Going off the Beaten Path
Recovering abilities we thought we had lost.
In my last post, I said I would turn my attention to how we might unearth the powerful mislaid skills that can guide us when logic, process (and of course AI) leave us with a sense that we’re missing something, and feel the need to explore a “road less travelled”.
The Road to Nowhere
It seems paradoxical that much of our innovation takes us nowhere; it just takes us there faster.
There’s a pattern that repeats whenever we come up with something new. We overdose on its novelty, yet fail to do the work of discovering what it might do that will move us forward, rather than enmesh us in an ageing present. We use it to increase efficiency and productivity of what we already do, and consolidate power.
Transformative technologies face a long, often underestimated gap between invention and meaningful adoption. This delay, sometimes spanning decades or centuries, isn’t due to technical shortcomings alone, but to a complex mix of social inertia, institutional resistance, economic lock-in, and the absence of enabling conditions such as infrastructure, literacy, or cultural readiness. Widespread exploitation only occurs when a catalyst, such as social upheaval, market demand, or complementary innovation, triggers a shift in norms, making the new approach not only possible but also necessary. Innovation, in other words, is not a straight line from idea to impact, but a slow negotiation between possibility and preparedness.
Up to now, however, the gap has been polite enough to span generations, and even as the gap has lessened, it has not overly bothered notions of career. I think that is changing rapidly, and is at the heart of the existential angst I have written about. A combination of hubris, complacency, and arrogance has allowed those in education, the professions, and government to continue as though the past is a reliable guide to the future. It is not, and never has been, but the difference we face is that the changes seem likely to manifest within career spans, rather than across them.
Those entering the workforce today face the prospect of the skills they have so expensively learned being redundant before they are thirty, whilst those in their thirties find the platform they thought they had built burning merrily.
It’s not that the people are irrelevant (anything but, as I will come to), but rather the processes they have learned. The totalisation of, and obsession with, efficiency and productivity has led us to outsource human qualities of embodied, relational, and contemplative intelligence to the equivalent of apps. As we have done so, our organisations have become containers for algorithms, silicon, and processes increasingly devoid of human context.. Organisations are no longer human communities with tools—they are hybrid systems, where technology and process are embedded in their nervous system, logic, and identity.
As these hybrid organisations, focused on shareholder profit delivered in regular, guaranteed, and ever-increasing increments, the tragedy we face is not much different from that faced by Victor Frankenstein. He doesn’t name the Creature; he denies him companionship and then blames the Creature for the violence, without acknowledging his role in shaping it.
The true tragedy of Frankenstein is not the birth of the monster, but the death of relationship.
We are entertaining the prospect of a RoboWars era of competition among hybrid organisations, where humans become components. People are increasingly plug-ins to a larger machine—expected to conform to systems, not question them. Creativity, ambiguity, and dissent become bugs, not features. Judgment is outsourced; decisions are often deferred to systems of logic (e.g., risk matrices, procurement frameworks), even when human context matters. Process Becomes Ideology: Tools and Methodologies (e.g., Lean, Six Sigma, Agile, OKRs) become belief systems; codified, defended, and ritualised. Emotion and Ethics Are Filtered Out. The cyborg’s “skin” is data-driven and cold. Moral judgement, empathy, and tacit knowledge struggle to find a voice.
We find ourselves facing the psychological fallout. People stop questioning or intervening—“the system won’t allow it”. Responsibility is diffused or denied “the policy decided, not me.” Decision-makers feel emotionally and cognitively drained by navigating impersonal systems.
In her iconic observation, Donella Meadows identified twelve leverage points—places to intervene in a system—ranked from least to most effective. While changing parameters like subsidies or standards may offer limited impact, deeper change comes from altering information flows, system goals, and, most powerfully, the underlying mindset or paradigm that shapes the system’s design.
Her insight that small, well-placed shifts in how a system thinks or sees itself can lead to profound, lasting transformation requires that we form relationships that do not depend on what our organisations are becoming, but rather on what we need to move beyond them, onto a road less travelled that takes us to better ways of doing work that matters, that takes us somewhere.
Recovering Mislaid Skills
We must turn off the beaten track of efficiency, productivity, and shareholder value, which shape our organisations and direct our attention to the qualities they lack.
One of the most insidious effects of automation, whether through technology or processes, is a creeping “learned helplessness”. As automation takes what we know how to do, inefficiently maybe, and improves it, we lose touch with the basics. We lose touch with our ability to work with the natural world to shape what we need, and accept the damage done by what we have invented in the hands of others. Our parents and grandparents would be bemused at best, our great-grandparents horrified, at what we have lost touch with, even as we have become notionally wealthier. The price of being able to recognise different birds, or trees, anyone?
We have ceded what enabled us to innovate to what we have created. We haven’t just outsourced tasks, we’ve gradually eroded our felt sense of capability, autonomy, and discernment. In the name of efficiency and scale, we’ve traded mastery for convenience, and in doing so, risk losing access to the very skills that make us adaptive, resilient, and fully human.
The list is long. From our cognitive, interpretive, social, and emotional capabilities to our relational, contextual, practical and manual skills. We have delegated our responsibilities little by little, first to large organisations, and increasingly personal technologies, until we face the prospect of being separated from them altogether.
Recovering them is not a big decision; it is a matter of many small ones.
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate..."
T.S. Eliot. Little GiddingsOver time, we have become used to trading what we have or what we know. The challenge now is that what we know is also known by the systems and technologies we have built. The work we do, as we have defined it, makes us increasingly disposable.
However, what we know has much less value than discovering what we do not. Our future will be shaped by how we work with it - to give life support to a failing system or create something better. If we are to make the many, smaller, better decisions, we need to reconnect with what we have lost. While artificial intelligence may be hogging the limelight, there are three other, more important ones we need to reconnect with.
Firstly, our somatic intelligence. Our bodies are the most significant indicator of how we relate to what is happening around us, whether at work or at home. We may think we can manage them through gym memberships, diet supplements and the rest, and whilst they help, no amount will disguise our inner knowledge that the work we do does not fulfil us.
Secondly, our relational intelligence. There is overwhelming evidence that small, self-selecting groups are more effective, creative and resilient than large ones. We become the average of the five people we most associate with. Forcing us into larger “more efficient” groups is like trying to scale up a Michelin-starred meal into a mass-market ready meal: the chemistry doesn’t work.
Then, there is our contemplative intelligence.
Quite simply, the time to “stand and stare”, individually and collectively.
Leisure by William Henry Davies What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare. No time to stand beneath the boughs And stare as long as sheep or cows. No time to see, when woods we pass, Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass. No time to see, in broad daylight, Streams full of stars, like skies at night. No time to turn at Beauty's glance, And watch her feet, how they can dance. No time to wait till her mouth can Enrich that smile her eyes began. A poor life this if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare.
It is this last element that is the key to regaining the first two. Many of those reading this post know this - we have been sharing space to “stand and stare” unburdened by goals, objectives or “desired outcomes” for over five years, and understand just how powerful it is in bringing what we need to the surface, from shared uncertainties to half-formed ideas. There are hundreds, probably thousands, of books and courses on how to capitalise on somatic and relational capital. Very few of them achieve very much beyond temporary celebrity.
Much of what we need falls into the “unknown known” category, lost through lack use, rather than lack. We can resurface them, as long as we are patient with ourselves, and others. What we haven't been using are like long-lost friends: we need time to get to know them again and catch up on what we‘ve missed.
We need time without the burden of expectation. No goals, objectives or timescales, just pleasure in the company of what we have forgotten; the joys of just noticing, of curiosity and play. Creating the space for what needs to emerge to show itself, and point us in the direction we need to go. We need community.
Progress requires people committed to one another and their communities.
Unless we are grounded in community, physical or virtual, where we can play and experiment, goals are no more than carrying someone else’s burden.
In my next post, I’ll dig a little deeper into how we might do that. How we might embrace “unknown knowns” and marry them to an appreciation of the power of developing a healthy relationship with ignorance to move us forward
In the meantime, I was struck by this post from
and her reminder of Da Vinci’s approach. I’ll develop it more in my next post.
I read "road to nowhere" as "road to now here":)
Maybe my dyslexia playing up or I picked up something from beyond the mind ...