I find there is something frantic about the dominant narrative at the moment, as though we're not quite sure what to be worried about first.
For the sake of somewhere to start, I've been looking at things through the eyes of artisans and the nature of craft. I get the impression we're so busy producing stuff that we are less concerned about the nature of the stuff we are producing.
In my "Outside the Walls" post on Sunday, I outlined Nassim Nicholas Taleb's view of Artisans. If those of you who have already read it will bear with me, I think it warrants repetition.
Anything you do to optimize your work, cut some corners, or squeeze more “efficiency” out of it (and out of your life) will eventually make you dislike it. Artisans have their soul in the game. First, artisans do things for existential reasons first, financial and commercial ones later. Their decision making is never fully financial, but it remains financial. Second, they have some type of “art” in their profession; they stay away from most aspects of industrialization; they combine art and business. Third, they put some soul in their work: they would not sell something defective or even of compromised quality because it hurts their pride. Finally, they have sacred taboos, things they would not do even if it markedly increased profitability.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Skin in the Game. p34.
There is a reason most artisans are self-employed. For all the words that have been written, the printers posted, and the podium speeches made, I cannot think of a single company or organisation that aspires to the excellence that motivates artisans.
They may well want to be better than the rest of their competition on what they can measure, but if the rest of the pack is mediocre, they are happy to be only a bit better than mediocre, not excellent.
During a conversation over the weekend, the topic of mediocrity arose. Out of curiosity, I looked up the etymology of “mediocre” and found it instructive.
MEDIOCRE. 1580s, "of moderate degree or quality, neither good nor bad," from French médiocre (16c.), from Latin mediocris "of middling height or state, moderate. from medius "middle" + ocris "jagged mountain". Etymonline.
I considered the relationship between the artisan and business, mediocrity, and excellence. My climbing friends tell me, “The summit is optional”. Achieving the summit may feel glorious—but true wisdom lies in navigating the descent safely. Don’t make the climb if you don’t have a clear way back. Statistics show that nearly 30% of Everest deaths happen on the way down.
Mediocrity carries a heavy price when it overreaches itself. A quick examination of the financial pages reveals that in many companies, substantial bonuses are awarded to those who stay at base camp and bask in reflected glory rather than actually risk the summit, when there are plenty of disposable heroes who will do that.
Which brings me to AI. There are many aspiring for the summit, but I’m less sure about those who know how to get back down if the economic weather turns against them. The prevailing narrative at the moment centres on cost and job replacement, and tinkering at the edges of familiar business models, rather than considering the power of AI to transform entire systems.
Donella Meadows’ wisdom in her Places to Intervene in a System is quietly ignored:
She teaches that not all leverage points in a system are equal: pushing harder on obvious areas like numbers, buffers, and feedback loops often has limited effect, while deeper change comes from shifting information flows, rules, goals, and—most powerfully—the underlying mindset or paradigm from which the system arises. The paradox is that the most effective leverage points (changing paradigms or transcending them) are also the least intuitive and hardest to act upon, whereas the more obvious ones (tweaking parameters) feel accessible but rarely shift outcomes in a lasting way.
We face an interesting challenge. The direction of travel of the culture in many tech-enabled businesses, and those who copy them, is towards what Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification” In his words, platforms “first are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.” The result is a predictable decline in quality and trust, and that sort of deficit takes a long time to repair, if it can be at all.
The second is that AI is entirely promiscuous and amoral - it amplifies the intent of the user based on the data it has been trained on. Enshittification, in MBA language, can be considered “Best Practice”. The Intelligence in AI is not of the emotional variety.
The question we face, then, as artisans, for whom excellence is something intrinsic more than economic, is how we behave when economic necessity finds us working in organisations pursuing short-term performance. What do we do when mediocrity is accepted and excellence is an unjustifiable cost?
Avalanches Don’t Move Uphill.
We know things are going to get “interesting” probably in the near future; we just don't know quite what will happen. What we do know is that it will affect us, even if we don’t know quite how. The choice we have to make is the nature of our relationship with the avalanche that is coming.
“Identifying who began something like this is like picking out the stone that began an avalanche. It began somewhere, true enough [...] but once it well and truly begins, we are all just stones moving together. One stone rolling down a mountain changes nothing unless others move with it.”
―Shane Arbuthnott, Terra Nova
Huddling together in the warmth of a quiet conspiracy of mediocrity feels sensible. The herd is comforting. Going for the summit is fraught with risk, and who wants glory anyway? The challenge, though, is not to reach the summit.
It’s to be above the avalanche when it starts.
When organisations increasingly reward rapid "good enough", while AI democratises basic competence. We are heading to a point where, if they haven’t already, those lines will cross, making mediocrity automatic, and our work will be determined by data rather than knowledge, creativity, and passion.
Avoiding the mediocrity trap and getting above the avalanche means developing excellence at the edges of our adjacent possible, a term first coined by theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman in the 1990s. He introduced it in the context of evolutionary biology to describe how, at any given moment, living systems can only move into states that are one step away from their current reality—what is “adjacent” to what already exists—rather than leaping into entirely unconnected possibilities.
For us, those spaces just beyond, but adjacent to, our current capabilities are where new opportunities and where we can do our best work coincide. The challenge is that those spaces are often “out of bounds” in businesses content with mediocrity. When mediocrity, even at a higher level, is ubiquitous, then differentiation moves up a level. towards excellence, and AI, on its own, doesn’t do excellence.
Excellence is the adjacent possible. It is that space we must occupy.
Starting this month, I’m turning my attention to how such a space might be created and how we can move the narrative here on New Artisans and at Outside the Walls from observation to orientation and action. What does excellence mean in the age of AI?
It will involve spending time with Heretics - some familiar, some new, and with Claude, who I find very adept as a challenging partner.
Here’s what is on my desk at a starter:
Incerto Nassim Nicholas Taleb. From Black Swans to Skin in the Game.
Reshuffle. Sangeet Paul Choudhary. (HT to
). The Real Impact of AI.Against Method - An Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge. Paul Feyerabend. What do we do when conventional Knowledge becomes a Prison.
Serendipity. David Cleevely. Encouraging Good Accidents.
The Chaos Imperative. Ori Brafman / Judith Pollack. Containing chaos to give disruption the space to flourish, generating new ideas that trigger serendipity.
Radical Uncertainty. Mervyn King / John Kay. When uncertainty surrounds us and the facts are unclear, how can we make informed decisions?
Over the next month, I'm exploring how people who understand this can work together at the edges of change, not trying to fix broken systems but building the adjacent possible where new forms of meaningful work can emerge. If you're ready to explore your adjacent possible for excellence, follow along as I work through these questions.
“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Watch your step.”
―ao Tzu
A number of thoughts come to my mind:
What is "excellence"? What is "mediocrity"? What is "quality"? You speak of all of them, but they are all multidimensionsal, and very interpretable:
Excellence: Is that to feel what one does is "good enough" to have a self-image of being excellent? Is it to be regarded by others as "excellent"? By many others, or by selected others?
Mediocrity: If that is a "good enough", or "moderate" level of quality, what does that mean? Who determines the quality of something? Commercial success? The esteem of others? My own perception? Can something be of moderate quality, but still be unique? Is uniqueness automatically a sign of higher quality?
Quality: Like excellence: Who determines that? If something is high quality terms of its craftmanship, we still may not consider it excellent, like an artisanic atom bomb, an impressively crafted machine gun.
Related: What does it mean to "master a domain", as you sometimes ask? Is that the same as excellence? Different? To be a master, do I need to compare myself to others, to non-masters? Can I master a domain without that comparison?
I think Nassim Taleb nails it: Artisans have their soul in the game. They produce for intrinsic motivations first. How is that related to excellence, quality and mediocrity? If I create an artifact that has a practical use, say a bottle opener, and I hand-craft it, does that make it "excellent"? If I add some unique elements, like colors or similar, does that prevent it from being "mediocre"? If I have my soul in the game, and if it is the "best" (by my own standards!) bottle opener I have ever crafted, and I am deeply satisfied, maybe because the person I gifted it to values it, what does that say about my mastery of the domain? About its quality? Its excellence? In which contexts are these meaningful categories?
I think it can become difficult to hunt for excellence without defining it further. I personally am always careful about that, careful about the comparing. I think we have deep emotional drivers for comparing ourselves to others, or to some ideals, and there are very many occasions where such comparisons have derailed, developed a life of their own, led to a narrowing in terms of the dimensions in which we compare (case in point: money only in the economy?). Care should be taken here.
To use your avalanche metaphor: Yes, I am convinced an avalanche, or a series of them, is coming. Should I try to get to high ground, to be above it, maybe with too little air? Or should I better reframe, and be outside its path (to the extent that is possible)?
I agree very much with the thinking about the "adjacent possible". AI may be good to help with identifying the adjacent possibles. So are human thought partners, especially heretics. What the "forward possible" is, the one we should consider our direction, is then the choice we personally need to make (and not ever delegate, however unpleasant the decision may feel!). What should guide us in that choice is likely our intrinsic motivation, which may be "excellence", in whichever way we define it, or something else?