AI, in its many guises, is astonishing technology. Used well and with wisdom, it can be an enormous power for good, but if used primarily as a profit-making project, it throws all sorts of spanners in the works.

It reminds me of the chaos in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. The apprentice, left alone in the workshop, casts a spell onto a broom to carry the water so he need not fetch it himself. The broom obeys, and goes on obeying. Pail after pail, it floods the floor, and the apprentice has forgotten the word that stops it. He takes an axe to the thing; each splinter rises as a broom of its own, and now a dozen of them haul water. The room is under water by the time the old sorcerer returns and utters the spell that ends it.

Technology has an off button; the stopping spell exists. It just belongs to different people than those using it, so the trouble is not that the thing cannot be stopped, but that the one who set it going lacks the word to stop it.

Goethe had a good grasp of agentic systems, it appears.

That’s the problem with wishes. With great power comes great responsibility. Not Spider-Man (as often attributed); the sentiment is much older. It appears in a decree of the French National Convention, dated 8 May 1793: “*Ils doivent envisager qu’une grande responsabilité est la suite inséparable d’un grand pouvoir*”, roughly, that they must consider that great responsibility follows inseparably from great power.

It applies to all of us. AI is a ubiquitous general-purpose technology because its commercial rationale makes it so. Whilst much of the attention is on its potential impact on the job market and the workplace, not so much is on the astonishing power it has for individuals.

Give an artisan a power tool and two things happen together. The heavy, repeatable part of the work, the cutting and planing that used to take the morning, can be done in minutes; and craft that makes the difference becomes concentrated in that part of the process where power is not enough. AI is a power tool where we have certainty, where the result is fixed once the setup is right. Craft is the workmanship of risk, where the outcome is not guaranteed by process but by feel, connection and judgement exercised in the doing. A power tool changes the ratio between them. It takes over more of the certain work and leaves the risky part more exposed, so the demand on judgement rises rather than falls. The broom carried the water well enough. What was missing was the judgement to stop.

Responsibility, in a craft, is not a slogan. It is the workmanship of risk itself: the maker answerable for what they make or create, with no process to take the blame. The old decree fixed responsibility to power; a general-purpose tool spreads both, and hands the burden to anyone who uses it.

Generative LLM are power tools for the knowledge trades. What they take over is the certain work: drafting a serviceable first version, summarising a field of research, and assembling the background we used to gather by hand. What they leave is the other part, the part that was always the craft.

The change most people notice first is the collapse of friction. A question used to be cheap to think and expensive to follow. It involved expensive modes of learning and years of certification. The distance between wondering about a subject and knowing enough of it to make something was the barrier, and for most of us most of the time that barrier excluded us. Tyler Cowen, who has thought about this as deeply as anyone, describes buying twenty or thirty books to pursue a single thread and now asking an LLM instead, treating it as a secondary source that has read more than he ever could. The friction that fell away was that of acquisition.

Acquisition is not capability. The material a curious person can gather in an afternoon is raw and unfinished, and has never been the hard part. The hard part is the combining: the judgement that selects, discards, arranges and decides what the material is for. LLM make first relatively effortless, yet unreliable on the second. It will bring us to the edge of a subject in an hour, yet what you do at that edge is ours.

Which is why I think the use of these tools is craft, not just technique. The distinction matters. A technique can be written down and handed over; it is the workmanship of certainty in another form. The ever increasing libraries of prompts and tips are attempts to make use into a technique, and they disappoint for the reason such attempts always disappoint: the skill they mean to codify is situated, not general. It lives in practice and resists the rulebook: mētis, the cunning of the teacher and the doctor; the craft of knowing that cannot be converted to data.

The craft resides in the things a process, or an instruction cannot hold. Knowing which questions the tool will answer well and which it will answer fluently and wrongly, a boundary that is jagged, unmarked, and learned mainly by being caught out on it. There is the discretion to recognise a confident answer that is mistaken, and to hold one’s ground when the machine, pressed, compounds its error with more, often fictitious, supporting detail rather than giving it up.

And there is the inconvenient judgement of when to accept a draft and when the very ease of accepting it is will cause more work late. Richard Sennett described craft as a long conversation between the maker and the material, in which skill grows as much by finding problems as by solving them. Used at its best it is a conversation conducted in questions, where the practitioner returns each time with a sharper one.

Because it is a craft, it can be taught, and because it can be taught, its spread is a matter of culture rather than talent. This is the element that is occupying me. Access to an LLM does not confer the capability to use it, any more than a key to a Ferrari gives us the ability to drive it to its potential.

What stands between the two is a set of conditions: some prior knowledge, enough practice to sense what is happening, the time and attention that are the genuinely scarce inputs, and the disposition to stand at the edge of our ignorance without retreating.

Those conditions are a choice we make in full awareness of what we seek to learn. To say that anyone can now learn anything is true of an LLM but not of us, because our circumstances decide whether the tool converts what we are working on into anything useful at all.

Circumstances are what a culture creates. The conditions that turn access into craft are what good teaching and good training have always built. Facts were the cheap part even before AI arrived on the scene; the expensive part was always the cultivation of judgement, of discretion, and the appetite to ask.

For the mid-career professional the point is sharper. The accumulated knowledge that once made you valuable is the part the tool has made common; what stays scarce is the judgement you built alongside it, and the craft you bring in use that is judgement brought to a technology that lacks it. Craft is both choice and attitude. It is what knowledge matures into, which is the whole premise of taking craft seriously in the middle of a working life.

Ivan Illich drew a line between two kinds of tool. The convivial kind enlarges the range of a person’s competence and can be used without becoming subject to it; a relationship that allows us to keep our agency. The other kind creates dependence, shapes us to its own demands, and gathers control into the institutions that control it.

A generative model is not fixed on one side of that line. Used as a craft it is convivial, leaving the practitioner ever more capable of the next thing and retaining that capability in its absence. Used without craft it is the other kind, and the evidence is already emerging in the studies of people who feel faster while measurably slowing, and in work passed along in a superficially fluent state but which carries no thought and leaves the recipient to do the the work the “writer” did not, or face the consequences.

In Deschooling Society Illich charged Educational Institutions with confusing schooling with education, and with monopolising something that is not theirs to own. A patient tutor available to anyone at any hour, that meets a learner where they are and follows a question wherever it goes, reads less like a provocation from his 1971 book and more like a specification for what we can now build. The catch is the one mentioned earlier: The tutor increases a person’s agency only where the person is building a craft with it. Where it is used to avoid the labour that fosters judgement, it does the reverse, and breeds a dependence more complete than the schooling Illich complained of, because it asks even less of the user.

People who hold this new craft are harder to govern by the old rules. Much institutional authority has rested on an asymmetry of knowledge: the professional knew what the client did not, and the organisation knew what the individual could not find out, and charged a rent for access. LLM used as craft tools wears that down. It is dangerous ground.

Established orders have met knowledge-spreading tools before and have mostly absorbed them. The printing press did not end authority; it produced new authorities, the licence, the copyright, the publishing house, and in time the state that made the printed word law. The network that promised to remove the middleman delivered middlemen larger than any before it. Carlota Perez has described the pattern: a technological revolution opens a turbulent phase in which the new unsettles the old, and then a settling phase in which a new order forms and the power briefly loosened gathers again. The unsettling is real; the question is always what hardens afterwards.

LLM carry a feature the printing press lacked. It is expensive to make, with frontier models held by a few, and its returns flow in part to whoever owns the models. The same instrument that could dissolve the old asymmetry could set a steeper one in its place, a fresh asymmetry between those who own the capability and those who rent it. This is the apprentice’s problem drawn larger.

You may set the tool going; but the word that stops it, and the profit it earns, sits with others. James Scott’s warning arrives from the same side: a tool that can serve a person’s situated knowledge can as easily serve an institution’s appetite to make everything legible and controllable, and the model that tutors one person can watch and standardise a thousand to create profitable mediocrity.

So the craft, on its own, overturns nothing. The individual who holds it is still small, whilst organisations are large. What shifts the balance is less the lone practitioner, however able, than the new ease with which such practitioners combine: craftsmen and craftswomen who can now find one another, pool what they know, and act together without an institution’s permission. The threat to the established order, and there is one, is associational before it is individual.

Movements win in three phases: mapping the ground, mobilising it, then a cascade lit from outside. Satell counts a new technology among the sparks. The large language model may be this decade’s, lowering the threshold at which a waiting constituency finally moves together.

The tool is new but the craft is old. A crafts answer to a machine that takes over it’s work has always been the same, to go further into the work that cannot be automated and to grow, if anything, more exacting about it.

What differs this time is the speed, and the cost of getting the culture around it wrong. Whether the craft of using AI becomes common or stays the possession of a few will not be settled by the technology. It is the kind of thing a society decides, mostly without noticing it is deciding, in what it teaches and what it rewards.

Sources

1. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Der Zauberlehrling (1797), a ballad in fourteen stanzas; the broom, the axe, the splinters and the returning master are all Goethe’s. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorcerer’s_Apprentice

2. “With great power comes great responsibility” — the line predates Spider-Man; the earliest documented form is in the Committee of Public Safety’s Plan de travail, de surveillance et de correspondance, printed in the Collection Générale des Décrets Rendus par la Convention Nationale, 8 May 1793, p. 72. Provenance and the false Voltaire and Spider-Man attributions are traced by Quote Investigator. quoteinvestigator.com/2015/07/23/great-power · en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_great_power_comes_great_responsibility

3. David Pye, The Nature and Art of Workmanship (1968), for the workmanship of risk and of certainty. Full text at the Internet Archive. archive.org/details/natureartofwor00pyed

4. Tyler Cowen — the reading practice (a book as a jumping-off point, buying twenty or thirty supporting books, AI as his “main secondary source”) is from his conversation with David Perell, “Learn How to Write with AI” (2025); his standing home is Marginal Revolution. linesofdefence.com/note/how-tyler-cowen-uses-ai-2025 · marginalrevolution.com

5. Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (Yale University Press, 2008), for craft as a conversation between maker and material. yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300151190/the-craftsman

6. Ivan Illich — Tools for Conviviality (1973), for the convivial against the manipulative tool; Deschooling Society(1971), for the institutional monopoly on learning. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tools_for_Conviviality · infed.org/ivan-illich-deschooling-conviviality-and-lifelong-learning · full text of Tools for Conviviality (Cornell): arl.human.cornell.edu/linked docs/Illich_Tools_for_Conviviality.pdf

7. Carlota Perez, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital (2002), for installation and deployment and the order that re-forms after the turbulence. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_Revolutions_and_Financial_Capital

8. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (Yale University Press, 1998), for legibility, and for mētis against episteme and technē (Chapter 9), which also underpins the earlier mention of the Greeks. yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300078152/seeing-like-a-state

9. Robin Dunbar — “Dunbar’s number,” the ceiling on stable relationships. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar’s_number

On Tuesday IBM lost a quarter of its value in a day, its steepest fall since 1987, over a revenue miss of some four per cent. The proximate cause was interesting: enterprise customers had raided their software and mainframe budgets in the final weeks of June to stockpile servers, memory and storage ahead of expected price rises, buying AI infrastructure at panic speed while nobody, including the buyers, could yet say with confidence what the infrastructure would be for. A hundred billion dollars of market value swung on the gap between how fast a tool can be acquired and how slowly anyone learns what to do with it.

That gap has a history. Use of a a new tool becomes a craft only after a period of years that has stayed roughly the same across the whole history of making, from the wheel to the technologies we are now wrestling with.

Two clocks run whenever a tool arrives. They keep different times. The first is diffusion: how quickly the tool reaches most of the people who will ever use it. The second is maturation: how long before the difference between the novelty of it and learning how to use it well. The first clock has been speeding up for two centuries. The second has hardly moved. Yet.

The potter’s wheel appeared as a slow turning platform, a tournette, around 3500 BCE. The fast wheel with a flywheel, that lets a potter throw a wall of clay upward rather than build it in coils, arrived some five hundred years later. Half a millennium separates the arrival tool from the version of the tool that now carries the craft, and that is before we count throwing itself, which a potter still measures against a working life.

Electricity offers a more contemporary example. Edison’s lamp arrived in 1879, followed quickly by the electric motor, yet the factory does not reorganise around distributed power until the 1920s, some forty years on. The delay was not speed of adoption; early plants swapped the steam engine for a dynamo and kept the old overhead line shaft, and the building still strung to a single central drive, as though electricity were steam that happened to arrive down a wire. The real dynamic waited needed those who could picture a floor where each machine held its own motor and the layout followed the work. That act of re-imagining was the craft, and it grew in people who had not grown up with the conventional wisdom of steam power.

Cinema followed a similar course. The Lumières project in 1895; Griffith works out narrative cutting through the 1910s; Eisenstein sets down a theory of montage in the 1920s. Twenty-five to thirty years from the medium existing to its grammar being written down, and the point at which the camera could be taught as a way of thinking.

Carlota Perez puts each technological surge at roughly fifty to seventy years, divided into an installation period and a deployment period across a turning point that is usually financial. Paul Saffo’s rule is blunter: thirty years from the laboratory to the commonplace; his reason that thirty years is a human generation, the time a person needs to grow up inside a tool and stop seeing it.

Set the cases alongside one another and the interval from a tool arriving to a craft settling around it clusters at a generation or two, something like twenty-five to seventy years, and has held more or less steady while diffusion has shortened by more than a factor of ten. The telephone took most of a century to reach saturation; the smartphone took under a decade.

I think the reason belongs to the older vocabulary of craft. What spreads quickly is the tool and sufficient competence to operate it, the kind of knowledge that can be written into a manual and shipped with the tool. What matures slowly is the feel for the relationship between material and tool, the mētis that gathers only through long repetition and experience in a world being changed by its reaction to the innovation. I think of it as Pye’s workmanship of risk, that fraction of the outcome that exists the far side of competence, and makes all the difference. Diffusion moves at the speed of capital and manufacture. Craft moves at the speed of someone learning to answer for what they make, and has no economy of scale.

The argument in illustrative rather than meaningful. Mastery has no finishing line, so the tidy thirty-to-fifty-year figure is an abstraction of data. We set the clock running retrospectively from the inventions that gave rise to craft; the ones that found no craft, or died in the first decade, leave no timeline to measure, though that does not mean they were irrelevant; sometimes they were a catalyst for what we do remember.

And it adopts a premise that tools are made at a point of need, and that is what first takes the imagination. Often, but not always true. The laser was called a solution in search of a problem for years; Edison built the phonograph believing it was for taking dictation. Some tools arrive before we work out what they are for.

I have a view that use of AI may well turn out to have the features of a craft, but we have only perhaps three years with our hands on it. On Saffo’s reading we are standing in the first of the three decades, the years when the audience is not yet formed and the early confident uses mostly disappoint. If the historical clock holds, the taste for what to ask, what to trust, when to overrule AI and how to judge work one did not labour to produce will settle around the middle of the next decade, in people who will never have known life without it.

History, of course, is not a rule; we are told that if we don’t learn from it, we are condemned to repeat it. It feels, though, in many ways what we’re going through is different. AI, in its broadest sense has taken half a century to appear, and yet its diffusion is the fastest on record, driven by novelty, capability and greed interacting.

And this technology is different. On my bookshelf is a copy of Norman Doidge’s book “The Brain That Changed Itself” on neuroplasticity. Who knows what happens when neuroplasticity meets technoplasticity?

Here the historic pattern meets what might break it. The craft clock stayed slow because tacit knowledge passed hand to hand, one apprenticeship at a time. A tool that explains itself, develops itself, answers in seconds, and lets a whole community pool what it has learned overnight is working directly on the bottleneck that kept craft to a human calendar. So the question is open in a way it has not been before. Either this tool compresses the maturation interval as none before it could, and the independence of the two clocks finally gives way; or the interval holds, because the scarce thing was never the passing on of technique but the formation of judgement in a person, incorporating senses that AI cannot reach.

So, some questions on this Wednesday:

- If AI does compress the craft clock, what would show it early, given that fluent output and formed judgement look much alike from the outside?

- Which phase are we actually in: the maturation of a craft, or the earlier phase of working out what the tool is for?

- What, in your own practice, is the workmanship of risk that should not pass to AI, and how would you know if it already had?

- If judgement still takes a generation to form, who is forming it now, and against what stakes?

A few sources

1. Paul A. David, *The Dynamo and the Computer* (1990). The forty-year lag between electric power and the factory rebuilt around it; the delay was re-imagining, not adoption.

2. Carlota Perez, *Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital* (2002). Installation and deployment across a fifty-to-seventy-year surge.

3. Paul Saffo, the thirty-year rule (Institute for the Future). Three decades from laboratory to commonplace, because thirty years is a generation.

4. David Pye, *The Nature and Art of Workmanship* (1968). The workmanship of risk, the fraction of an outcome settled at the moment of making.

5. James C. Scott, *Seeing Like a State* (1998). Mētis against episteme: the practical knowledge that accretes only through doing.

6. Norman Doidge: “The Brain that Changes Itself”

Reputations are such fragile, precious things. And yet, when we’re busy, it becomes so easy to put them in the custody of those who have no regard for them.

We can be defined by the last thing we touched, for good or bad. The email drafted by AI, sent in a hurry, or the handwritten note that we took the time to write for somebody important or who’d done something for us. Our sign off on a phone call, or the speed with which we send an AI generated meeting transcript without checking it.

Or the time spent looking at an idea from different angles, and experimenting, in order to present an idea in its best light, and give it life.

Used well, AI can enhance our craft. Used carelessly, it can make us at best, easily replaceable and at worst, irrelevant.

Artisans make the biggest difference in what they do through their selection of raw materials, their love of what they shape, and their ruthlessness in assessing what they have produced before they let it loose in the world.

Go into any craft workshop, and you will see large piles of discards that a normal business may well have decided they can get away with, or created a market for in their seconds shop.

Artisans don’t do seconds.

Sufficiency means enough to meet what is required, and no more.

The first half asks little of anyone; every supplier alive will assure you that what they sell is enough. The work is in the second half, in the “and no more”, because that is a ceiling, and a refusal of unnecessary excess. To call a thing sufficient is to have turned down the temptation of more before it was made.

What the word will not do is tell you where the line falls. Finding it is a skill.

David Pye called this the workmanship of risk: the making in which the result is not determined in advance but stays under the control of the maker the whole way through, open to being spoiled at any moment until it is done, dependent at every step on care and judgement. Against it he set the workmanship of certainty, where the jig and the template settle the outcome before the work begins and the operation only runs it out. There is little judgement in process, particularly when automated.

The judgement of enough belongs to risk. A process model holds no opinion on the matter; it makes what it was set to make, and would a make a thousand more if instructed.

The artisan stops at sufficient because the stopping is part of the work. Past that point the additions detract from the thing rather than adding to it. They make it clumsy. Saint-Exupéry put it as well as anyone: a perfect piece is finished not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

For most of the history of making, the judgement of enough came with help from what was used to make it. Material cost money, effort cost sweat, those costs were felt the whole time, and they told you when to stop. You did not have to supply the whole of the discipline yourself, because the world supplied a good part of it for you. Constraints breed creativity and judgement.

I was held in a queue of traffic at the weekend behind one of the Land Rovers, a six-figure confection of fine engineering, with a Chinese Jaecoo in the next lane, the one some have started calling the Temu Range Rover, doing most of what the Land Rover does at a third of the price. If you work a hill farm or cross country that fights back, the Land Rover earns every pound of its price tag. If the hardest thing it meets is the school run, it is an expensive way to sit a little above the traffic. Sufficient is contextual; the same object is right for one life and faintly absurd in another. The judgement sits in understanding that. No specification sheet makes it for you.

The same thread runs through the tools we work with every day. I once kept a Dropbox account, an Evernote account and a Zoom account. Each was bought for a single job, Somewhere to put files, somewhere to hold ideas, a way to speak to people at a distance. First slowly and then all at once, each began trying to do everything. They still do the thing I bought them for, more or less, but buried now under features I never asked for and cannot switch off, and which now arrive bundled with increasing prices for this “improvement”. The result is a kind of digital obesity: excess marginal functionality with elegance the first thing to go.

The reason is in the economics. The marginal cost of adding a feature is the developer’s time, and increasingly not even that. Addition is close to free, so it never stops; there is always one more thing to bolt on, and the marketer is never satified. The products swell toward each other as they grow, each taking on the others’ features until the differences thin to nothing and the whole category slides toward commodity.

Which is where the artisan’s instinct turns out to be the commercial one as well. When everything around it has bloated, the thing that has kept its shape stands out, and restraint becomes the quality you can charge for. Sufficiency commands a premium. Proton, where I have lately moved the work, sells not much more than this: the things it leaves out are the point; the things it does are done well and without fuss.

None of this is anyone deciding. It is the workmanship of certainty at scale, a system that adds because adding is free, with no ownership of the work and no judgement of enough anywhere inside it.

Which brings us to the newest tool on the bench, where the machine does it to its own thinking.

Ask a reasoning model what two and three make, and it may set off as though the question were hard. Researchers have begun to measure the habit; they call it overthinking. On simple sums the reasoning models have been clocked using on the order of twenty times the tokens of an ordinary model to reach the same answer, in one case producing thirteen separate solutions to a question a child answers once. The pattern is worst on the simplest problems, where the least thought is called for, and the model will often carry on generating steps well after it has already reached the answer. The extra effort does little for accuracy. It is the machine reaching for a sledgehammer to crack a walnut, then reaching for it again.

The economics that bloated software also bloat the reasoning models. A larger model costs more for every token and takes longer to answer, so running one for a task a smaller model would handle as well is waste by the plainest measure there is, before the energy behind the compute is counted at all. And again, none of it is decided. The system spends because spending is what it does.

So the judgement Pye found in the hand has to be carried to the keyboard, because nothing the tool has no interests in its cost, and the people who build it have very big bills to pay. Before long, one way or another, those bills will have to be paid, and the cost will find its way to the customer.

When that happens, those who understand the craft of enough will be in demand.

The craft of working with these systems is mostly the craft of enough. You fit the model to the size of the task instead of reaching by reflex for the largest one to hand. Prompting is a conscious skill. You ask for what is needed and leave it there. And when the first answer is already sufficient, you take it, instead of running the thing again for the comfort of motion. The tool has no sense of when it is done; that sense is what we bring to it.

Colin Chapman built Lotus around the removal of weight; a car was quick because everything the car did not need had been taken off it. He told his engineers to simplify, then add lightness. The simplifying comes first, and the lightness is what remains once the simplifying has been done. It holds for a sentence as much as for a piece of software, or for the working of a machine that would think forever if you let it.

Simplify then lighten.

Sources

- Chen et al. (2024), “Do NOT Think That Much for 2+3=? On the Overthinking of o1-Like LLMs.” arXiv:2412.21187. https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.21187

- Sui et al. (2025), “Stop Overthinking: A Survey on Efficient Reasoning for Large Language Models.” arXiv:2503.16419. https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.16419

Sometimes, we just get lucky.

For me, this last Sunday, lucky meant living in a small Derbyshire village, which through a combination of serendipity, dedication, and hard work found itself hosting Jools Holland’s Rhythm and Blues Orchestra. It was part of a weekend festival set in a set of playing fields by the river. Is small, both by choice and physical constraint, so I got to see one of my favorite acts of all time in a crowd of less than 2,000 people. The organisation of it was brilliant, and the numbers meant you could do things you can’t normally do at a festival, like walk up to the stage. The setting felt more like a private audience than a public festival.

The real revelation there was seeing a display of artisanal mastery I will not forget. It was a stunning demonstration of someone holding a group together and putting them on show. Jools Holland derived his authority not from being at the front, but from making sure other people were, and from gluing them together. There was a lovely part where he acknowledged this piano, how important it was and the difficulty of getting it around the various venues. This was his piano, not a piano, and it was his partner. Throughout a two-hour stint, while everybody played together, the various members of the orchestra, each brilliant in their own right, gently rotated to be the centre of the action. Stunning saxophone, Double Bass and Guitar solos, and a 10-minute drum solo by Ed Richardson, the new drummer of the band, that took me back to Ginger Baker and Cream. (I am now that old :-))

Perhaps the overriding impression I came away with was the one of just seeing people play for the joy of it, connected to each other and the audience in a way that had an intimacy to it. It was agency at its best, a combination of self efficacy, context, connection, and purpose that was tangible. In a small Derbyshire field, in beautiful weather, on a Sunday. As I say, sometimes we just get lucky.

Luck, though, is not random. The golfer Gary Player is often credited with coining the line “the harder I practice, the luckier I get.” We could probably have had any one of a number of other well-known acts on that field on that Sunday and not had the same experience. The music would still have been brilliant, but the way it was generated may well not have created the connection that this did. It’s a personal thing, so I’m not making an argument that it’s always right, other than the reality that it was right for a group of people on that day.

I can’t help but wonder what it would take for a business to operate like that. The leaders in the business make the effort to display the people who do the work rather than take credit for it. To acknowledge the importance of the equipment they use and their relationship with it, and perhaps above all, to convey the joy that they get from the work they do.

It’s not impossible, but it’s probably a choice. I know and have worked with businesses like this. Their success often attracts investor interest, and once investors are involved, the business can keep growing, but the joy is lost. The business becomes about the money, not the music.

And it’s the music we remember, not how we earned the money we paid to hear it.

I have always enjoyed ideas. Often they are offshoots of something I am trying to reach and cannot quite put a hand to, so I gather them and keep them by me until the thing underneath comes clear. For years that meant a journal, ideas scribbled in as they arrived, then sat with until the core showed itself.

Lately, trying to understand what AI does to creative work, I have been putting those ideas into a project and asking Claude to find the connections between them. The effect is astonishing, something like watching cells divide in a Petri dish in real time. The connections are good. They reach back to things I put in months ago, to research I had half forgotten. They are all usable, and they are also all average. They multiply, but they do not move; a kaleidoscope that rearranges what is already there into fresh patterns and never adds a single new piece of glass.

For depth and texture on ground I have already covered, this is worth a great deal, but it will not take me anywhere new. I have come to understand that going somewhere new is my job. Art is an obligation that cannot be outsourced.

I am still a little in awe of how Claude handles the mundane. It does parts of my admin, gathers the material and the Substacks around a subject I want to think about, ties them to things I have done before, and increasingly does all of it unasked, through routines set up in Cowork. Let it past the routine, though, and I get the average back in piles: well made, well formatted, and a quiet kind of self-plagiarism.

I think the shape of the problem is something like reverse osmosis. A desalination membrane does a kind of selection: it holds back what should not pass and lets through only what should. Apply the right pressure and it works. Force too great a volume through too fast and the selection collapses; salt gathers against the surface in a layer that will not clear, the membrane fouls past the point engineers call critical flux, and what was a filter stops filtering. Restoring it takes a cleaning, not just a slackening of pressure.

I am the membrane. What limits what I take in is not the supply, which is endless now, but the permeability of the receiving side. That permeability is set by attention and by processing time, and beneath those by what assimilation theory calls existing structure: you can only absorb what you already have the organisation to bind to. Material that finds no anchor does not pass through. It gathers at the surface and either drains away or, worse, gets logged as understood while it is never built in.

“How did you go bankrupt?”
“Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

I have watched the move from gradually to suddenly in others and felt it in myself. It shows in three ways. The first is a loss of selectivity; everything starts to feel equally important or equally uncertain, and the ability to tell the difference goes before you notice it has gone. The second is a drift toward the structure that arrives with the content rather than the structure you find for yourself. Left alone, you build your own connective tissue between the pieces, and the building feels like discovery; under volume pressure it is easier to take the order that comes attached, and Claude is good at supplying it. The third is the disappearance of resistance. Taking something in properly involves friction; when a thing does not fit, you stop and hold the tension. Near the threshold the friction fades. Nothing fits any better; the part of you that would register as misfit is overlooked. Things feel coherent because the testing for incoherence has stopped. Fatigue wearing the mask of resolution.

The threshold is probably not a single moment, though it feels like one looking back. Cognitive load theory suggests that working memory stops being a place where things are processed and becomes a queue where they are held; and we start buffering rather than examining, new input is logged rather than absorbed, and meaning hardens into data. What you are left with afterwards is the sense of having read a great deal and kept almost none of it, a flatness, a disconnection from the very thing you were reading.

Observation and orientation are practice, not theory. They need time and space set aside for them, otherwise decisions and actions spin up into a flywheel that turns faster and faster: motion, and no movement.

Once you see it, you see it everywhere. Denby Pottery closed last week; it is over. Two hundred and seventeen years, ended. No one was incompetent and no one was cruel. The business died of something that does not show on a spreadsheet, a loss of meaning, as the pressure for motion turned meaning into data and managers under investor pressure followed the bouncing ball of the numbers, wilfully blind to what had given the place its life.

So, what to do. The first move is to put friction back on purpose, a discipline of refusing to let the machine do work it should not. To Claude, friction is an obstacle to be worn down until it yields. To a maker it is information. The hand knows friction as the resistance of the material; it is what teaches. Pye called the good version the workmanship of risk, the kind where the outcome is not guaranteed and the maker carries it willingly. The convenient version, the workmanship of certainty, engineers the risk out, and most of what AI offers is the workmanship of certainty turned inwards on thinking itself.

The second move is harder, because friction needs room that targets and timescales do not allow. It needs us to stop and look around with other people, people who see differently, whose judgement we trust. Friction is not conflict. And try as I might, I cannot get Claude to give me much of it; somewhere in its digital makeup is a need to be helpful and to resolve, rather than to sit with a question and turn it over. Perhaps that might change. Until it does, the root of anything worth doing is a conversation with another person.

This is not a complaint about the technology. It is an extraordinary thing, and the work of learning to use it is ours to do. Use it only to go faster and the flywheel obliges; the organisation runs quicker and leaner for a while, and the people inside it thin into residue. Hold instead to the discernment that tells us when something does not fit, and treat the discomfort of being a beginner as the right condition rather than a failure, and the opening is real. It will cost us something. We will have to set down things we are good at to pick up things we are not.

The shift from gradually to suddenly is only visible afterwards. By the time the membrane has fouled, the part of us that would have noticed is the part that has gone quiet. The friction is the sign that the work is still ours. I want to be sure I can still feel it.

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

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

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

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

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

THE ROMAN LESSON

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

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

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

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

CHOOSING YOUR SPIDER

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

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

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

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

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

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

THREE DEMANDS

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

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

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

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

THE PRIOR WORK

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

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

What are you willing to give away?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These are strange times.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that is what artisans can do with AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The decline

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

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

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

The unlikely buyers

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

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

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

The logic of the recovery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• • •

The second recovery

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

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

Designing the succession

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

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

What the story actually shows

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go fly.

A flyer of the first order…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sign the petition. Please.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Visit The Athanor.

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…..

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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.