faster than the descriptions can keep up with. The shadow of AI falls across every job title. Role descriptions written twelve months ago describe work that no longer exists in quite that shape, and the work that is actually being done has no official language yet. The instinct, when this happens, is to reach for a framework that will make the uncertainty manageable. I have watched a lot of people reach, and I have watched a lot of those frameworks fail to describe them. The frameworks were designed for a more stable territory than the one we are now in, whilst those who do not understand pretend it hasn’t. It’s easier that way.

What does describe people, when I watch carefully, is something older and stranger than a framework. It is what they have read, what they have watched, who they have worked alongside, and what they have made and remade. The books they return to when they are lost. The films they quote without thinking, and the teachers whose voices still arrive in the middle of a hard decision. The predecessors at the bench, or the desk, or the studio, whose examples they measure themselves against. I have taken to calling this a person’s canon, though formation is probably the truer word. A canon suggests a list. A formation is what a life has built.

The Denby craftspeople have a formation that would humble most of us. Two centuries of accumulated practice in a single valley, a specific clay, a lineage of makers teaching makers, and a relationship with the people who would eventually bring what they made into their homes. That formation is not in the administrators’ report. It does not appear anywhere on the balance sheet, and is, in accounting terms, invisible. And yet it is the only thing at Denby that has any prospect of surviving what is about to happen, because it is the only thing the administrators cannot sell.

A personal formation is not a list of favourites, and it is not built by collecting; it is built by returning. The books that keep calling you back are the ones doing the work. The films you watch every few years are rearranging something in you each time. The conversations you find yourself repeating to other people, years after you first had them, are part of your structure now. Formation is not curated; it reveals itself through the pattern of what you cannot leave alone. Most of us carry one and do not know what is in it. The exercise, when things become uncertain, is not to build a new one. It is to notice what is already there.

This matters practically, and not only as consolation. In fluid markets, where the descriptions of jobs are unstable and the organisations themselves are being reshaped in real time, what you carry in your formation is the most reliable thing you have to offer. It is what makes you legible to the people who might want to work with you, and it is what distinguishes you from the next plausible candidate whose CV looks similar on the page. A role description can be matched by many people. A formation is yours alone. It is also, usefully, the part of you that AI cannot simulate, because it is not a set of outputs but the accumulated judgment behind them.

I think often of the kiln manager. Whatever happens to Denby, he will walk out of that building with his formation intact. It was never theirs to keep. He will find, or be found by, other work, because what he carries is rare and the rarity will out. The tragedy of Denby is real, and I do not want to diminish it. But the lesson, for the rest of us watching from our own fragile vessels, is worth taking. The organisation is not the source of what you are good at. It is the setting in which your formation has been visible. When the setting goes, the formation does not. It walks out with you.

We are, most of us, organisational orphans now. That sounds bleak, and on a bad day it is. But orphans, as the old stories remind us, are also the ones who travel. They take what is theirs and they find the next place where it can do its work. The question worth sitting with is not how to hold on to an organisation that may not hold on to you. It is what, exactly, you would take with you if the furnace went cold tomorrow. That inventory, more than any job description, is the measure of what you have.

Sign the petition. Please.

This is a thought experiment, not a business plan; please bear with me.

Denby Pottery has been in administration since February. I have written about it already, and I find I keep returning to it, less because I think anything can now be saved in its existing form, but because the failure itself is as instructive as it is a tragedy. It tells us something about the kind of organisation that cannot survive a particular combination of pressures, and that understanding is worth sitting with.

Denby faced two things at once: energy costs that had become structurally punishing, and a financing model that had been extracting value rather than building it. Those two pressures are not unrelated; they belong to the same logic, and that logic, it turns out, was always fragile.

Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom published The Starfish and the Spider twenty years ago, drawing on lessons from the failure of the sophistication of the US Army to deal with the asymmetric warfare of Al Qaeda. How time flies.

The central distinction, as a metaphor, is simple and devastating. Cut off a spider’s head, and it dies. Sever a starfish limb, and the limb regenerates into a new starfish. Spider organisations are centralised: power, knowledge, and function all flow through a single point, and when that point fails, everything fails. Starfish organisations are decentralised: each node carries enough of the whole to survive and reproduce independently.

Denby, as it existed, was a spider. The great continuous kilns at the heart of the operation required constant fuel and constant throughput to justify their economics. That throughput requirement drove volume production, which drove the logic of brand extension and licensing, which invited the kind of financing that prioritises extraction over craft. Each step followed from the last. The spider structure was not an accident; it was the shape that the energy economics and the logic of profit maximisation demanded.

Those economics have changed. Industrial gas prices are not returning to where they were, and we don’t know where they are headed. The large continuous kiln, which once made industrial sense, now looks like a liability dressed as an asset, and the financing model that attached itself to the asset base has accelerated the collapse rather than cushioned it.

So here is the thought experiment. What would a starfish Denby look like?

Imagine a loose constellation of small independent workshops, each run by a skilled potter or a small team of potters, scattered across the area around Denby in Derbyshire. Each workshop has its own modest kiln, electric or small wood-fired, scaled to the work in hand rather than to the demands of volume production. Each workshop is self-governing, financially independent, and makes its own decisions about what to make and how to sell it.

What connects them is not a corporate structure but a set of shared roots. The Derbyshire stoneware clay, which has been dug from this ground since 1809, is their common material. The knowledge of how to work it, built up across generations of Denby craftspeople, is their common inheritance. The place itself, and the history embedded in it, is their shared identity.

This is not a franchise, nor a collective. It is closer to what Brafman calls a circle: an autonomous, self-governing group that participates voluntarily in something larger than itself without surrendering its independence to do so. The connection is real, but it carries no obligation to conform.

In this imagined constellation, a potter might specialise in tableware thrown to the old Denby weight and proportion. Another might work with the local clay in a more contemporary idiom. A third might focus entirely on the kind of bespoke, small-batch work that the industrial model could never accommodate. They would know each other, share knowledge freely, and perhaps share kiln time when it made sense to do so. None of them would own the others. None of them would be in a position to extract value from the others.

The brand, in the conventional sense, might be dispersed or dissolved. But something more durable would remain: a genuine provenance. Made here, from this clay, by these hands, in this tradition. That is harder to fake and harder to license away than a trademark.

There is a deeper point here about the relationship between energy, scale, and craft.

The large kiln requires large throughput. Large throughput requires standardisation. Standardisation is the enemy of the workmanship of risk, which David Pye identified as the irreducible core of genuine craft: the live, responsive attention that cannot be delegated to a template. When the economics of production demand that risk be eliminated, craft retreats to the margins of the operation, tolerated as a quality signal but no longer structurally central to what is made.

Small kilns change this. The energy cost of firing a small electric kiln is manageable for an individual practitioner. It scales to the work, rather than the work scaling to it. The economics no longer demand standardisation, and the workmanship of risk returns to the centre.

This is not sentimentality about small-scale production. It is an observation about what the current energy environment actually makes possible, and what it makes prohibitive. The extractive financing model and the large continuous kiln belong to the same moment in industrial history. That moment is passing.

I have been following the work of , whose Nation of Artisans project has been doing something important and underappreciated. He has been travelling across Britain, documenting the shoemakers of Northamptonshire, the luthiers of Dorset, and the gansey knitters of Yorkshire. Visiting surviving pockets of skilled making and recording what they know and how they work. He has recently launched the British Cræft Prize, looking for what he calls maverick and misfit makers who can draw on the deep knowledge embedded in heritage craft and bring it into genuine conversation with new technologies and contemporary conditions.

There is something significant in that framing. Not preservation. Not nostalgia. A living engagement between accumulated knowledge and present possibility.

What strikes me about his project, in the context of this thought experiment, is that the starfish model he is implicitly documenting already exists across Britain in fragmented form. The knowledge is still there, held in the hands and judgments of practitioners who mostly work in obscurity, not because the work is poor but because the infrastructure of visibility has collapsed along with the industrial structures that once made craft legible at scale. Nation of Artisans is, among other things, an act of making that knowledge visible again. Each film and essay functions as a node: a point from which connections can be made, practitioners can find each other, and something more distributed and resilient than the old spider structures can begin to take shape.

I think this matters particularly now, when the failures of centralised models are becoming hard to ignore. Denby is one example among many. The lesson in each case is not that making is dying. It is that a particular organisational form, one that required continuous throughput, external financing, and the suppression of genuine craft risk to remain viable, is no longer sustainable. What survives, and what has always survived these collapses, is the knowledge itself. The mētis. The embodied practical wisdom that cannot be administered away because it was never held in the organisation to begin with. It belonged to the people.

None of this will save Denby as it currently exists. The administration will run its course. The brand will likely be sold to someone who will attach it to products made somewhere else, from different clay, by different hands. That is a loss, and it is worth naming it as one.

But the potters remain. The clay remains. The knowledge, held in the hands and judgment of the people who have spent their working lives at the wheel and the kiln, cannot be administered away. It belongs to them, not to the company.

The spider has failed. The question now is whether the conditions exist for something more distributed, more resilient, and more honest about where value actually lives in the making of good things. A starfish Denby would not look like the old one. It would be smaller, looser, and far less legible to the financing models that brought the spider down.

Louis Elton’s project suggests that the map of those conditions is already being drawn, one maker at a time. That, perhaps, is enough to be going on with.

We’re talking starfish at The Athanor. If this resonates, have a look…

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Dulce et decorum est pro oeconomia mori. It is sweet and fitting to die for the economy.

It doesn’t work, does it? The famous line, pro patria mori, that has sent men to their deaths for centuries, only functions when the thing you’re dying for has a name, a place, and a face. You can love a country and grieve a community, but an economy is a set of metrics that belongs nowhere and connects nothing but numbers.

Denby Pottery remains on my mind as we await news of its fate. It made things that lasted. Generations of the same families worked there, and people who own Denby pieces tend to keep them. We have pieces from before we were married, half a century ago. There is an almost visceral relationship between the clay, the place, the makers, and the people who bring what they made into their homes. That relationship with Denby has a name, and I’ll come to that.

What it doesn’t have, apparently, is a sufficient number on a balance sheet. And so it finds itself on life support, in the care of Administrators.

The fate of Denby is not unusual. It is the logic of a particular kind of ownership applied to a particular kind of thing, with predictable results. Venture capital and private equity do to heritage businesses what phylloxera did to the French vineyards in the late nineteenth century; moves through them systematically, leaving the surface intact long enough to extract value, and the underlying organism dead. The French, after the phylloxera crisis, developed the AOC, the Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée, precisely to protect what markets alone could not. A legal recognition that some things are inseparable from where and how they are made.

That “terroir” is not sentiment. It is substance.

Denby would have a claim. The clay is specific to that valley, as is the skill accumulated across generations of workers which is not transferable to a cheaper location. The relationship between maker and user, built over two centuries, is not a brand asset that can be stripped and redeployed. To reduce it to a number and then to act only on the number is not only fatuous, it is a particular kind of wilful short-term blindness because the thing being ignored is inconvenient to the dogma of a model.

The Greeks had a word for what is being destroyed in these transactions.

Metaxy; the between.

Eric Voegelin used it to describe the participatory space in which human consciousness exists: neither purely immanent nor transcendent, but tensioned between the two. Communities need economies to function, but an economy is not an community. Between them, between what we make and who uses it, between the place something comes from and the person who receives it, is the metaxy. The space where connection is created or severed.

In Plato’s Symposium, Diotima tells Socrates that Eros is not a god but a daimon, an intermediary being whose function is to occupy and traverse exactly this space. Daimons carry meaning between realms that would otherwise be sealed off from each other. Without them, the divine and the human, or for us, the community and the economy, fall apart into incommunicable worlds. The daimon is the activity of the between made personal.

When Rome received this idea, it became genius, but with a significant shift. The Roman genius was not an external visitor. It was the generative, animating principle of a person or a place. Every person had their genius, and every place its genius loci, its presiding spirit, the force through which it acted, created, and accumulated meaning across time.

The crucial point: the genius was not you. You collaborated with it.

Romans made offerings to their own genius. They had a choice; they could honour it, cultivate it, or neglect it. What they could not do was manufacture it or move it somewhere with lower overheads.

Denby has a genius loci. The particular clay, the generations of hands, the accumulated tacit knowledge that cannot be written in a manual or loaded into a system; these were its offerings. To close the vessel is to lose what was inside it. That is not a sentimental observation. It is a precise one.

This matters now more than it might have in a quieter moment, because we are making the same category error at scale.

The story currently being told about AI is an economic story. Valuations are built on displacement; on the proposition that human judgment, craft, and presence can be systematically replaced by process. And because the story drives the valuations, and the valuations drive the decisions, it is becoming self-fulfilling. Not because it is true, but because enough people are acting as if it is.

What the Greeks understood, and what our accounting systems do not, is that not everything that matters can be measured. Between everything we create and those who use it, there is a metaxy. We are part of its genius loci. What we do may, in many cases, be automated. But how we do it; the particular presence, the judgment under uncertainty, the mētis that comes from years of practice in a specific domain, is not separable from us in the way that a process can be separated from a person by a machine or an algorithm.

Denby may be a tragedy, but it is also a warning.

This leaves us a genuine choice. We can become centaurs, humans working with AI, directing it, using it to extend capacity while retaining the animating judgment. Or we can become reverse centaurs, humans in service of the machine’s requirements, our role reduced to managing its exceptions. The difference between these is not technical; it is a question of what we believe about ourselves, and whether we are prepared to act on that belief.

The Romans would have put it simply: are you making offerings to your genius, or sacrificing yourself on the altar of technology?

That question, what it means to cultivate your own animating principle in conditions actively hostile to it, is what we are exploring at The Athanor. Not as nostalgia, or resistance for its own sake, but because the vessel that we each are matters.

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The workshop, the atelier, the intentional space where mētis is cultivated and the genius loci is tended are not luxuries in a transition. They are the point.

If you want to explore what that means for your own practice, come and have a look.

I continue to think about Denby Pottery. As I wrote last week, the company is in administration, and I find myself hoping that a way will be found to keep the craft and the clay together in the place they have occupied since 1809.

Administration, it seems to me, is a facet of hard power: the triumph of numbers over nurture, and of the interests of those who don’t make things over those who do. If it leads, as I suspect it will, to the sale of the assets and the transfer of the brand, then the Denby name will be exploited the way we mechanically recover meat from a bone. Something will be extracted, and nothing will be created.

The craft, though, will not disappear. It will relocate, because craft is far more than skill. It is the way in which skill is used. It cannot be recorded in a balance sheet or transferred with a trademark. It belongs to the people who practise it, to the materials they work with, and to the conversation between them that has been going on for over two centuries.

Richard Sennett’s argument in The Craftsman is that good work is fundamentally dialogic. The craftsman doesn’t impose a vision on inert material. He enters into a conversation with it, attending to grain, resistance, the way a joint fits or refuses to fit. Peter Korn deepens this in Why We Make Things and Why It Matters. Making is partly self-discovery, but it is also a form of listening. The material has its own agenda. You negotiate with it. The moment you try to force it, to make the wood do what its grain will not support, to fire the clay faster than it wants, you get fracture. The object resists because it has integrity. It will not submit.

David Pye called this the workmanship of risk. In craft, every cut, every question, every decision is live. Failure is always a moment of inattention away. There is no template that guarantees the outcome, and what matters is continuous, responsive judgement: a quality of attention that cannot be delegated to a process. It is why genuine craft is so hard to industrialise. It depends on the practitioner remaining in genuine contact with the thing being made.

I keep returning to the idea of craft as a form of soft power. I think they are describing the same underlying truth about how durable outcomes are made.

Joseph Nye described hard power as power that compels. Soft power attracts. The distinction sounds simple, but the deeper implication is the one that gets less attention. Soft power only works if you genuinely attend to what others value, what they aspire to, what they find legitimate. You cannot manufacture attraction through an act of will. A CNC machine compels; a joiner senses the grain.

If your culture, your institutions, your policies and your leaders lack genuine appeal, no quantity of effort converts them into soft power resources. The material here, other people’s values and perceptions, has integrity too. It resists.

James Scott, in Seeing Like a State, shows why high-modernist power fails so consistently. It tries to impose standardised legibility on systems that require attentive, local knowledge. The state tries to compel society into submission. It cannot. Society, like wood, has integrity.

The parallel with soft power failures is uncomfortable but precise. Cultural diplomacy that ignores local context, aid that transplants institutional templates and creates lasting damage rather than development and policy exported as finished product rather than offered as conversation. The idea that a brand is portable. These are all attempts to force the outcome that the material will not support. They fail not because the intention was wrong, but because the epistemology was wrong.

Adam Kahane’s concept of generative power points in the same direction. Power that opens and creates is structurally different from power that closes and controls. The craftsman who listens to wood and the diplomat who listens to culture are engaged in the same epistemic practice. Albert Hirschman offers a useful way of reading what happens when that practice is abandoned; when you try to force compliance from a system that requires genuine engagement, you eliminate the conditions for voice. What you get back is either exit, or a performance of loyalty that holds only until it is tested.

What all of this points toward is a particular quality of attention: attention that takes the integrity of the other seriously as a condition of the work, not as an obstacle to it. Call it constitutive attention. Both craft and soft power are practices of this kind. They work by staying in genuine contact with what they are working with, following its logic as much as imposing their own.

We cannot craft something into submission. This is not simply a warning about method. It is a description of how reality is structured.

Which leaves a question worth sitting with. When technology is used as hard power, when the lathe becomes a weapon, and the algorithm becomes a mandate, where does the craft go?

It does not disappear. It relocates. Kintsugi is the practice of repairing broken ceramics with gold, so that the fracture becomes part of the object’s history rather than a flaw to be hidden. The break is not erased. It is honoured.

We seem to have a surfeit at the moment of people who revel in their ability to break things they do not have the patience or curiosity to understand. Craft is the opposite impulse: to attend, to repair, to make something that can live with its own history.

Craft has patience, persistence and soul. That is not softness. It is the only kind of strength that lasts.

I have been thinking about Denby Pottery this week, as we await news of its fate. I have lived five miles from it for over three decades, know some of the people, and have used what they make all of my adult life.

Denby Pottery entered administration on 18 March 2026, after 217 years of continuous production in Derbyshire. Five hundred people are likely to lose their jobs. A business that had survived industrialisation, two world wars, and the collapse of its conglomerate parent could not survive the combination of energy costs doubling in four years, a weakened consumer market, and a capital structure that had been progressively hollowed out by successive owners who were interested in the business as a financial instrument rather than as a living practice.

I have been thinking about the fettler standing at the workbench, hands reading the clay; the kiln manager watching the colour change inside the chamber and knowing, from forty years of watching, what it means, and the generations from Denby Village who work there. About John Douglas Stone, the industrial chemist who joined the company in the 1940s and spent the next four decades developing the glaze formulations that made Denby’s stoneware what it was. He knew things about how those glazes moved at temperature that he could probably not have fully described. He knew them in the body, through attention, over years.

That last sentence encapsulates what angers me. Let me come at it from the direction that matters most to us here: not from the investors’ perspective, but from the craft’s perspective.

What 217 years build

William Bourne found a seam of exceptional stoneware clay during road construction near Denby in 1806. He built the pottery in 1809. His son Joseph ran it, and Joseph’s son Joseph Harvey after that. Then Sarah Elizabeth Bourne managed the business for thirty years: Five generations, 160 years, the same clay, the same valley, and a gradual accumulation of knowledge about what that particular clay could be made to do.

It is worth dwelling on, because what those 160 years built was not primarily a brand, a product range, or even a set of glaze formulations. What they built was a substrate of knowing that underpinned all those things that lived in people: the chemist, the designer, the kiln manager, the fettler, and the jollier whose hands had learned the material over decades of daily contact.

The clay could not tell you what it knew. Neither, entirely, could the people who worked with it. That is precisely the point.

Michael Polanyi, who gave us the concept of tacit knowledge, put it simply: we can know more than we can tell.

The glaze chemist John Douglas Stone knew more about those glazes than any written specification could contain. Glyn Colledge, who joined as a designer in the early 1930s and served as art director until 1983, knew more about what Denby stoneware wanted to be than any brief could specify. In their design peak of the 1950s and 1960s, we got the Chevron pattern, the Glyn Ware, the Glynbourne Ware, the collaboration with Tibor Reich on Tigo Ware: these things happened because of institutional continuity, because the same people were there, year after year, attending to the same materials, developing a relationship with them that only time can produce.

In the language of the Athanor framework I have been developing, this is what we call the tacit substrate: the invisible foundation on which everything codifiable rests. Every explicit product, registered glaze recipe, design file, and every fired piece rested on something that was never fully written down and could not be. It was the workmanship of risk, in David Pye’s precise sense: knowledge whose value resided in the skill and judgment of the person doing the work, in real time, in relationship with the material.

The moment the logic changed

Denby went public in 1970. That was the first structural break: not because public ownership is inherently destructive of craft capability, but because it introduced a logic that was not, at its core, oriented towards the thing itself. Institutional accountability means being answerable to people for whom the business is a position in a portfolio rather than a four-generation relationship with a seam of Derbyshire clay.

For a decade this did not matter much. But Crown House Group, which acquired full control in 1981, made no significant investment during its tenure. The Langley Pottery was closed in December 1982 after 117 years of operation. Glyn Colledge retired in 1983. Gill Pemberton, who had designed the Chevron pattern in 1962, had left in 1981. Crown House then sold the business at a profit.

Nobody set out to destroy Denby’s creative capacity. Crown House simply applied a logic: optimise the balance sheet, reduce costs, prepare for a disposal that was indifferent to the tacit substrate. The closure of Langley did not show up as “accumulated craft knowledge lost” on any balance sheet. It showed up as a cost reduction. The departures of Colledge and Pemberton showed up as reduced salary costs. The effect on the depth of the organisation’s creative capability was not measurable, and therefore, for the purposes of institutional accountability, it did not exist.

This is the catastrophe that James Scott documented across the twentieth century in entirely different domains: the things that cannot be measured are treated as though they do not exist, and their destruction is therefore invisible until the moment the system fails because of it.

What followed Crown House made things worse. Coloroll, the conglomerate that acquired Denby in 1987, collapsed in 1990 under the weight of its own leveraged expansion, dragging Denby into receivership through no fault of Denby’s operating performance. Then came the management buyout, the public flotation, and eventually, in the years before 2009, a leveraged buyout that left the business carrying £72 million of debt it had not itself incurred. This is the financial mechanism by which craft businesses are quietly bled dry: the acquirer uses debt to finance the acquisition price, places that debt onto the balance sheet of the acquired company, and the company must then service this obligation from its own operating cash flows. Every pound committed to debt service is a pound not available for the kiln chemist, the design programme, or the time and space that genuine craft development requires.

For a decade, this is what constrained Denby’s capacity to invest in its own capabilities. The business was being asked to fund, from its own earnings, the cost of its own purchase.

What Hilco got right, and what it could not fix

Hilco Capital’s seventeen-year ownership does not fit the simple extraction narrative, and the analysis would be dishonest if it pretended otherwise.

The turnaround in 2009 was real. The £72 million debt was written off at acquisition: a genuine structural repair that transferred losses to creditors rather than leaving them to crush the operating business for another decade. Leases were renegotiated, and the outlet store portfolio was expanded. Burleigh Pottery was acquired in 2010, adding a second heritage brand, and the design team was using SolidWorks CAD and 3D printing for prototypes by 2017. In 2021, Denby launched a porcelain collection from a newly established facility within the original factory, creating eighteen new jobs and entering a production category that required genuinely different kiln temperatures, clay chemistry, and glaze formulations. The design director described Denby as “the biggest studio pottery in the UK, designing as though for two or three pieces rather than tens of thousands.”

That description is worth sitting with. It is precisely the philosophy this Substack has been arguing for: depth over volume, craft values at working scale, making as though the work matters rather than making as though the process can be optimised. In 2021, Denby posted an operating profit of £2.7 million.

Then the energy market turned. Three gas-fired kilns running continuously, at the core of a production process that cannot be interrupted or substituted. Annual energy costs more than doubled from approximately £1.25 million before 2022 to between £2.5 million and £3 million by 2026. For a business with revenues of £45 million and an operating loss already building, a sustained £1.25 million annual increase in a single input cost, applied over four years with no prospect of relief, was not survivable without capital injection. The capital injection did not come.

The macroeconomic context is real. Wedgwood has had its difficulties, and Heritage manufacturing is under structural pressure across Britain. The energy cost shock of 2022 was applied broadly, but a better-capitalised business, one that had not spent a decade servicing the debt from its own acquisition, one with genuine financial headroom built up over years of stable stewardship, might have survived the same conditions. The immediate cause of the administration is macroeconomic, but its root is structural, accumulated over 50 years of ownership transitions.

What is actually at risk

When Denby’s administrators at Alvarez and Marsal conduct their process, they will be valuing assets. The brand name: 217 years of provenance, strong recognition in the UK market, cult status in South Korea after an appearance in Squid Games. The design archive: decades of documented patterns, colourways, and product ranges. Registered glaze formulations. The Burgess and Leigh subsidiary, which appears to be trading well. The Korean subsidiary. The pottery village visitor operation in Derbyshire.

All of these are real assets with real value. An acquirer will likely emerge for some or all of them. The brand may well survive.

What will not appear on the administrator’s asset schedule is the knowledge that the fettler carries in her hands. The kiln manager’s forty years of reading the chamber. The glaze chemist’s understanding of why a recipe that works perfectly in one atmospheric condition fails in another.

This knowledge is not fully codified, and cannot be purchased from a catalogue. It was never on any balance sheet because balance sheets do not have a column for things that cannot be measured. And if the workforce is dispersed, as 500 people scatter to whatever comes next, this knowledge does not go to a competitor. It simply goes. Retired, scattered, lost. The brand can be revived by an acquirer with ambition and marketing budget. The design archive can be reissued, but the knowledge of how to make Denby stoneware the way Denby stoneware has always been made cannot be reconstituted from the archive. It would take a generation to rebuild, and there is no guarantee that anyone will think it worth the effort.

This is what David Pye meant by the workmanship of risk, and it is the most precise description of what is at stake. The chip resistance, the oven and dishwasher safety, the colour depth, the material honesty that two centuries of glaze development produced: none of this survives a move to contract manufacturing in any meaningful sense. What survives is the name and the cultural memory. The workmanship of certainty can replicate the shape. It cannot replicate the risk.

What this means for us

Denby is not an isolated case. It is a pattern. British craft manufacturing follows the same arc again and again: family foundation, craft peak, institutional acquisition, extraction or neglect, administration, brand survival without craft survival. Wedgwood, Royal Doulton, Wade, now Denby. The tacit knowledge that made these businesses what they were was never on any balance sheet and therefore did not receive protection from successive ownership transitions. It was invisible to the logic that destroyed it.

I am not arguing for the preservation of craft as heritage or nostalgia. I am arguing that craft capability, the workmanship of risk, the mētis that cannot be codified, the knowledge that lives in people rather than procedures, is not a luxury or a remnant of a pre-industrial past. It is the irreducible substrate of competitive advantage in a world where algorithmic certainty is becoming ubiquitous. As AI absorbs the workmanship of certainty, the workmanship of risk becomes more valuable, not less. The fettler’s hands, the kiln manager’s eye, the chemist’s four decades of attention: these are exactly what the machine cannot replicate. I have friends in the professions who sense the same emerging in their own field.

But the conditions under which this kind of knowledge develops and survives are specific, and they are not the conditions that the dominant logic of institutional ownership tends to create. Generational timescales. Owner-operator alignment. Reinvestment over distribution. The space to develop work slowly, to let the material teach you, to accumulate the kind of knowing that cannot be hurried. These are not romantic conditions. They are structural requirements.

The question that Denby’s administration poses for every artisan, every craft business owner, every professional whose competitive advantage lives in tacit knowledge rather than codifiable process, is not primarily about what went wrong at a pottery in Derbyshire. It is about what conditions we are creating, or allowing to be created, around our own work. What logic are we answerable to? Whose timescale are we operating on? What are we trading away, in small increments, when we optimise for things that can be measured?

When the furnace at Denby has gone cold, it will be a loss, and not only for the 500 people who worked there. A form of knowing has left the world, and the world is the smaller for it.

Whether the brand acquirer understands that is the question that will determine whether anything worth preserving actually gets preserved.

I suspect they will not. I hope to be wrong.

I will be picking up this theme further at The Athanor over the coming weeks…..

Visit The Athanor

There is a question worth sitting with before the noise of the day takes over. It is not a comfortable question, and does not resolve quickly. It may, though, be the most important question we can ask of ourselves right now, in a period when so much of what used to count as skilled work is being absorbed quietly into systems that do not sleep, charge by the hour, or need to understand what they are doing to do it adequately.

The question is this: what, in what you do, is genuinely yours?

Not yours in the sense of ownership. but rather in the sense of origin. Where does the work actually come from? What in it required you, specifically, with your particular experience, skills, attitudes and disposition? What would have been different if someone else had done it instead? Why would it have been different?

These are not rhetorical questions; they have answers, and finding those answers requires a kind of attention that our working lives do not naturally encourage.

The Workmanship of Risk

David Pye, writing about craft in 1968, drew a distinction that resonated when I first encountered it. He separated what he called the workmanship of certainty from the workmanship of risk.

The workmanship of certainty is work in which the result is predetermined: the process is reproducible, the output can be checked against a template, and the quality of the outcome does not depend on the continuous judgement of the person doing it. The workmanship of risk is the opposite; the quality of the result depends, throughout the making of it, on the care, the dexterity, and the judgement of the maker. It cannot be guaranteed in advance, and there is something genuinely at stake in the doing of it.

Pye was writing about physical craft, but the distinction travels. A document that follows a standard template is the workmanship of certainty. A negotiation that requires reading the other party, sensing when to press and when to hold, knowing what the numbers cannot tell you, and having the authority to walk away is the workmanship of risk.

A market analysis built from a shared methodology is the workmanship of certainty. A strategic recommendation that draws on years of pattern recognition in a particular industry, that draws on trust in your intuition, and that would look different in the hands of anyone else is the workmanship of risk.

Most of what we call knowledge work sits somewhere on the spectrum between these two poles. And the question worth asking is: where, honestly, does your work sit? Are you creating, or assembling?

Rationalisation Clarifies

Something genuinely useful is happening alongside all the disruption of the current moment. As the procedural layer of most professional work is absorbed elsewhere, into systems that are extremely good at the workmanship of certainty, what is left behind is more precisely what the workmanship of risk always was.

The rationalisation is clarifying, in its brutal way. It is akin to running an MRI over the knowledge economy and showing us where genuine judgement still lives.

I have been thinking about this in terms of infrastructure over on The Athanor, where the question is what conditions make genuine practice possible when so much of the surrounding work can now be handled by machines? But the prior question, the one that sits underneath the infrastructure question, is what you are actually trying to protect and develop. What is the thing in your practice that needs the status quo to hold, as against offers the opportunity to craft something new that the [times are hungry for?

That is the question of originality.

The “MRI Test”

Pye offers something that functions as a diagnostic instrument, though he does not quite name it as such:

Could the work your work have been produced by a capable person working from a good template and reliable data, without genuine exposure to the risk of failure?

If yes, it is the workmanship of certainty, however sophisticated it looks from the outside. If no, if the quality of the outcome depended throughout on the judgement of a particular person with particular experience, then it is the workmanship of risk.

Run that test over what you did last week. Run it over what you are being paid for; not to judge, but to see. The results can be surprising, and not always in the direction you might expect. Some of what feels most creative and original turns out to be highly templated when you look at it honestly, and some of what feels most routine contains, buried inside it, a moment of genuine judgement that only you could have provided.

The question is whether you know which is which.

Source as Practice

Tom Nixon, in his work on what he calls source, makes an observation that sits alongside Pye’s without quite touching it but shares the same territory. The generative energy behind any practice, the thing that makes it distinctively yours rather than a competent imitation of someone else’s, is not a fixed asset. It is not something you either have or do not have; it is something that requires conditions to remain alive. It can be eroded, starved and buried. It can survive in vestigial form for years, present in outline but no longer genuinely at risk, no longer doing the thing that made it valuable.

The conditions that erode it are familiar to anyone who has worked inside large organisations, or who has spent too long doing work that others defined rather than work that arose from their own encounter with a real problem. Codification and metrics erode it. The accumulation of procedure erodes it. The pressure toward consistency, toward predictability and output that can be checked against a standard, erodes it.

Not because these pressures are malicious. They are often well-intentioned, and sometimes genuinely necessary. But they run systematically in one direction: away from the workmanship of risk and toward the workmanship of certainty. In short, if you can measure it, it is almost certainly the workmanship of certainty.

What this means in practice is that maintaining your source is not a passive exercise. It is not simply a matter of protecting what you already have; it requires repeated, deliberate exposure to genuine risk. It requires doing work in which your judgement actually matters, where you cannot hide behind a template, where the outcome depends on the quality of your attention in the moment. Not as a side project. As the centre of the practice.

Three Questions Without Easy Answers

I cannot resolve this, because it does not resolve, but I want to leave three questions that I think are worth sitting with because they are the ones I find myself returning to when I am trying to think honestly about where my own practice stands.

The first is about location. Where, specifically in your work, does genuine judgement remain genuinely at risk? Not performed risk, or the appearance of judgement, but structural risk: the kind where the quality of what you produce depends throughout on you, and would be meaningfully different in someone else’s hands. If you cannot point to it clearly, that is worth knowing.

The second is about pressure. What in your working life runs systematically toward certainty? Toward codification, repeatability, and the reduction of variance? That pressure is not necessarily wrong. It is often the thing that makes reliable delivery possible. But it needs naming, because unnamed it tends to win by default, and what it wins is the gradual displacement of the workmanship of risk by the appearance of it.

The third is about development. If the source requires conditions to stay alive, what are yours? What are the relationships, practices, and kinds of work that keep your particular form of judgement genuinely sharp? And what has been quietly crowding those conditions out?

What Originality Is Not

One thing Pye is careful about, I think rightly, is resisting the romantic version of originality. The idea that it means creation from nothing, that the truly original practitioner owes nothing to anyone, that source means standing entirely apart from the tradition in which you have been formed. This is not what he means, and it is not what I mean either.

Originality in the workmanship of risk is not about being unprecedented, it is about whether genuine judgement is present and at stake. A craftsman working in a centuries-old tradition can produce work of the highest originality in Pye’s sense, because the quality of every piece depends throughout on decisions that only that craftsman, with that level of experience in that material, could have made well. A consultant producing bespoke analysis in a well-established framework can do the same. The tradition does not diminish the originality. The absence of genuine risk does.

Which means the question is not whether you are doing something no one has ever done before. It is whether what you are doing requires you to keep showing up with genuine attention, and genuine exposure to the possibility of getting it wrong. That you have genuine skin in the game regarding the outcome. If you have the responsibilities of authorship, the source is alive. If it does not, something worth recovering may be buried somewhere underneath the procedure, and it is a good time to be looking for it.

A Starting Point

The rationalisation currently moving through most industries is not, on balance, the catastrophe it is often described as. It is clarifying. It is making visible the distinction between what can be templated and what cannot, between what can be produced reliably from a well-designed system and what requires the ongoing presence of a particular person with irreplaceable experience. That clarity is worth something, if we are willing to look at what it reveals honestly. Including about ourselves.

What the scan shows is not always what we expected to see.

But it is where the work begins.

Over at The Athanor yesterday, I wrote about the limits of hard power and the alchemical sequence that runs from nigredo through to albedo: how disintegration without a sense of what follows produces nothing but ash, and how what we are living through right now looks very much like a furnace running at full heat with no coherent account of what the burning is for.

I want to pick that thread up here, in a different register. Because if soft power is the albedo capacity; if what comes after the breaking requires reflection, discrimination, and the slow accumulation of genuine quality, then the question for New Artisans is not abstract. It is immediate and practical. What does that capacity actually look like as a craft? Where does it live? How do you develop it, in what conditions does it thrive, and what does effective, profitable practice look like?

* * *

The argument I made in The Athanor piece was that soft power cannot be performed and cannot be deployed as a strategic adjunct to harder instruments, because it does not work that way. Albedo, tending to what is emerging, is not a tactic. It comes from the quality of character developed over time; from sustained attention, genuine risk-bearing, and the long accumulated evidence of work done in service of something larger than self-advancement.

Joseph Nye was describing something like this, though he framed it in the language of international relations. His insight was that influence operating through what you genuinely are is structurally different from influence operating through what you can threaten or claim. The former compounds. The latter depletes gradually; it works until it stops working, and then it stops very suddenly.

What struck me, writing that piece, was how precisely this maps onto what is happening in knowledge work right now. The episteme, the recorded knowledge, is everywhere. The ability to generate a competent first draft of almost anything, to process and synthesise at speed, to produce the credentialed surface of expertise, all of this is now table stakes. It is the compute layer, and like all compute layers, it scales beautifully until it meets the thing it cannot do. What it cannot do is cross into mētis, the kind of knowledge that lives in the body, accumulated through practice, calibrated through failure, and expressed through judgement rather than procedure. It is what the experienced facilitator reads in the room before anyone has said anything, and the good editor notices in the rhythm of a sentence before they can explain why it is wrong. It is what the master craftsperson feels in the resistance of the material, whether wood or code. It does not transfer through documentation, or scale through replication. It is personal and irreducibly slow, operating in kairos rather than chronos time.

The Greeks called it mētis to distinguish it from episteme, the kind of codifiable, transmissible knowledge that institutions and algorithms handle well. The distinction matters enormously right now, because we are in the middle of a global experiment in replacing mētis with episteme at scale, and discovering, sometimes painfully, what the substitution loses.

The Gaussian copula, the algorithm, used to price collateralised debt obligations was brilliant episteme. It was also catastrophically wrong because the people using it had lost touch with what the data could not tell them. The contextual judgement, the mētis, had been engineered out of the process in favour of a more scalable, more auditable, more legible system. What you gain from legibility is accountability. What you lose is clarity.

Now, we are making the same substitution again, on a larger scale, in more places, and with more sophisticated instruments with equivalent hubris and misplaced, confidence.

* * *

It is here where the artisan comes in. Not as some romantic figure from a pre-industrial past, but as a specific functional capacity that the current moment is actively undervaluing and that the next phase of the work will not be able to do without.

Another Pye, David Pye, in his 1968 book The Nature and Art of Workmanship, writing about the nature of craft in the nineteen sixties, made a distinction that has stayed with me. He separated the workmanship of certainty, where the result is predetermined by the system, the machine, or the procedure, from the workmanship of risk, where the outcome depends on the judgement of the person doing the work. Both have their place, but only one of them develops mētis and the capability to sense what. lies beyond the data.

The artisan, in David Pye’s sense, is someone who has stayed inside the workmanship of risk long enough to have accumulated the kind of judgement that cannot be automated. Not because they have resisted technology (artisans use tools, and always have) but because they have refused to let the tool carry the judgement that belongs to the person. They have kept their hands in the material, and held the uncertainty rather than outsource it.

That is, I think, what the albedo capacity looks like as a craft. Not a deference to AI, but a deliberate decision about where the human remains in the loop, and why.

* * *

There is something else, less comfortable, worth naming.

The workmanship of risk is slow. It requires patience with disintegrating material, a willingness to sit with a question long enough that it changes the person holding it, and resistance to the urge to resolidify prematurely into something that looks like an answer. These are not virtues that the current metrics dominated moment rewards. The nigredo logic of force, speed, scale, and decisive action is structurally hostile to them.

Which means that developing this capacity requires a degree of deliberate counter-cultural commitment. Not in the sense of refusal or withdrawal, but in the sense of choosing, consciously and repeatedly, to do things the slower way when the slower way is the one that develops judgement. To stay with a problem rather than process it. To keep the workmanship of risk alive in your practice even when, especially when, it would be easier to hand it to the machine.

The Lunar Society did not try to stop the Industrial Revolution, it assembled at the edge of institutional life and developed the quality of thinking that the next phase of the work would require. People who understood craft and mētis and the long, slow process of genuine transformation; not in opposition to the force that was transforming England, but preparing what would come after.

That seems to me the right orientation for New Artisans right now. Not against the artificial intelligence layer, but clear-eyed about what it cannot provide, and deliberate about keeping the capacities alive that only sustained attention and genuine risk can develop.

Our job is not to try and fix what is breaking, it is tending the work of what comes next.

* * *

In my next post, I will start to explore where artisans belong as old structures fail and new ones emerge. I think we can learn from those like The Lunar Society. We may feel displaced at the moment, but maybe we’re wrong. Maybe, we’re perfectly placed. We just need to reorient.

Artisans are deeply invested in their craft, and have an understanding of and with their raw materials that makes recipes superfluous. The realisation occurred to me when reading C. Thi Nguyen’s excellent “The Score”, his latest book on the philosophy of games and scoring systems. It reminded me of a time in my life, decades ago now, when I was given a task to launch the first chilled pasta range in the UK.

Chilled Pasta is ubiquitous now, but then it was an innovation. It involved long hours, and long lunches, with a wonderful, eccentric Italian chef, Andreano Rossi, for whom pasta was something of a religion. I learned that making fresh pasta was an art that involved the feel of the flour, the ambient temperature and humidity, and the nature of the equipment. Sauces were also an art, and tomatoes, herbs and garlic come in all sorts of varieties, even when they look the same. Choosing ingredients felt more like an extended interview for Goldman Sachs than a shopping trip. The results were uniformly wonderful, hence those long lunches.

The challenge was developing recipes that could be scaled to industrial production, because Andreano refused to do them. He refused on the basis that making great pasta and sauces needed more than a set of instructions; it involved empathy. His line was that recipes produced mediocrity, and he wouldn’t do mediocre. If I wanted a recipe, I would have to write it myself. And that is what happened: lots of observation, increasing understanding, but not the empathy of mastery, which takes years of daily practice, and I suspect, a drop of Italian DNA.

The range was a great commercial success, but I always felt a bit of a fraud.

Nguyen helps me understand why. One of the central ideas in The Score is the distinction between scoring systems that liberate and scoring systems that constrain. In games, we adopt rules freely, and the constraints become scaffolding for creativity. A chess player hemmed in on the board discovers moves they would never otherwise have imagined. But when institutions impose scoring systems on work, something different happens. Rich, complex activity gets flattened into measurable outputs. Nguyen calls this value capture: the process by which thin, quantifiable proxies replace the thick values they were meant to represent. Scores replace the experience of playing, metrics replace the experience of managing, and recipes replace the experience of cooking.

A recipe is a scoring system imposed on craft. It captures the achievement, the measurable output, but it cannot capture the striving, the quality of engagement between maker and material. Andreano’s cooking was striving play: the point was the conversation between him and his ingredients, the feel of the flour between his fingers that told him something no thermometer could. The recipe I wrote reduced all of that to steps and quantities. It worked, and produced consistent, defensible results, but it was somebody else’s game, and Andreano knew it.

Anything that can be reduced to a recipe follows the same pattern. MBAs are a case in point. They are recipes for management: frameworks, case studies, decision trees, all designed to produce competent operators at scale. They work, in the same way that my industrial pasta recipe worked. But the best leaders I have encountered did not get there through a curriculum; they got there through years of paying attention to the texture of situations in ways that no case study can teach. The MBA gave them a start point, a vocabulary, and a set of tools. Mastery, for those who made the effort, took years of commitment, of learning to “feel the flour”.

The same is true across most of the professional landscape. Coaching methodologies, agile frameworks, accounting standards, consulting playbooks: all recipes. All designed to produce acceptable outcomes at scale, and all available now, courtesy of technology, for a fraction of what they used to cost. The franchise model is built entirely on recipes, which is both its strength and its ceiling. If your business or your role is built on following recipes, the next few years will be instructive, because the recipes are about to become very accessible, and very cheap indeed.

This is where AI enters the picture, not as threat but as a revealing agent. AI is extraordinarily good at recipes. It can process, recombine and optimise codified knowledge faster and more cheaply than we can. If your work consists of following recipes, AI will do it better, and this is not a prediction; it is already happening. But AI cannot strive. It cannot feel the flour, has no empathy with its materials, and no embodied relationship with the situation it is working in. It operates entirely in achievement mode, which makes it powerful and, for anything that matters, fundamentally limited.

I have now spent enough time working with AI, with Claude in particular and Gemini Deep Research alongside it, to understand something important about this relationship. Using AI well is itself a craft, more than a recipe. There are plenty of recipe-level guides to prompting and workflow, and they will get you started in the same way that my pasta recipe got the factory started. But the real work, the critical thinking work that produces something genuinely powerful, involves developing a feel for what each tool does well, how they interact, where to push and where to listen. It involves learning to read the texture of a response in the same way Andreano read the texture of his dough. It is mētis: the embodied, practical knowledge that develops through sustained attention to a particular practice.

This matters because it changes the landscape of value. When recipe-led solutions are ubiquitous and cheap, the focus moves to craft, to mētis, to the quality of relationships and the depth of understanding. The recipe gets you to the starting line. It is necessary, and it is no longer sufficient. Turning up to crank the organisational handle, following the process, delivering the acceptable output, that is no longer a place of invisible safety. It never really was, but the fiction was sustainable when recipes were expensive and hard to come by. Now they are everywhere, and the question shifts from “can you follow the recipe?” to “what can you do that the recipe cannot?”

The answer, for Andreano, was empathy andlove of cooking. The answer for the overlookers at Cromford Mill, who understood both the craft of weaving as well as the the machinery, was a hybrid sensibility that no instruction manual could produce. The answer for us is something similar: the willingness to develop a relationship with our tools, our materials and our situations that goes beyond competence into genuine understanding.

None of this is comfortable. Mastery takes years. It requires commitment to a practice when the recipe offers a shortcut, and means sitting with the discomfort of not yet being good enough, of feeling like a fraud, which is perhaps how most of us feel when we are genuinely learning rather than merely performing. The range of subjects to be mastered is exploding, and the pressure to reach for the recipe has never been greater. But the recipe, however good, will only ever produce Andreano’s mediocrity at scale. The craft is where the difference lives.

Nguyen’s subtitle asks the right question: how do we stop playing somebody else’s game? For Andreano, the answer was simple. He refused. He wouldn’t write the recipe because writing it meant accepting that pasta could be reduced to a score. The rest of us may not have his clarity, or his stubbornness. But the question is worth sitting with, because the game is changing whether we like it or not, and the recipes will not save us.

I am bringing my observations here, ​and at together at The Athanor as we look to turn them to practical use in a changing world. We meet every Wednesday on Zoom at 5:00 pm UK. Feel free to join us.

Zoom link for 4 March 26

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I love this time of year, as the light changes, new life begins to appear so many places, and we feel different; a sense of anticipation that we can’t really articulate, but which we can sense.

Providing that we are open to it.

One of my rituals at this time of year is to get my 1997 Lotus Elise, which I’ve had from new and is now nearly thirty years old, out of our garage and start preparing it for the spring and summer. When I went to do it this year, the trickle charger I keep it on had failed, and the battery was flat. Not just pancake flat. Graphene flat.

There are two ways to get it back up and running. There’s the brutal way, to jump-start it from another car, which for a battery is the equivalent of being woken up by having cold water poured on you. It gets your attention, but doesn’t make you feel great. The more civilised way is to wake it up gently; connect it to a power source, let it absorb a small charge, and put it back on a new trickle charger. A cup of tea in bed. Let it get used to being awake.

The thing is, though, that for a trickle charger to work, it needs to find at least one or two per cent charge in the battery. Without that, it can’t even recognise what it’s connected to. Below that threshold, the only option is the cold water treatment. Above it, and the patient, steady work of restoration can begin.

I think we’re the same.

People, ideas, and organisations go flat. Not broken, or dead, but depleted to the point where nothing seems to connect. The lights are off, and no amount of gentle encouragement registers. What they need first is not a programme, a strategy, or a ten-point plan. They need that small transfer of energy, just enough to bring them above the threshold where they can begin to charge themselves.

This is what I think the artisan does. Not “rescue”, or change management. Not the dramatic intervention of the jump start, which shocks the system into temporary life but leaves it fragile. The artisan is the one or two per cent; the person who, through their own practice, presence, and their own willingness to sit with the flat battery and find the connection, provides just enough charge for the trickle charger to take over.

If you want to see what the cold water treatment looks like at scale, consider the Citrini Research report that went viral this week.

Published by James Van Geelen and Alap Shah, it is scenario writing at its sharpest. Framed as a fictional postmortem from June 2028, it models what happens when the scarce input that organised the entire modern economy, human cognitive labour, becomes abundant. AI agents matching or exceeding professional capability across most knowledge domains trigger a cascade: mass white-collar displacement crushes consumer spending, mortgage stress and private credit defaults destabilise the financial system, and collapsing tax receipts paralyse policy responses built for an economy that no longer exists. Their most striking concept is “Ghost GDP,” economic activity that appears in national accounts but no longer circulates through households. Labour’s share of GDP drops from 56% to 46%. The circular flow breaks.

It is a compelling, internally coherent provocation. It is also, by design, a bucket of ice water.

Its blind spot is what makes it useful to us.

The report treats intelligence as a single commodity, differing between humans and machines only in cost and speed. Everything it models follows from this assumption. But intelligence is not one thing. There is the kind that can be codified, scaled and automated, and there is the kind that lives in the body, in relationships, in the slow accumulation of practical wisdom the Greeks called mētis. The joiner who understands the feel of the wood. The farmer who knows the soil beyond what any sensor array can capture. The teacher who sees the pupil, not the data point. Artisans carry decades of calibrated judgement, none of which appears in the report’s models because none of it speaks the language the report uses. GDP, employment rates, and consumption multipliers. The Citrini report is a comprehensive map of one economy, drawn with such conviction that you could forget there is another economy it cannot see at all.

That other economy is where the opportunity lives. And it is where the trickle charge matters.

The report models what breaks. It has no theory of what grows. It diagnoses provocatively, but diagnosis alone is the cold water treatment. It shocks you awake, tells you everything that’s wrong, and leaves you standing there, wet and shivering, wondering what to do next. We’ve all been in meetings like that. The consultant who presents forty slides of devastating analysis and then asks, “So, what are you going to do about it?” The answer, of course, is that you sit there, stunned, unable to do much of anything, because the diagnosis has consumed all the energy in the room, leaving you open to the blandishments of the consultant who, of course, doesn’t know either, but can offer your CEO a security blanket.

The alternative is the trickle charge. Not denying the diagnosis, but starting somewhere else entirely. Starting with what’s already alive, however faint. Finding the one or two per cent that’s still there and working with it. It is not optimism; it is a different method and a different worldview.

I have spent the past year exploring what this looks like in practice, through the alchemical frameworks we’ve been developing at The Athanor.

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Alchemy offers a more honest map of transition than economic modelling, because it accounts for transformation rather than just destruction. It has language for what happens in the vessel when the old form dissolves, and it understands that dissolution is not the end of the process but a necessary stage within it. Over the coming weeks, I will be taking the questions the Citrini report raises and working with them in that space. Not as a sentimental retreat from the hard numbers, but as a serious inquiry into where new value comes from when the old sources are being automated.

If you’re reading this, the idea of the artisan already resonates with you. I am suggesting that it has never been more important. The artisan is, in effect, that small element of charge that can move people, ideas, and in some cases organisations from flat to the point where they can begin to rebuild on their own. Not by providing the answers, but by providing the conditions in which answers can emerge.

None of this will be easy. The temptation to wait around for somebody to put things right and rescue us is a forlorn hope. The Citrini report is almost certainly wrong in its specifics, as all scenarios are, but it is right enough in its direction to shake us out of waiting. The question is, what do we do with that shake? Whether we treat it as a cold water moment that leaves us gasping, or as the signal to begin the quieter, steadier work of finding where the charge still lives.

We will be exploring this, along with other ideas, at our usual Wednesday gathering. 5:00 pm UK time, on Zoom. The trickle charger is plugged in. You are welcome to connect.

Zoom Link 25th Feb 5:00 pm UK

It seems at the moment that our lives are a series of connected games, each separate but inextricably linked to the others. Different goals, strategies and rules. The boundaries feel less permeable than they once were, when work and personal life were connected by shared interests, shared places, shared histories. Today, each game feels different, more intense. In some, if we’re lucky or determined, we are the game master, making the rules, setting the scene, controlling the narrative. In others, we are just players, with limited resources, riding our luck and hoping for a break.

Picture our lives as a series of connected game spaces, touching the others but governed by distinct rules. The work space operates on achievement metrics and quarterly outcomes. The family space runs on unmeasured care and presence. The creative space thrives on exploration without predetermined endpoints, time to be with ourselves, free of the other two. They share edges, moments where one bleeds into another, but we’ve been required to keep them separate. “Work-life balance” has become a sick joke, as though our lives can be compartmentalised and remain coherent.

We can end up placing a different element at the centre while the others orbit at the periphery. At work, we might prioritise capability and measurable output, pushing values and relationships to the edge for a while. At home, we centre connection and care, but skills and aspirations fade into the background. In our creative work, we promote identity and possibility, even as constraints find their way in like intrusions from another game entirely.

This constant rotation is exhausting, not because the elements change, but because we’ve lost the sense that they could all occupy the same space simultaneously. We’ve accepted that focusing on one means neglecting the others, that fragmentation is normal. We leave our skills at the boundary when we enter a different space, as if bringing our whole self to every space would cause some kind of catastrophic breach.

Why?

C. Thi Nguyen, in his book Games: Agency as Art, identifies two kinds of play that bear on this. Achievement games are those where winning is the sole purpose, where coming second is failure, and the result is everything. Striving games are different: winning is a necessary condition of play, something that gives the game its shape, but it’s secondary to the experience of playing well. Think of the difference between a child learning to ride a bicycle and a professional cyclist in a race. One is fully absorbed in the struggle; the other must win or the day is wasted. James Carse captured the same distinction differently: finite games are played to be won; infinite games are played to keep playing. Our lives contain both, and the problem is that we’ve allowed the finite games to colonise the infinite ones.

Most organisations start as infinite games. In those early times, when enthusiasm and commitment to an idea need the play ethic to make sense of the chaos they generate, everyone knows who the players are, the goal is clear and shared, and pleasure is a feature of the game. Then, somewhere along the way, we find ourselves with different game masters who have little interest in the game, only the result. We are now players in a different game to the one we thought we joined, unable to leave without real penalty. Why else would we stay voluntarily with companies that make the headlines every week for behaving like sociopaths?

Stafford Beer understood this decades ago, seeing organisations as social systems in their own right, taking actions in their own interest rather than those of the people in them. He also had a useful view of complexity: that peering inside a black box is futile. At sufficient complexity, we cannot determine outputs from inputs with any clarity. Better to attend to the relationship between them than to obsess over the internal machinery. I think he had a point. We are, right now, consumed with what AI can do rather than with the results of what it can do.

But Beer’s framework opens a deeper question: if organisations evolved to play finite games — winner-takes-all, score-above-all — then AI is the logical endpoint of that evolution. A machine that plays nothing else. Build AI in the image of the organisations that finance it, and the thought is sobering.

Artisans face a specific dilemma here. Their nature is to play the game with elegance, to create something memorable that touches us rather than merely provide goods and services, and not to sacrifice integrity in order to win at all costs. Artisans understand the idea of “enough”, but it is a difficult place to occupy in organisations where winning is fetishised by those who set the rules and make the bets but never play in the game. For those people, AI is straightforward. It is extraordinarily good at achievement play, optimising, maximising, and finding edges. It is entirely incapable of striving play. It cannot find meaning in struggle, value process, or care about how something is done beyond whether it achieves the stated goal. It does not understand craft, because craft is not separable from the person who practises it.

The danger, then, is not that AI replaces us. It is that in competing with it on its own terms, we reduce ourselves to achievement players and begin valuing only what we can measure.

Which raises a possibility we are not yet properly considering. AI may pose a greater long-term risk to our current forms of organisation than to the nature of work itself. The organisations are the finite game players; the work is where the infinite game lives. If that is right, the disruption runs deeper than any technology roadmap suggests.

Geoffrey West has shown that the mathematics of scale carry their own limits built in; growth that appears inexorable tends to contain the seeds of its own correction. Organisations harnessing AI to continue to scale fave natural limits.

Small groups have rarely been more important. Margaret Mead told us never to doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world; that, indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

AI changes the rules of the game for all of us, not just the organisations that have brought it into being, and life is full of unintended consequences.

How we respond will be determined by the games we choose to play, to which rules, and on whose terms.

Because winning is a very poor way to go about a life worth living.

The Overlooker’s Moment

The house I live in has seen this all before. The River Derwent flows through the bottom of the valley, and was the spine of the Industrial Revolution. A few miles upstream is Arkwright’s Mill at Cromford, in which we can see a perfect microcosm of the shift from the “golden age” of the independent artisan to the rigid discipline of the factory, and finally to a new class of technical specialist. I think there is something in that story we need to pay attention to right now.

Before the 1770s, weaving and spinning were largely domestic “cottage industries.” Artisans possessed holistic skills, managing the entire production process from raw material to finished product. Mastery of the handloom and the spinning wheel required years of apprenticeship, and these workers had high levels of autonomy, controlled their own hours, and owned their tools.

When Arkwright introduced the Water Frame (patented 1769) it effectively “de-skilled” the spinning process. By using water power to drive the rollers, the artisan's physical strength and rhythmic intuition were no longer required to produce high-quality warp thread. When Arkwright opened Cromford Mill in 1771, he didn’t look for skilled weavers; he looked for cheap, compliant labour. Because the machinery performed the complex task of drawing and twisting the fibre, the human role was reduced to “minding” the machines. By the late 18th century, a significant portion of the workforce at Cromford consisted of children as young as seven, and “skill” was replaced by the need for cheap dexterity and stamina. The tasks were repetitive: piecing together broken threads, cleaning dust and fluff from moving parts. The worker was no longer a creator but a small, replaceable gear in a larger mechanical system.

It sounds horribly, currently, familiar.

But Arkwright’s conviction that his Water Frame was so automatic it only needed children to mind it lasted about a decade. The machines were temperamental beasts; rollers misaligned, water power fluctuated, threads snarled, entire lines stopped dead. Downtime meant thousands of pounds sitting idle, and Arkwright quickly realised he needed something his original vision hadn’t accounted for: Overlookers who understood the mechanical heart of the system.

These weren’t the old artisans in different clothes. They were a new hybrid, part mechanic and part manager, enforcing factory discipline on children who’d never worked by the clock while managing belt tension and lubrication. The need for skilled supervision emerged through trial and error, with management by physical coercion until Arkwright discovered that terror-based management actually increased machine breakage.

Meanwhile, the independent artisans who’d been displaced didn’t accept their obsolescence gracefully. The Luddites smashing frames weren’t opposed to technology; they were responding to the perceived theft of their craft and their independence. The older weavers who simply couldn’t compete with the sheer volume the mills produced were structurally displaced, regardless of their skill. Their craft hadn’t become worthless; the conditions in which it could be practised had been dismantled around them.

The Complexifying Stage

As the 19th century progressed, the machinery at Derbyshire mills grew increasingly massive and complex. The “automatic” nature of the factory began to require a new kind of high-level worker to ensure the system didn’t collapse under its own weight. A new class of elite workers emerged: Overlookers and Mechanics who didn’t just operate machines but understood the logic of them. These workers required a blend of the old artisan’s “feel” for the material and a new, scientific understanding of mechanics.

It seems to me that this is precisely where we are with AI.

The initial excitement has been about deskilling, about the prospect of cheap cognitive labour. We are told that AI can write our reports, manage our projects, analyse our data, handle our customers. The promise is the same one Arkwright made: the machine is so capable it only needs children to mind it. But as anyone who has used AI for anything consequential knows, we are entering the complexifying stage. The power of what has been invented creates conditions that require skills and perspectives we have not considered in our excitement at the prospect of cheap labour.

The overlooker’s job was not to operate the machine. It was to understand when the machine was wrong, to notice the subtle signs of misalignment before an entire line stopped dead, to hold in their head a model of how the whole system worked so they could intervene at the right point and in the right way. They needed the old artisan’s feel for the material combined with a new understanding of the mechanical system. Neither alone was sufficient.

This is the hybrid we need now. Not someone who can prompt an AI (the equivalent of minding the machine), but someone who understands the logic beneath, who can feel when the output is wrong even when it looks plausible, who knows enough about the domain to supervise rather than merely delegate. Someone who, when the system produces confident nonsense, has the first-principles knowledge to catch it.

First Principles

AI is not starting from scratch. It is automating what has already been partially automated. It is not the start of a revolution; it is a further intensification of what began when computing found its way into our working lives. Each wave has deskilled one layer while creating demand for a new kind of oversight at a higher level. The pattern is consistent. What changes is what we need to oversee and the kind of understanding required to do it well.

First principles means remembering what is at the core of your craft. The ability, if needed, to start from scratch. To create a profit and loss and balance sheet by hand from a pile of receipts in a Tesco bag, to code by hand, or to manage a project without resorting to software. Ancient, legacy skills, but as with legacy technology, the foundations on which what we do is built. It is where craft, mētis and networks of knowledge are created.

Our clients don’t care what tools we use. They rely on us to know what tools to use and, if necessary, to improvise. They want reliable outcomes, not a detailed explanation of the reasons why our system is down, or why it has made a basic category error because we had delegated but not supervised. They want accountability. That has not changed since Arkwright’s day; it will not change in ours.

In an always-on culture, it is easy to accept that the process is the work, that KPIs capture the value of what we do, and that value is determined by the bottom-left-hand corner of the profit and loss. To accept that is to become the fluff in the machine, the same fluff those children once cleaned from Arkwright’s rollers: something to be brushed away to keep the machinery running smoothly.

The Question of Access

There is something else the Cromford story teaches us, if we are honest about it. The overlooker’s path was not available to everyone. The children minding the machines did not, for the most part, become the mechanics who understood them. Access to that transition depended on conditions that were unevenly distributed then, and they are unevenly distributed now. The ability to invest time in understanding first principles, to step back from the immediate demands of productivity and develop the kind of deep knowledge that makes genuine oversight possible, is not equally available to everyone in a world that demands constant output. If we are serious about the artisan’s path, we need to be honest about who gets to walk it and why.

Where This Leaves Us

When we talk about AI displacing knowledge workers today, this is the shape transition actually takes. Not smooth evolution, but breaking points that force new configurations of human capability into existence. The Cromford weavers were not inadequate. They were caught in a structural shift that dismantled the conditions for their craft faster than new conditions could form. The overlookers who emerged were not superior people; they were people who found themselves, through circumstance and disposition, in a position to develop a new hybrid competence.

We are at that point now. The question is not whether we can use AI. The question is whether we understand the thing we are using well enough to know when it is wrong, to supervise rather than merely delegate, and to maintain the first-principles knowledge that makes such supervision possible. Whether we can be overlookers rather than machine-minders.

The Derwent still flows through the bottom of the valley. The mill at Cromford is a museum now. The pattern it set in motion has not finished with us yet.

We will be meeting this evening, 5:00 pm UK as normal on Zoom….

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There was a time when quality, provenance and connection were the prime determinants of success. Not through virtue, but through necessity. If you needed boots, you went to the local bootmaker with a good reputation. The one your neighbours used, who had been there for twenty years and whose work you could see on the feet of people you trusted. Social Proof, before we had a term for it.

Word travelled slowly then; a reputation took years to build and could be lost in a season. The product was the proposition, and marketing was the conversation. Then we learned to make things at scale, and everything changed.

Mass production created a curious problem. We could now make ten thousand units of something, but had no natural connection to ten thousand customers. The old mechanisms, reputation, visible craft and direct relationship, could not span that gap. So we invented advertising.

We built an entire industry whose job was to manufacture attention and desire at industrial volumes. To create the demand that matched the supply in order to bridge the distance between the factory and the stranger. It worked spectacularly, and it changed the equation entirely.

Success became about managing the gap between production capacity and consumer awareness, and the product itself became almost secondary to the machinery of desire creation. Brands became abstractions, and marketing became a tax on everything as companies began spending more on telling people about things than on making the things excellent. We learned to sell stories rather than substance, and have lived inside this system for so long now that it feels like the natural order of things. Scale or die. Either we reach people we will never meet, or we do not matter.

Something wonderfully unsettling is happening now: the ground is shifting underneath us in a way we sense rather than understand. Not in the way we expected, but in a way that might matter more.

Artificial intelligence is not, it turns out, primarily about replacing humans, at least not in any simple sense. It is becoming very good at jobs where our human qualities are not a priority, where we are required to be some sort of Meat Based Algorithm. What it seems to be doing, though, for those paying attention, is amplifying capability. A small group of committed, well-organised, skilled people can now do sophisticated, bespoke work at a pace and quality that previously required an industrial apparatus. There are no committee dynamics, political overhead, or bureaucratic coordination tax. Just capable individuals who trust each other, using tools that extend their reach without diluting their judgement. We are seeing them here on Substack, as the abstractions of big businesses are replaced by mycelial networks of specialists.

Which means the bottleneck has moved; we have solved production, and we are drowning in output. The scarce resource now is something else entirely; wisdom, perhaps; judgement, taste, validation. The tacit stuff that emerges from practice and relationships that cannot be industrialised because it cannot be fully articulated. Michael Polanyi saw this clearly. We know more than we can tell. Most of what matters in craft lives in the watching and the trying, not inside the algorithm.

There is something about that kind of knowledge; it does not scale the way products do. It spreads differently, through conversation and people working in close proximity, with someone trying something, succeeding, and mentioning it to someone else who has a similar problem.

Word of mouth, not the fake kind that marketers try to engineer with campaigns and influencers, the real kind that travels through existing trust.

Which makes me wonder whether we are not, in some strange way, going full circle.

Not back to the village and the bootmaker, obviously, but to something structurally similar. A world where the primary discovery mechanism for serious work is not broadcast, but recommendation, where reputation is continuously updated rather than manufactured in bursts and being genuinely remarkable matters more than being loud.

Mark Carney used a phrase in his now-famous WEF speech at Davos that has stayed with me. Middle Powers. He was talking about nations, not superpowers, but not spectators. Countries that cannot coerce but can convene, who trade on competence, credibility, relationships and punch above their weight not through size, but through trust. Those who have no desire to be a superpower but who become indispensable through their qualities of practice, character, consistency, and integrity.

Maybe there’s a parallel. A handful of capable people, known for their craft and their practice. Called when something tricky needs doing. Too small to throw their weight around. Too competent to ignore.

Superpowers, whether countries or companies, compete on dominance. They try to control the game. Spectators accept irrelevance; they are not in the game at all.

Middle powers play differently. They become indispensable to specific situations, not because they are the biggest, but because they are the ones who can actually solve the problem in front of you.

What if we apply this to the world of work? The empire, the big consultancy, platform or corporation, competes on reach and standardisation. We can serve anyone, anywhere, using a proven, generic methodology. Just change the client name on the slide deck. The exile, the solo freelancer, or portfolio worker accepts limitations. They do what they can do, with what they have.

The middle power, though, the small atelier, tight practice or workshop, competes on something else entirely. They do a specific type of difficult thing exceptionally well, and you know this because others you trust have told you so. Their distribution mechanism is not advertising, it is being remarkable in the original sense; worth making remarks about.

It only works, though, if there is a way for the right clients to find the right practices.

In the old world, that was geography. The village, or the neighbourhood. In the industrial world, it was broadcast. Television, billboards, then the digital machinery of reach.

What seems to be emerging now is something different again. Networked reputation. Awareness of good practice because someone you trust worked with them and came back changed. The signal is not reach, it is the specificity of praise. Not everyone can or should use them; that’s the point, but they solved this exact type of knotty problem for us in ways we did not know were possible.

It creates natural scale limits, which is actually the point. We do not want infinite clients, we want the right clients, whose problems are interesting. Whose values align, who will let us do our best work and then tell others who might need similar thinking. The sort of practice that cannot be sold to deficient big business short on ideas, because relationships and people cannot be sold.

There is something both liberating and demanding about this. Liberating because we are no longer competing on volume or visibility, or trying to be all things to all people, but rather trying to be the right thing for the right people at the right time.

Demanding because the work has to actually be more than good, it must be remarkable and memorable, because the work itself is the only marketing that matters. Our reputation is continuously updated, and every engagement either reinforces or degrades our position. There is no coasting on brand, or a buffer of advertising spend to smooth over mediocrity. Accountability is very real.

If this is right, if word of mouth is returning as a vital discovery mechanism for serious work, then several things follow.

We need to be findable by the right people, not everyone. Those who have the specific problems we are built to address, which means being visible in the places where those people already gather and trust.

We need to be clear about what we are for. Not a laundry template list of services; a sharp, memorable point that travels through conversations without losing meaning.

We need to tend our network as seriously as our craft. Not networking in the oily “speed dating” sense, but knowing who is doing genuinely interesting work; staying in touch with people who have seen you at our best, and being genuinely useful when we can, not just when it’s for money. The mycelial layer that carries signals.

And we probably need to resist the urge to scale beyond our capacity for coherence. The moment we cannot maintain the quality, the word-of-mouth mechanism turns against us. We need to be small enough to stay sharp, good enough to be worth talking about and connected enough to be found by those who need us.

Not empire. Not exile. Something in between. A middle power built on trusted alliances.

I know many of you reading this, and I’m aware that in what I’m saying above, I’m in danger of preaching to the converted. I think repeating it matters. I know a lot of people who are already middle powers, but who are trapped in environments where they cannot exercise what they’re capable of. We become the average of the people we associate with. If we find ourselves not being able to exercise what we’d like to, maybe we need different company.

Because, at heart, business has always been about people dealing with people. We just forgot for a while, because we were dazzled by the machinery and the technology.

The question, then, is simpler than it seemed.

Who needs to know we exist?

And who do they already trust?

I think we start there.

Zoom will be open this evening, 4th Feb at 5:00 pm UK. Feel free to join us,

Zoom Link, 4th Feb 5:00 pm UK

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“So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is… fear itself: nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyses needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s First Inaugural Address, delivered on 4 March 1933, at the depth of the Great Depression.

On a planet over four billion years old that we occupy, if we’re fortunate, for around four thousand weeks, the gap between Roosevelt’s address and where we are now is little more than a heartbeat.

Yet a heartbeat is all it takes for things to change. Between heartbeats, America has moved from being a source of inspiration to a source of fear. Our relationship with fear, though, has not changed, except perhaps that fear has become an industry in search of eyeballs, operating across boundaries, trading attention for profit. It retains the power to paralyse us, but only if we let it.

Fear thrives in our private disquiet when we think it’s only us and that we are somehow uniquely vulnerable. However, when we gather together and name it in a way that sums up all our individual fears into something we can deal with, fear loses its paralysing power. It doesn’t eliminate the problem, but it changes its nature in a way that makes it something we can address together.

And scary stories, for all their chill, do something quietly humane for us. They give us a way to meet fear without being overwhelmed by it, to rehearse danger, loss and uncertainty within the safety of narrative. They help us give shape to what would otherwise remain formless and troubling about the time we are in. They help us down our individual and collective Kubler-Ross curves, through denial, past anger to negotiating with whatever notions of ourselves are holding us hostage, and on through acceptance to growth. They also bind us, reminding us that we are not alone, that we can be frightened and still belong.

In a culture that prefers us neat, legible and optimised, ghost stories keep alive a more ambiguous, symbolic way of knowing, one that honours who we really are beneath who we are told we should be.

What we need now are not more ghost stories about what might happen, but maintenance stories about what we can actually do. Stories that remind us of capabilities we already possess but have been encouraged to forget, about tending rather than inventing, about the craft of keeping things working rather than the theatre of disruption.

Stewart Brand’s recent book, “The Maintenance of Everything”, offers us such a story. It arrived on my Kindle this week, a delightful and timely reminder that maintenance is an often-ignored discipline. Brand reminds us that it is not invention that keeps systems alive, but the quieter craft of tending, repairing and renewing what already exists. Maintenance is where the reality of our capabilities asserts itself, where abstract plans meet wear, friction and human unpredictability, and where Mētis, not optimisation, does the real work.

Many of the institutions now presenting disruption as an external shock have, for years, quietly neglected their own maintenance work. They have optimised for growth, scale and extraction, whilst the slower disciplines of renewal, skill cultivation, cultural coherence and institutional memory have been allowed to atrophy. The result is not just fragility in the face of geopolitical and technological turbulence, but a kind of internal hollowness. Systems still function, but no longer quite know what they are for or how to adapt without tearing themselves apart.

What we are seeing now is not simply the impact of new forces, but the delayed cost of having treated maintenance as a secondary concern, as many organisations are not being disrupted so much as revealed.

The same could be said of us. For most of the last century, organisations absorbed much of that maintenance labour for us, tending not just machines and buildings but also our skills, trajectories and identities. The reality is that while the absorption was never as complete as we liked to believe, we still went along with it. The idea of belonging to an organisation was always a story, and one that ceased to be believable the moment somebody decided to put the words “human” and “resources” together.

The current moment has changed the stories we are being told, first gradually, now suddenly, and there is no longer any pretence that organisations offer us security or career paths. We are being told very clearly that might is right and that we have a choice: accept what we’re given or find our own way. It can feel like betrayal, but it isn’t. It’s simply the end of a particular fiction we chose to believe.

That doesn’t stop it from being unsettling.

This is where maintenance becomes more than metaphor. To maintain our career today is not to polish a CV, but to steward a practice, a reputation, a web of relationships and a capacity to learn and unlearn over time. In a culture fixated on speed, scale and reinvention, this quieter discipline of self-maintenance becomes a form of resistance, a way of refusing to be treated as disposable.

In his book, Brand refers to some of my favourite authors on craft, from Richard Sennett and Robert Pirsig to Matthew Crawford, whose observation captures something essential about maintenance work:

“The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on.”

The things we do that matter are supported by technology, but cannot be done by it, and it is easy for us to forget and neglect the skills we have that fill the vital spaces between what technology can do. Every time we use an app for convenience, a little bit of our own skill and connection to our work erodes, and we start to hollow out, and lose the memory of capability. This is not an argument against technology, but a reminder that technology works best when it enhances rather than replaces our own embodied knowledge.

The danger is that when we listen to others’ stories rather than tell our own, we lose sight of who we are. Particularly when there are those whose credibility and fortunes rely on our gullibility. As Brand observes, “Old systems fail in familiar and prepared-for ways. New systems fail in unexpected and unprepared-for ways.” The stories we are being told about transformation and disruption will not unfold as they are presented. Those whose hubris convinces them they are in charge of what’s happening will find themselves surprised.

As that happens, we need to be in the best shape we can be in, physically and mentally, to do the work we choose to do. Maintenance requires us to be honest about our current condition; not the version we present on LinkedIn or in performance reviews, but the actual state of our capabilities, our relationships, and knowledge. This is the work of acceptance that follows denial and anger. It is where we stop negotiating with the fictions that have been holding us hostage and start tending to what we actually have, and creating what we want.

The problems that emerge will not be solved by technology alone, but rather by people with skill and knowledge working together effectively. It will be a function of improvisation by people who care about what they’re doing more than the money they’re being paid. People who have maintained their capacity to respond to what’s actually in front of them rather than what the plan said would be there.

This is what artisans have always done. They maintain their tools, their workshops, and their materials. They maintain their skills through practice, their knowledge through attention, and their craft through teaching. They know that mastery is not a destination but a discipline of continuous tending, that the work is never finished, that there is always more to learn, and that there will always be something that needs repair or renewal.

Roosevelt spoke of converting retreat into advance. That conversion is not a single moment of decision but a sustained practice of maintenance. It begins with naming our fear collectively rather than enduring it privately. It continues with tending to the capabilities we have rather than abandoning them for the promise of something new. It requires us to recognise that we are not starting from nothing, but from an archaeology of capability that we have been encouraged to bury.

The maintenance of everything includes the maintenance of ourselves. Not as resources to be optimised, but as craftspeople with knowledge, skill and the capacity to work alongside others who are doing the same.

Whatever we end up calling them, we’ll recognise them as artisans.

Wednesday Zoom Call

For those of you that can, Zoom will be open this evening at 5 pm UK time. If you haven’t come on the call before, you’re more than welcome. No preparation is needed.

Zoom Call. 5:00 pm UK, 28 Jan