The Skills of a New Artisan.

Craft in an age of Technology

One of the hallmarks of artisans is that they use existing skills to sense and create the foundation of new ways of working. Neither the skills nor the tools make them artisans; what they see and bring about does.

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Artisans are constants whose catalytic importance runs in cycles. They have the skills, imagination, and connections to nurture the seeds of the next cycle of development and growth to a point where they can become self-sustaining. At that point, they return to their day job of making what matters in ways that express who they are and what they believe in. Their relationship with scale is momentary - they bring it about but rarely ride it. The abstractions of process and protocol that scale requires have no attraction versus the satisfaction of providing unique and beautifully crafted answers to beautiful questions.

The benefit lent by artisans of the last cycle, crafting technology to meet the challenges of globalisation, is essentially over. Those who brought it about - Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Alan Turing, Linus Torvalds and many others are now memories whose vision is submerged beneath the frantic efforts to wring every last drop of benefit from the products of their creative energy. Investors’ money is going into more of the same, reaching that point of insanity defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

The scale that has resulted has brought its own challenges. As we have stretched supply chains further and thinner, we have made them more vulnerable. Puddles of ignorance, deliberate, strategic, and careless, have formed in the cracks and fissures as we have focused on deliverables and neglected adaptability and resilience in favour of efficiency and productivity.

We have created powerful ways of collecting and analysing data in the belief it will give us answers, only to find that it is excellent at working with what we already know rather than what we need to know, and as it does so, dilutes our ability to understand how it is being done. The artisans turned mysteries into heuristics we could work with, from spreadsheets to graphic processors, only to develop algorithms that have given us new mysteries we choose to ignore.

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I wonder what the new mysteries we need to address now are.

Perhaps we have cycled back to when we needed diviners' skills. In indigenous communities, diviners were those who made sense of conflicts between people and communities, challenges presented by the weather, or unexpected changes. They sat in the middle of the perceived chaos, identified patterns, joined dots and told stories that helped people move forward.

Today instead of village elders, we have Microsoft; instead of chicken bones and tealeaves, we have ChatGPT, and, as with the chicken bones, we are presented with information we have not gathered ourselves. We are presented with signals we are meant to interpret. That is both a skill, and a calling.

Welcome to the New Artisan.

Artisans have always been about relationships in the broadest, most holistic sense. Between facts, as we understand them, people, and the natural world. They exbibit what academics ters “4E” cognition:

1. Embodied: Cognition involves the entire body, not just the brain. The brain and body co-evolved, so cognitive processes are shaped by bodily characteristics, sensory-motor experiences, and actions.

2. Embedded: Cognition is situated within and dependent on the physical and socio-cultural environment. The mind is intertwined with the world, not an isolated entity.

3. Enacted: Cognition emerges through the dynamic interactions between an organism and its environment. Thinking is distributed across brain, body, and world - it arises from action and interaction, not just internal representations.

4. Extended: Cognitive processes can extend beyond the boundaries of the individual to include tools, devices, and other people that we interact with. The environment plays an active role in driving cognitive processes.

Artisans make poor conventional employees because the metronomic nature of measured work to targets does not understand these qualities. Left to their own devices, however, artisans shine.

I think that is what we’re about here. We accept the practical necessity of corporate work, because it is primarily what we are educated and trained for. That does not mean we have to stay there, though.

I don’t know what the precise role of artisans will be in what is emerging now, though I think it likely involves all the elements—meaning, relationships, purpose, contribution, and generosity—that the relentless pursuit of growth removes from “performance” work. These elements are as essential to healthy organisations as laughter is to relationships. It is the lifeblood of the artisan.

If we treat our time with corporations as an apprenticeship, where we can learn valuable skills and gain experience whilst being paid, recognising that there will be a time as inevitable as Autumn when we can take what we have learned and bring the rest of us to the party to do something more meaningful and generous, our time will have been well spent.

ZOOM CALL

I’ll be running a Zoom call at 5:00 p.m. on September 17th with people from Outside the Walls to discuss where we can take these ideas together. It would be great to have you there.