Source and The Artisan

Something About Originality?

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.

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