Artisanal Resilience

There is a price we pay for cheap

There is a world of difference between being resilient and being scared.

At the moment, it feels like corporations are scared. Layoffs in technology and retail are well ahead of 2023; a survey by Randstad suggests that 90% of hiring managers expect to be making redundancies in 2024, and yet the same people are complaining that recruitment is difficult in terms of both skills and attitudes. At the same time, balance sheets are bulging with cash. It suggests that companies are far from resilient and are making changes in anticipation of difficulties rather than as a result of them.

Perhaps that is not surprising when share prices are so closely coupled to short-term performance, and rumours abound about performance long before they are published. Resilience is also an attitude that reflects culture and commitment, and it is clear that for most corporations and large businesses, balance sheets trump loyalty to employees, who are treated as commodities.

In turn, perhaps this fragility is linked to a commitment to sales volumes, which encourages a race to the bottom on price with an acceptance of thin margins, which makes any downturn in sales highly damaging to short-term performance.

It brought to mind Ray Dalio’s description of all business models as machines, and whilst I’m not personally a fan of his brutalist approach, there is no denying the success it brought his company and the mimicry it has spawned:

The problem with mimicry is that it involves blind copying without the originator's depth of understanding. So, I think we find “machine minders” leading many large organisations with little appreciation or understanding of how their machines are built or the impact their machine has on their social and natural environment

This makes those who work for them, at every level, analogous to machine parts to be replaced the moment the machine looks like it is slowing down. It is hardly surprising that businesses are currently disapproving of the “transactional approach” they find among their employees: that they will not go “the extra mile” and are more interested in work-life balance than “performing.” The reasons are not hard to see in machine mentality cultures. They are operating on razor-thin social margins, leaving almost nothing in reserve to cope with fluctuations in fortunes or investing in relationships through downturns.

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It is hard to sympathize with businesses that are facing a problem of their own making that could be resolved by human rather than machine-centred leadership. They are difficult, if not impossible, to “cure” because reversion to their previous financially healthy state does nothing to resolve the cultural issues that cause them.

I suspect our best approach is to let them go, to let them expire, hospicing them as best we can to minimise the social damage their death causes. Focus on the creation of new, vibrant, human-scale businesses. Businesses built on principles that recognise the pursuit of cheap erodes resilience and carry enormous costs. For all of us, individuals and businesses alike, healthy growth is not linear and involves cycles. Instead of abandoning people and businesses at the first signs of slowdown, to look instead at what is changing around them that they are not adapting to and give them time to do so. To spend time focusing on what is emerging rather than the blind and frantic pursuit of an obsolescent model whose time is past.

The same applies to us as individuals. As we apparently sit on the cusp of machines that reason, the tendency to leap and then look in pursuit of marginal gains will disrupt many elements of our lives and careers in ways that we do not expect and for which we are not prepared. Just as jobs we have not yet thought of emerge, so will jobs we think of as essential disappear.

This time requires the resilience of the artisan. Those who relate to the whole of a system, rather than just a tiny vertical slice for which they have been trained, and whose curiosity takes them to second and third order thinking. Those who treat their work as craft, not just labour, and who are not just prepared to change their approach but are hungry to. Those who do work that matters to them for its own sake and who respond to notions of longevity and beauty more than sterile balance sheets.

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The problem with cheap is that it does not allow for constructive and generous responses to mistakes from which learning emerges. A mistake generously responded to builds relationships, whilst ones that are denied destroy them, as corporations from Boeing to The Post Office amply demonstrate.

I suspect we may see history repeating itself. The first phase of the Industrial Revolution resulted in thousands of skilled artisanal weavers losing their jobs to the first generation of power-driven looms worked by cheap labour, mainly children. Within a short period, however, they found themselves re-employed, albeit in fewer numbers, as technology improved and greater demands were made of it, which required the knowledge and experience of skilled weavers to set up and supervise.

Technology is great at reducing costs and increasing capacity in what we already know how to do. It is less effective, though, at identifying or exploring what emerges. That requires imagination, curiosity, and a willingness to try what might not work.

Which is, I think, where we find ourselves now. Those inside the walls want to defend what they know how to do and the position their knowledge gives them.

It won’t work.

Harnessing what is emerging will happen outside the walls, driven by the attitudes and capabilities of those who live outside them - the New Artisans, harnessing what is becoming available to create value by making things that matter, not to make things that don’t matter, cheap.

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Over at Outside the Walls, we are creating spaces to catalyze, nurture, and connect conversations that matter. There are no goals or objectives, just a place to hold uncertainty ready for when its source makes itself known and see it as opportunity rather than threat.

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