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

VisIt The Athanor.

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

You can also consider doing the work at The Athanor…

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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

When I did my year-end review, I wrote that I thought 2026 would continue the trend of 2025 and amplify it. That hardly makes me smart, but I think we’ve all been taken a little aback, not just by the pace of change, but by its seemingly malicious irrationality.

Except, of course, if we look back, we can see history repeating itself in a perverse sort of way. The Louisiana Purchase in the early 1800’s was, at heart, an act of strategic audacity wrapped in pragmatic restraint. Jefferson didn’t conquer territory; he bought optionality. For $15 million, the United States more than doubled its size, secured the Mississippi trade route, removed a European great power from its western flank, and bought itself time and space to become something bigger than a coastal republic. It was an expansionist move, but a quiet one. No triumphalism, no ideological crusade. Just a cold-eyed recognition that power in the 19th century would belong to whoever controlled land, logistics, and internal coherence. It was empire-building by invoice rather than invasion.

Fast-forward to American foreign policy now, and you can see almost the inverse pattern emerging. Where the Louisiana Purchase was about expanding the strategic perimeter and reducing long-term risk, today’s posture feels like perimeter contraction and risk externalisation. The US is not buying space; it is shedding obligations. It is not embedding itself deeper into a rules-based order; it is selectively disengaging from it. The instinct is no longer “how do we shape the terrain for the next century?” but “how do we stop paying for this quarter’s problems?”

What we are seeing is not strategy, it is culture, and as for America, so for its approach to business. In turn, that means corporates, as we witness them coagulating, in a values-free zone in Davos, aping authoritarian power.

But my purpose here is not another on line polemic, but rather a reflection on what it means for us, as artisans, when trusting large business with our livelihoods and careers becomes an unacceptable risk.

From 1800 to today, Britain has changed its workplaces far more than its underlying patterns of advantage. Industrialisation, the rise of big organisations, the postwar expansion of white-collar work and the growth of higher education all created huge absolute mobility, as millions moved into better, safer, higher-status jobs simply because the economy itself was being remade. The deeper inheritance mechanism, though, has proved remarkably persistent. Across two centuries, the chances of reaching the top have remained stubbornly tied to family background, even as job titles and institutions have shifted. In the nineteenth century, this was shaped by apprenticeships, patronage and literacy; in the mid-twentieth century by organisational ladders and selective education; and today by credentials, networks and, increasingly, access to wealth and housing. The result is a society that feels more open and modern, but still reproduces class patterns with quiet reliability. The big contemporary shift is that mobility is no longer just about occupations; it is about assets and security, with property and inherited wealth becoming the new gatekeepers. So social mobility has changed in form and scale, but not nearly as much in its underlying logic. Britain has modernised the furniture many times; the old floor plan still shows through.

Our lives have been a three-part affair. In the first part, we have no choice over who we are born to, where we are born, or our early circumstances. In the second act, we entered the workforce shaped by our first act and made our way through our careers until, in act three, we had a short retirement before exiting stage left.

The jobs may have changed, but the structure has not, until now.

From Three Acts to Five Acts

Our second act, depending on circumstances, was likely to be a forty-year or so affair. We would stay in the same worklane, whether in a profession or a trade. We would progress as far as our abilities and luck took us, and then cruise to retirement. Yes, we became more mobile, changing companies more often, but the basic pattern remained the same.

Three acts. Prepare for the workplace, work, retire and exit.

In little more than a decade, our second act has changed out of all recognition as globalisation, technology and financial engineering have turned what used to be a single act into an uncomfortable adventure.

Since 1975, the half-life of a job has shrunk from decades to single-digit years, but the half-life of what we actually do in our job has collapsed to a couple of years or less. Volatility has moved from the edges of working life into its daily texture.

Or in more practical terms, as a rule of thumb. In 1975, you changed jobs every 10 to 15 years, and your job changed shape every 15 to 20 years. By 2000, you changed jobs every 7 to 10 years, and your job changed shape every 5 to 7 years. Now, you change jobs every 3 to 7 years, sometimes more often, but your job changes shape every 1 to 3 years, and the tools you use change every 6 to 18 months.

The uncomfortable reality is that we have to be preparing for our next job as soon as we start this one, because by the time we change, the job we are leaving, or being ejected from, no longer exists. Our second act in the world of corporate is an accelerating cycle of brief mastery and continual apprenticeship. Whereas our second act would end in our sixties, it has been getting shorter and shorter. Even for “professionals”, real ones, those who are members of chartered bodies, are hitting in their early forties. For everybody else, it’s in their thirties.

Act Three

Act Three begins when the job you were hired to do can be reduced to something that can be done faster, cheaper and with fewer questions asked. Sometimes by someone younger and more recently trained on the latest tools, and increasingly, not by someone at all, but by something. You can see it arriving in the metrics organisations already use. It begins when time to productivity matters more than depth, when outputs are standardised into templates and workflows, and when the skill half-life of a role collapses to a few years.

It is when discretion is stripped out by dashboards and playbooks, and when revenue per head rises even as judgment density falls. When creative roles are unbundled into asset pipelines, toolchains and production sprints, when AI starts generating art, code or dialogue scaffolds, and when seasoned professionals find that their craft is being reclassified as throughput.

The job may still have your name on it, but the system has been redesigned for a faster, cheaper, more compliant version of you. Act Three, then, is not just about being replaced. It is the moment your work stops being tacit and starts being legible, when what once required judgement, nuance and connection is treated as just another workflow to be optimised.

There is a word for the kind of intelligence that survives this hollowing out. The Greeks called it Metis.

Metis is not formal knowledge or professional technique. It is practical, experiential intelligence that emerges from long engagement with specific situations. It is the ability to read context, to sense timing, to judge when rules no longer apply, to improvise in ambiguity, to translate between incompatible worldviews, and to act without a script when the script has failed. It is what allows someone to spot regime shifts early, to move sideways into adjacent roles, to build trust where systems break down, and to create small, resilient pockets of value when large structures start to wobble.

Organisations systematically exclude this kind of intelligence because it cannot be captured in best practice, standard operating procedures or performance dashboards. It cannot be benchmarked cleanly, automated easily or priced neatly. And yet it is precisely this form of intelligence that becomes decisive when episteme and techne, formal knowledge and professional technique, stop being enough.

Act Three is the phase of a career in which your accumulated expertise begins to depreciate, but your situated judgement rises in importance. It is not that you suddenly become less valuable. It is that the system becomes less able to recognise your value.

In dramatic structure, Act Three is not just the ending. It is the turning point. It is the moment when the assumptions that carried the protagonist through Act Two stop working; when the rules of the game are revealed to have changed, when the cost of continuing in the same way exceeds the cost of changing.

It is the point where complications peak and illusions fall away, when hidden constraints become visible, and the protagonist must either reframe the situation or be destroyed by it.

In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Prospero begins the play in apparent control, using his books and his art to conjure the storm that strands his enemies on the island. But the real drama unfolds when his magic, his technique and his carefully laid plans prove insufficient to resolve what he has set in motion. The turning point arrives not with more spectacle, but with a moral pivot. Prospero must choose between domination and reconciliation, between continuing to control events and relinquishing power. The climax of the play is not a technical triumph but an ethical one. He breaks his staff, drowns his book and forgives his enemies, discovering that what finally restores order is not mastery of the system, but judgement, timing, restraint and mercy.

The Tempest is not a story about control, but about the limits of control. It is about the moment when wisdom must replace technique, and is exactly what Act Three now asks of us.

I do not think this story resonates inside most corporations. The story there is still one of mastery and control, of optimisation and scale, of dashboards and deliverables. Which means that our own Act Three asks some serious questions of us. Whether, being aware of the position we are in, we choose to stay or move on. Whether we are happy to be defined by the job we have been doing, or by who we are becoming.

Act Four and the Three-Legged Stool

Imagine, if you will, that you are sitting on stage in the middle of Shakespeare’s Globe. You are sitting on a three-legged stool you have made, telling a story to the audience. The stool has to be stable. Any wobbling, any uncertainty, and your story will be incoherent, and you will be distracted.

The first leg of the stool is your career to date. What you have done, what you can prove, what you have learned and the mistakes you have made. It is a well-crafted leg, and you are confident in it. Even as you know, on its own, it is not enough. One-legged stools do not work.

The second leg of the stool is your Metis. It is all the things you have learned that cannot be measured. The relationships you have made, the insights you have gathered, the opinions you have developed, and your sense of what you could shape and craft given the opportunity. The second leg of the stool is the essence of who you are becoming, not just who you have been.

The third leg of the stool reflects your options. In many respects this is the scariest part. It may involve leaving the familiar, taking on the risk of failure, and learning new skills. It may involve leaving people behind and meeting new people. It may involve stepping sideways rather than climbing upwards.

The stool needs three legs. There are no rule books, no best practices, no foolproof processes. But we can learn from those who have been on the journey and those who are on it. We can learn from what they have learned and from their mistakes.

Crafting your own three-legged stool is the stuff of alchemy. It is where we decide what to leave behind, what to pick up, and what to develop. It is the point where we step out of other people’s plays and into our own, even if we have to write the script as we go.

Crafting our own stools is what we do in the Athanor. It is not a programme of optimisation or acceleration. It is a counter space to the systems that are hollowing us out. A place where Metis is treated as an asset rather than an inefficiency. A place for slow conversations, deep pattern recognition and mutual sense making. What you make of it is determined by what you bring to it, and how you help others as they help you.

Because right now, few of us are sitting comfortably.

Visit The Athanor.

In my previous post, I questioned the effect of organisations setting strategies within an invisible doctrine. We talk about strategy, its creativity, and potential, but not about the invisible doctrine that creates a boundary between the organisation and its broader environment. The places that we find scary or unacceptable, and which might affect the future in ways that would threaten the reliability of short-term, regular returns.

There is a gap between what we know and how we use it that cannot be replicated by AI. In search of efficiency and productivity, our organisational instinct is to eliminate that in order to create uniformity. I think that’s a dangerous place to be.

When we find ourselves inside the invisible walls of unstated doctrine, our ability to learn what’s going on outside them is limited. Whilst shareholders can change their commercial environment with a click of a mouse, those working inside the organisation cannot.

They are constrained by practical considerations, including mortgages and the need for a regular income, as well as by non-compete and confidentiality agreements that make relocation difficult. In many areas, there’s a further complication: they work with proven legacy technologies that can be made efficient and productive, even as new technologies emerge outside the walls that may replace them, but that they don’t have time to learn.

As they do the work of delivering on KPIs and OKRs using the technology that they’re being told to use, they can find themselves, in remarkably short order, perfectly prepared for a world that no longer exists outside the walls of their organisation. Businesses that not long ago offered security and career development are now becoming liabilities, as they mine the seam they’re working to exhaustion, with no view of the longer term.

The shareholders may be able to move on to a new scene, but it’s much more difficult for us, and as AI combines the depth and breadth of roles that may be subverted, at the same time as it offers easy access to the knowledge of the world, it is easy to become, or at least feel, stranded.

That, though I think, is to fall victim to willful blindness, to view the world of work through the same lens as those who would organise it, treating technology as a blunt instrument, and who fail to recognise the nuances of the work that matters.

Technology may be effective at doing the work we already know how to do. It will not only help us but may eventually replace us in performing the calculations to make the best bets we can with what we have. It’s equally effective at accessing knowledge that we lack, but is needed.

But it starts to run out of steam where judgment is required. Technology may be great for gathering information together and helping us to make better, calculated risks, but when we get to other forms of uncertainty, radical, the world of black swans, and dynamic, the risks that emerge as the system responds to what we do, it’s of far less use.

These are the areas where there is no data. It’s the world of judgment, imagination, and spotting the emergent, and I think, like many of us, finding a way to capture that and bring it into process is more than difficult.

As an experiment, I took the line from my last New Artisans blog, shared at the top of this post, printed it out, and stuck it on my wall. Every time I walked past it, I’d put a pencilled thought on it, then, after a week, put the phrase and all my pencilled thoughts into Claude, and asked it to give me frameworks for thinking about it.

And there it was, James C. Scott and his book “Seeing Like a State”.

At the heart of the book is the idea that, to function, the state needs to make society legible; to arrange the population in ways that simplify the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and the prevention of rebellion, as well as to align these with the interests of the economy. He, of course, was talking about the state, but a few years later, it applies equally to Google, Meta, Amazon, and the rest.

In analysing why, over the centuries, these attempts have not worked for more than short periods, he identified one key dynamic: mētis.

Mētis. The concept of practical, experiential knowledge that emerges from intimate engagement with specific environments offers a powerful lens for understanding what organisations systematically exclude. This is knowledge that cannot be captured in best practices or standard operating procedures. It’s the farmer who reads subtle changes in wind patterns, the craftsperson whose hands know when the wood is ready, the community organiser who senses when a moment is ripe for action. Seeing Like A State.

What is your Mētis?

Imagine for a moment that somebody has taken your job description or even your own view of what you do and written it down at every last level of detail they can imagine. Then imagine that they take that description and place it in a digital Petri dish, and heat it until every element in there has been burned off. The residue, the matter it cannot process, is what is really valuable about you and the way you see the world.

If, on the other hand, there’s nothing left, then AI can do your job. Not today, perhaps, but probably before long.

My search for a place to bring the idea of mētis into the work we do here took me back to the work of David Graeber, the anthropologist and author of “Bullshit Jobs,” whose work I really valued, and Larry Greiner, who showed that organisations grow through a series of predictable phases, each marked by a dominant management approach that eventually creates its own crisis.

Greiner’s central insight is that the structures, roles, and processes that enable success at one stage will, if left unchanged, become the very constraints that organisations must overcome in the next stage.

Graeber approached work from the standpoint of meaning, legitimacy, and lived experience, asking why so many people find themselves in roles they privately believe should not exist. Greiner, by contrast, examined organisations from the inside out, mapping how growth produces predictable crises and how roles thicken with layers of process, coordination, and managerial control as a rational response to scale.

It made me think that perhaps mētis is the difference between meaningful work and bullshit work.

Read together, their work traces a quiet arc. Greiner helps explain how such roles come into being, while Graeber shows how, over time, they can lose their social purpose while remaining structurally entrenched.

If we view AI from that perspective, it appears less as an external disruptor and more as a revealing agent, stripping away ritualised busyness, proxy activity, and organisational theatre.

What remains, if anything does, is judgment exercised in context, accountability that cannot be delegated, and trust built through relationships over time. Yet this opens a deeper line of questioning. If meaning only survives in the residue, what does that say about the way we have chosen to organise work in the first place? Is value something that can be designed into roles, or does it only emerge through lived responsibility and human presence? And if organisations increasingly prefer scalable approximation to situated judgement, are we witnessing a technological shift, or a philosophical choice about what kinds of work, and indeed what kinds of people, we are prepared to value?

What “Deep Knowledge” matters to us?

To go back to my original query:

“If deep knowledge of changing landscapes cannot be acquired inside organisations constrained by invisible doctrine, how are we to develop it? And where are the spaces in which this learning can take place?”

The unsettling thing about AI isn’t that it knows so much, but that it reveals the difference between processing and transformation. AI operates like an industrial refinery, efficiently recombining the vast archaeological record of human thought, but it cannot do what happens when this knowledge meets us as humans.

When knowledge enters us, we don’t just recombine; we transform it through embodied experience, through presence, through the weight of knowing there will be consequences.

I think it goes beyond the immediate ideas of the nurse who senses infection before any test shows it, the craftsperson who knows wood through touch, and the teacher who feels the moment before a classroom tips into chaos to something deeper. As is so often the case, when we’re ready to hear something, it appears. I was on a call yesterday morning with someone who had a bottle of a well-known whisky in front of them and asked what it was about that didn’t resonate.

We discussed several areas. It appears to have had its cultural heritage quietly sanitised in favour of inoffensive design. The pack doesn’t give an indication of the age of the whisky, which, for those of us who like whisky, is really quite important. A brief exploration uncovers a deliberate choice rather than an omission. In Scotch whisky, any age statement must legally reflect the youngest spirit in the bottle, not an average or a promise of maturity. In this case, the whisky is built by marrying spirit drawn from different cask types and of different ages to achieve a particular flavour profile. By omitting the age statement, the focus shifts from time spent in wood to the brand’s heritage, while still meeting the legal requirement that all Scotch be matured for at least three years.

It’s a perfectly valid marketing strategy, but it seemed a powerful metaphor for the way that many people and companies are using AI, looking for speed and time to market rather than crafting content.

The McDonaldisation of a heritage product. Mediocrity at pace.

I think that when it comes to doing the work that matters, we are the wood in which the product is matured. Polanyi called it personal knowledge, passionate participation, where we don’t just use tools but become them. We develop, and want skin in the game, as Taleb would say, while AI remains forever skinless. It cannot embody what it “knows”

It processes; we become.

It raises uncomfortable questions: What knowledge really matters that can’t be scaled or transmitted digitally? How do we value the trembling heart before the crucial decision, when that trembling is part of what makes knowledge deep rather than merely comprehensive? And if transformation requires embodiment and presence, what does this mean for how we develop our craft in an increasingly mediated world?

In my Outside the Walls Reflections on Sunday, I argued that what we’re experiencing is a phase change that cannot be reversed.

I think we need to regard this not as some additional increment in a linear form of change, but as something altogether different; a phase change. As energy increases and the waters boil, the relationships among us, our organisations, our communities, and our economies change fundamentally. Some phase changes are reversible, for instance, changing water to ice and back. Others are not; we can’t uncook an egg.

Outside the Walls, 11th January

The value we bring as New Artisans is the ability to find novel ways of thinking about a problem, rather than merely solving it using existing models. AI can do existing models, but it can’t do the alchemy that we talk about at The Athanor.

If we want to turn the base materials of AI into gold, mētis is a vital element.

We are valuable not so much for what we know as for how we use and experiment with what we discover together.

We should not be afraid of AI; we should welcome it, but we should also realise its boundaries. That can be quite challenging in a world in which we have been brought up and raised, educated, and given gold stars for what we know, even as those gold stars are now obsolete.

We’re in a different game.

The question isn’t whether AI will replace us; it’s whether we’ll remember what makes us irreplaceable. Not our ability to process information or follow procedures, but our capacity to transform through encounter, to know through presence, to judge through consequence.

Take your own work and subject it to the Petri dish test. Heat away everything that can be documented, proceduralised, or scaled. What remains? That residue, perhaps barely visible, certainly unscalable, definitely unmarketable, is your mētis. It’s what emerges when knowledge meets flesh, when information encounters mortality, when data confronts care.

This isn’t about protecting old ways of working or resisting new tools. It’s about recognising that in the rush to make everything legible to machines, we risk losing precisely what cannot be made legible: the trembling before decision, the intuition before analysis, the knowing that comes only from having skin in the game.

This phase change is irreversible. We cannot uncook this egg. But perhaps, in small rooms and patient conversations, in the space between private knowledge and shared understanding, we can remember how to be alchemists rather than processors. How to transform rather than merely recombine. And mētis, unlike data, multiplies rather than scales when practiced together in small, patient groups

What is your mētis? And more importantly, where will you practice it?

We will be meeting on Zoom this evening at 5:00pm UK. You are more than welcome to join us.

Zoom Link. Weds, 14th Jan 5:00pm UK

New Artisans is one of three blogs I write exploring the changing world of work, craft and community. You will find the others here:

Visit Outside the Walls

Visit The Athanor

The political events we have witnessed this week bear the familiar hallmarks of a short-term response to a long-term problem. Although framed in the language of geopolitical doctrine, the thinking behind them is as recognisable in organisations at our current stage of industrialisation as it is in international politics.

In complex environments, doctrine offers an illusion of certainty that masks a sterility of thinking. Under pressure, what is presented as adaptive strategy is often constrained by the unspoken theatre of doctrinal assumptions. These assumptions are rarely articulated, let alone examined. They shape what feels sensible. What appears risky, is sanitised or dismissed before it is properly considered.

Doctrines do not collapse so much as decay, and only rarely are they revived. What begins as a clear boundary, designed to reduce uncertainty at a particular point in time, is gradually stretched by new actors, shifting incentives, and changing conditions. Principle gives way to precedent, legitimacy to compliance, and a guiding signal becomes background noise.

Where boundaries endure, it is not because they are asserted more forcefully, but because they are re-established through contemporary consent, embedded in institutions and practices, and permitted to evolve. Where this does not happen, doctrines persist as defensive habit rather than guidance, quietly constraining adaptation while giving the illusion of order.

This matters for New Artisans because it is easy to become trapped within organisations shaped by old ways of thinking and insulated from the ideas that are shaping the emerging future. We may become highly competent in what is slowly becoming obsolete, while struggling to remain attuned to what now matters. Expertise, under these conditions, can become a liability.

There is a common assumption that doctrine is enduring and rigid, while strategy is adaptive and ephemeral. In the military, doctrine is typically revised every five to seven years, with deeper transformations occurring over much longer cycles. Corporate strategy, by contrast, often operates on much shorter horizons, sometimes three years or less. The irony is that, while strategy appears more fluid, unspoken doctrine is often taken for granted. Strategy changes, but always within the same invisible boundaries.

In organisations, hidden doctrine becomes strategy’s invisible prison. Comfort with past success reinforces existing routines and competencies, leaving little space to explore new ones. Over time, layers of unquestioned assumptions build up about what works and what does not. A kind of doctrinal sediment forms. Organisations become trapped not only by their capabilities, but by the stories they tell themselves about those capabilities. It is reminiscent of technical debt, where systems continue to function while carrying architectural decisions from a very different era.

Nothing is actively broken, but change becomes increasingly difficult.

This hidden doctrine amplifies several forms of myopia. Competitive myopia limits attention to familiar rivals while missing disruption from outside the field. Temporal myopia elevates quarterly performance over longer-term resilience, and most insidious of all is learning myopia. Knowledge that does not fit existing mental models is quietly rejected, not because it is wrong, but because it is uncomfortable.

There is, at least, an underlying honesty to military doctrine. It is explicit, written down, debated, and periodically revised. Corporate doctrine is rarely afforded the same visibility. It exists, but remains largely unspoken. In this sense, it resembles what Pierre Bourdieu described as habitus: the internalised dispositions that shape perception and action without the need for explicit rules.

The result is elaborate strategy theatre. We rehearse change, innovation, and transformation, but always on the same stage, with the same actors, the same production crew, and the same backstage staff. The performance changes. The structure does not.

The challenge for us as artisans is that we, too, can be shaped by this habitus. We become the average of the people, ideas, and constraints that surround us. The ideas that might invigorate our thinking are never seriously entertained. Many of them would fail, of course, but some would not. Yet the landscapes we might explore are marked with an implicit sign warning us not to proceed.

Perhaps, as new artisans, we need to recover the nomad within us. Not as rootlessness, but as the ability to carry our home with us rather than defending fixed territories. Our strength lies less in walls and more in mobility, adaptation, and the patient acquisition of deep knowledge about changing landscapes.

That raises a final question. If deep knowledge of changing landscapes cannot be acquired inside organisations constrained by invisible doctrine, how are we to develop it? And where are the spaces in which this learning can take place?

Those are questions for my next post.

In the meantime, the Wednesday group will be meeting this evening at 5 o’clock UK time on Zoom. You would be very welcome. One of the quieter truths we will explore is that developing deep knowledge often requires working together, outside the walls of organisations, in places where doctrine can be named, questioned, and, where necessary, left behind.

Zoom Call. 5:00 pm UK Weds 7th Jan

I suspect that for many of us, this is the most important time of the year. A liminal space between the end of one year and the beginning of the next. A pause after the manic consumption our economy seems to require of Christmas, before we return to its equally manic demands for growth at any cost.

A space in which we can reflect on what we have done and what we might choose to do next. As 2025 ends and 2026 begins, that space feels unusually charged.

One of the novelties this year has been the ability to feed my writing back into itself and interrogate it using different AI tools. What was I thinking? What was I noticing? What kept recurring? It has proved a valuable exercise, partly because I do not write to a plan; I write from where I am and from what catches my attention, and this approach helps me to join dots.

Looking back, those dots clustered around four broad themes:

The first was a recurring interest in what does not change amid technological upheaval. The constants of human connection, such as meaning, trust, fairness and belonging. None of these is easily measurable, and all of them tend to slip from view when data and short term optimisation dominate our thinking. I found myself returning to the idea of artisans as those who weave the unchanging into the changing, attending to what technology struggles to see. That thread led me to questions of scale and multiplication, a distinction I will return to, particularly as scale makes organisations (and us) increasingly sterile when it comes to innovation and human flourishing.

The second cluster explored technology’s double-edged sword. I was interested in what happens when expanding technological capability collides with organisational structures designed for efficiency and productivity. Again and again, I noticed the same tension; technology enables new forms of work, but industrial age organisations often struggle to accommodate them. In response, they constrain rather than adapt. Over time, this raised an uncomfortable thought; many of the organisations we rely on are becoming counterproductive, not through malice or incompetence, but as management shifts from enabling the possible to guarding what has already been ritualised and sanctified.

The third followed a more personal line of inquiry. What does technology do to us as individuals? In performative cultures, it can emphasise what we are functionally, rather than who we are creatively. I became interested in the difference between technologies that hollow us out and those that amplify originality, and AI in particular began to feel like a kind of Tolkien’s “one ring”, binding us into mass mimicry by removing friction and difficulty, and in doing so quietly encouraging mediocrity at scale.

The fourth took me back to where I started, with people and with what does not change. In our obsession with data, we often fail to notice what goes missing. That took me towards the idea of artisans as strange attractors in the language of chaos theory. People who hold space for the conversations that data cannot have. I thought of artisans, heretics, pirates, and alchemists as boundary crossers, and as the year drew to a close, alchemy offered itself as a way to carry these ideas into 2026. That, in turn, led to the Athanor, the vessel in which alchemists conduct their work, and to the decision to create a separate space for those who wish to undertake the work of change, rather than simply observe it.

I suspect that when we look back, 2025 will prove to have been a pivotal year.

One of the gifts of this pause between years is the chance for a second distillation. Not only can we reflect on what we have noticed, but we can sit with others and ask what lies beneath it. Why are these things coming into view now? What might deserve our attention as we enter 2026?

Experience suggests that this focus need not be correct to be powerful. But we need to begin somewhere. To discover that we are moving in the wrong direction, we must first move.

Alan Kay famously said that the best way to predict the future is to invent it. It is a compelling line, but I am increasingly drawn to a different framing. Masahiro Morioka suggests that life is something we feel our way into rather than discover.

How we approach it shapes what it becomes.

Perhaps we have more choice than we think, if we approach it wisely.

So, as we enter 2026, I am choosing two things to focus on. First, AI as a form of personal transport. Second, the idea of scale as sterility.

AI as personal transport

Our media has an almost limitless appetite for anything that can be dressed up as a crisis or a revolution. I am amused and slightly bemused that we are currently being warned of a “cold weather bomb”, complete with colour coded alerts, when the reality is that it will simply be a bit chilly for a week or two. It’s what winter does. There is no news to it.

I think we are seeing something similar with AI. It is often framed as a revolution in its own right, when in truth it is part of a technological wave that has been unfolding since the 1970s. Carlota Perez offers a useful lens here. She shows that major technological breakthroughs follow long diffusion patterns that reshape not only the economy, but society itself. Each wave, of 50-60 years, brings a new common sense about organisation, institutions and best practice.

These revolutions tend to unfold in two phases. An installation period marked by experimentation, speculation and inequality, followed by a deployment period in which institutions slowly adapt, and benefits spread more broadly. Technology alone does not determine outcomes; social and institutional choices matter just as much, and I think this lag between technological possibility and organisational adaptation is where much of our current tension sits.

If we look back to the early twentieth century, technological change initially transformed society through industry, enabling mass transport by rail, road and air. Yet the most profound social shift occurred with the advent of the car. Henry Ford did not invent it, but he standardised it, simplified it, and built an infrastructure that ordinary people could learn from. He made cars accessible and understandable and in doing so, he made personal transport possible. People were no longer limited to following where institutions led. They could choose where to go themselves.

I wonder whether AI might be doing something similar. Before its recent advances, modelling, analysis and optimisation existed, but they largely lived inside firms, consultancies and governments that had the resources to support them. Today, capabilities once locked behind teams and budgets are accessible to individuals. The cost of experimentation has collapsed. Iteration now rewards curiosity more than hierarchy.

Railways centralised movement. Cars decentralised it. Enterprise AI centralises intelligence, but AI used well can decentralise it again.

There is an obvious caveat. Cars empowered drivers who learned to drive well, but tended to kill those who did not respect them. AI will not empower everyone. It will empower those who treat it as a craft, who develop judgement, taste and restraint, and who remain morally and intellectually in the loop. Those who don’t will end up as passengers, or victims.

This raises an awkward question for organisations. Just as railways did not vanish, organisations will not disappear; however, they may no longer be the only places where complex work can occur. Individuals with AI fluency may rival small teams, and small teams using AI may unseat large ones, because Capital is promiscuous. Coordination can increasingly happen through loose networks rather than rigid hierarchies. In some respects, this may look less like modern corporations and more like Guilds 2.0.

The risks are real. Cars brought freedom and sprawl, but also accidents and environmental damage. AI may expand agency, but it can also encourage cognitive overreach and moral externalities.

Developing horsepower is easy. Developing the skill to handle it is something else entirely.

The greatest challenge in all this is us. We are the inheritors of industrial systems in which survival depended on compliance, yet we now find ourselves in a world where that compliance increasingly leads to irrelevance.

The Industrial Revolution provided mass transport for organisations before it enabled mobility for individuals. AI may reverse that pattern, offering mass capability to individuals before organisations fully learn how to respond.

Agency may an attractive idea, but it carries responsibility, and responsibility can be uncomfortable. We are accountable, perhaps more than for a very long time, for our own futures.

This will be my starting theme for 2026. AI may be the most significant personal enabler we have ever encountered. Working with it will be a craft. Developing that craft will not be straightforward, and the challenges are already with us.

The organisations we have are not there for our benefit.

What might we do instead?

Scale as Sterility

If AI reintroduces personal agency, it also casts existing working environments in a harsher light. It raises a simple but unsettling question. If the tools are now capable and experimentation is cheaper than ever, why does so much organised work still feel so flat? I do not think this is a failure of imagination or intent. It is structural. Scale entails a hidden bargain.

Large systems exist because they work. They deliver efficiency, predictability and productivity at levels smaller systems cannot. They reduce cost per unit, smooth variation and enable complex coordination. Modern life depends on these achievements.

But scale also changes what systems reward. As organisations grow, they become increasingly sensitive to risk. Errors travel further. Failure becomes reputational rather than local. Small deviations can have disproportionate consequences. Over time, systems adapt by valuing repeatability over originality, compliance over judgement, and safety over surprise.

This is not stupidity. It is self defence.

The consequence is that optimisation quietly displaces vitality. Variation becomes noise, and anomalies become threats. Experimentation must justify itself in advance, and innovation narrows into safe recombinations of the familiar. Franchises replace exploration, until what remains is competence without aliveness and motion without direction. A kind of professional sterility, with our Animal Spirits caged and tamed.

At the human scale, judgment is personal, and accountability is immediate. Trust lives in relationships rather than processes. At the organisational scale, these qualities have to be abstracted. Rules replace norms. protocols replace judgement and roles replace people. It is not a moral failure, it is a cognitive necessity.

But abstraction has a cost. When judgement is externalised into process, people are trusted less to think and more to comply, and when responsibility is diffused through systems, ownership weakens.

When success is defined narrowly by metrics, everything else fades from view.

This is how sterility feels from the inside. Not like oppression, but like thinning. A quiet sense that something important has gone missing, even as performance improves.

There is a deeper inversion at work. Systems designed to support human flourishing can, beyond a certain point, begin to undermine it. Tools that once extended agency start to prescribe behaviour. Success overshoots its purpose. More process reduces judgement, more optimisation reduces imagination, and more safety reduces aliveness.

Seen this way, sterility is not a bug. It is a feature of success taken too far.

AI does not create this condition; it reveals it. By collapsing the cost of experimentation and shifting capability from hierarchy to curiosity, it exposes how constrained our structures have become. When individuals with fluency and judgement can move faster than teams embedded in process, the issue is no longer talent. It is architecture.

This is why AI feels destabilising to large organisations. It bypasses the immune system. It allows work to happen without permission, revealing how much energy has been devoted to maintaining coherence rather than exploring possibilities.

The problem, then, may not be scale itself, but the confusion of scale with growth. Scale multiplies the same thing. Growth, in any meaningful sense, requires difference. It depends on variation, mutation and recombination.

Multiplication thrives on diversity. Scale smooths it away. In the last few months, Microsoft cut 15,000 jobs despite an 18% profit increase, Meta laid off 3,600 employees, calling AI a “mid-level engineer” and Google quietly eliminated roles across Android, Pixel, and Chrome. Salesforce cut customer support staff from 9,000 to 5,000 in under a year, with a 17% reduction in costs and performance reportedly steady or improved. I can sense the sterility increasing, masked by the joy of shotrt term savings.

When sterility increases, vitality does not disappear; it migrates to the edges, to small groups, to informal networks, to places where judgment still matters and failure is survivable. It appears in craft and practice, in people who take responsibility rather than wait for permission.

As we enter 2026, I am less interested in fixing large systems than in noticing where life is already reappearing despite them. The question is not how to make organisations more innovative in theory, but where meaningful work can still be done in practice.

Perhaps we have more choice than we think. Not in controlling the future, but in deciding where we place our energy. In maintaining systems that feel increasingly sterile, or in cultivating small, human-scale spaces where something alive can emerge and thrive.

I will begin 2026 focusing on these topics and incorporating my observations into my writing on The Athanor to identify ways to work with others to turn observation into orientation and orientation into action.

Because I suspect 2025 was only a mild introduction to the change we will have to accommodate, as we learn to dance with, rather than for, technology, and chart our own direction rather than follow blindly organisations that find themselves lost, confused and stuck without purpose other than short-term profit.

Onwards…..

On this last day of 2025, wishing you a smooth entry into 2026, and a fulfilling, satisfying and contented year.

I write in three places:

Here - about the potential power of craft in an automating world:

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At Outside the Walls, about what I notice emerging outside the walls of convention and “best practice”:

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And at The Athanor, on the power of conversations in small groups to bring about the change we want for ourselves.

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If ever there was someone to whom his craft mattered more than the money he earned. Someone who, for many of us, was the soundtrack of our lives.

He was a couple of months younger than me, and my father used to sell his father essences and flavourings for his ice cream business, back in a day when relationships mattered more in business than they do now, and going to the factory with him.

I will miss him, but am grateful we were around at the same time.

This week has got a bit out of hand, and rather than do a quick post for the sake of it, I’m going to roll this week’s thinking into a year-end review. I hope you’ll bear with me.

In the meantime, here’s a link to yesterday’s post in the Athanor:

The Athanor - Conversations as Ecosystems

As ( I hope) you wind down for the holidays, wishing you a peaceful, content time with those you love.

R