Hay in the Barn
Hay in the Barn
The nature of artisanal wealth in uncertain times
“Hay in the barn is worth more than money in the bank’
Farming Wisdom
The aphorism above appeared in a conversation at the end of last week, courtesy of Andy Adler, and it has stuck with me like “beggar tick” seeds stuck to clothing. There was something about it: a prompt awaiting a response. Something more than the logic that when it comes to it, you cannot feed animals on bank statements, and if what you need is not there to buy, money is useless.
The answer dawned during dinner with a colleague who occupies the upper reaches of project consultancy, running “transformation’ projects that run into eight figures. The biggest challenge with transformation projects is a ready supply of people willing to be transformed.
People who will engage in changing a business are hay in the barn. Budgets are just money in the bank. Money on its own changes nothing.
Most of our jobs are leasehold; we hold them only at our landlord’s pleasure and can be served notice at any time. If our role in creating value is little more than turning the handle of the business machine, without the machine, we are well and truly stuck.
As Artisans, our “hay in the barn” is a skill, a craft we can apply on our own without having to turn the handle of someone else’s machine. The ability to earn a living without someone else’s permission.
It feels particularly resonant on a day that has witnessed an increase in unemployment and more people, particularly young people, classified as “economically inactive” (I so hate that term, as though somehow our value is determined by our economic contribution). Anecdotally, it seems as though there is a sharp increase in what I can only see as speculative redundancies; in effect, selling the hay in the barn in order to keep the money in the bank. (Also interesting to note that today sees the publication of a KPMG report that supports this observation, showing real declines in venture capital activity to a five-year low. Hardly inspiring)
It has often been observed that the social importance of a job—from nurses and teachers to those who grow our food and empty our bins—is inversely proportional to the amount of money one can earn doing it. Yet they are the hay in our community barns.
I wonder about those for whom money in the bank is more important than hay in the barn. Those who think value is created by offering ever more complicated and fragile ways to do something simply because it saves us a few moments we can invest in social media.
As I write this, I have a colleague who is wrestling with commenting on a simple document created on a complex project management app, capable of Gantt charts and automated project dependencies, that could have been done more effectively and faster on Excel or probably Word. The skill is in understanding the gaps in the sequence, and there is no value in complication yet; somewhere, complication has found its way in. No more hay will be gathered as a result of it.
To continue the bucolic theme, I think there is an important point here. The distance between understanding something and just doing it is increasing. We are increasingly able to do things we do not understand. At the moment, those using AI to automate the drudge tasks can mostly do the drudge tasks if required, but in the pursuit of money in the bank, within less than a generation, we will have people who cannot. We will have more money in the bank but less hay in the barn.
Innovation will become an exercise in logic and efficiency rather than a place where craft meets insight to create something new, and we will accelerate into incremental mediocrity.
We seem to be blindly doing to our skills base what we have done to our crop base - reducing diversity in favour of a handful of varieties that trade resilience for chemically dependent yield and efficiency:
“From the agroecological farmer’s perspective, modern wheats don’t grow well in a low-input, organic system; quite simply, they’re designed for a different growing system that is reliant on external inputs. “Organic farmers don’t have access to or want to use these chemicals,” Andy explains. But they also don’t have access to wheats that don’t need these inputs or that are suited to their local climate.”
Even our debate on the topic is traduced by technology designed to make us more efficient. As I write this, Grammarly is working frantically to get me to change words it does not recognise. It seems to have been recruited by some forces that have reduced our vocabulary from more than a million words to about 170,000 words in current use and about 20,000-30,000 words used by each individual person.
Are we starting to speak in algorithms?
Very recently, an entirely different concept of SMS language has also emerged where the usage of these abbreviations is extensive and normal. These terms include using shorter abbreviations for referring to any terms' full name, such as using 'Tc' instead of 'take care' or 'btw' in place of 'by the way'. Another example is the term 'okay', which was first replaced by 'ok', and now mostly just 'k' is used in place of 'okay'.
International Journal of Social Science And Human Research ISSN(print): 2644-0679, ISSN(online): 2644-0695 Volume 06 Issue 04 April 2023
As artisans, our value is as “hay in the barn” rather than mere sources of “money in the bank”.
We need to understand, value, grow, and protect what it is in the way that we do, think, connect, and create, which cannot be replicated by technology or sterile processes.
We seem to blindly be doing to our skills based what we have done to our crop base. Good line. Do we still have Diversity of jobs however we have lost diversity of attitude? We have lost the mavericks who take risks?
I shared Andy’s aphorism with one of my sons. His response was “POSIWID!” I said, “what’s that?”
“Purpose of a system is what it does.”
Having hay in the barn is the purpose of the farm. The purpose of a management system is to <…>. The purpose of a government is to<…>.
As we talked about this Richard, we decided that conversation is THE hay in the barn that we need right now. It feeds our curiosity, nourishes our minds, energizes is for work, unites us in purpose, and helps us to see what we must do.