I hope you’re enjoying this late spring early summer sunshine. I’m travelling for a couple of weeks, largely sans signal :-), but will be back in a fortnight. Until then, go well.

A Thought

R

Growth is a ravenous beast; all the more so when the growth is demanded by those who don’t have skin in the game. Then it is all about appearances; a convincing story to tell, knowing people won’t check the substance.

It is the mentality and culture of Potemkin villages, something rapidly put together and just convincing enough to fool somebody passing by without stopping to look carefully. People have built entire careers creating corporations that are Potemkin villages, where instead of paint, it is a series of acquisitions and ambitious, if flawed, strategies that beguile the unwary. Caveat emptor: networks of privilege, easy debt, and golden parachutes.

There is something particular about debt incurred without the intention of repaying it. It is not recklessness or malign intent. It is calculation: that the bill will fall due after you have left the building, taken the bonus, and moved on. The debt becomes someone else’s problem. It is the sort of debt that administers the coup de grâce to a wounded company like Denby Pottery, where over two hundred years of craft history is likely to be brought to an end by debt with no accountability.

Finance is not the only sort of debt to be treated this way. It is as true for technical debt as it is for cultural, reputational, or geopolitical debt, and the same logic runs through all four. Borrow against the future. Dress the facade. Keep moving.

What we tend to forget is how old this pattern is, and how deeply it is woven into the fabric of moral life. The anthropologist David Graeber spent a career reminding us that the language of reckoning, redemption, and guilt is not a metaphor borrowed from finance. Finance borrowed it first. In Sanskrit, Hebrew, and Aramaic, the words for debt and guilt were, for centuries, the same word. The person who builds a Potemkin village and moves on before the facade falls is not merely making a financial miscalculation. They are doing something older and darker than that, and we are still fighting these battles without quite knowing it.

Technical debt is not a sign of failure but a fundamental characteristic of how complex systems evolve. It represents the gap between the messy reality of the present and the cleaner standards of the future. Taking on debt is often a strategic necessity: to hit a market window, test a concept, or keep pace with a competitor. The interest is paid in the currency of developer time and system stability. The most resilient organisations treat technical debt as a revolving door. They don’t aim for a perfect, debt-free system, which is often a mirage in a fast-moving industry, but focus instead on sustainable management. By allocating time to repay the principal through refactoring and documentation, they ensure that the cost of past decisions never outweighs their capacity for future innovation. The discipline is not elimination but maintenance: ensuring that the choices made yesterday don’t rob you of the ability to move tomorrow.

The IT estates of many large organisations, seen clearly, bear a closer resemblance to favelas than to planned infrastructure. Not chaotic, exactly. A favela has its own internal logic, its own improvised connections, its own surprising resilience, but the connections are unmapped, the dependencies undocumented, and the whole becomes increasingly difficult to navigate or extend. Each system was a reasonable response to a felt need at the time. Nobody designed the mess. It accumulated, decision by decision, acquisition by acquisition, until the organisation found itself living inside a structure it no longer fully understood. Like a favela, it persists not because it is good but because too much now depends on it, and the cost of removal is too high to contemplate.

Cultural debt accumulates more quietly and compounds more dangerously. It builds whenever an organisation consistently chooses speed, convenience, or appearance over the slower work of building genuine trust, honest communication, and shared understanding. Each shortcut is defensible in the moment, but the aggregate is corrosive over time. This kind of debt lives in the informal register of human obligation, in what people owe each other that cannot be put on a balance sheet or entered into a system. When it is violated, the language that surfaces is not financial; it is moral. The person who knew why a particular decision was made has left. The trust that would have allowed a difficult conversation to happen was never quite established. The habit of working through genuine difficulty together was never developed, so when the crisis arrives, the organisation discovers it does not have the relational reserves it believed it had. What looked like culture was closer to compliance, and what felt like alignment was proximity. Remove the proximity, through a restructure, a departure, or simply the passage of time, and what remains is what was actually there. What is missing is a form of mētis, invisible until it is no longer there.

Reputational debt is, perhaps, the most dangerous of the three organisational forms, because it is the only one that cannot be repaid quietly. Technical debt can be refactored. Cultural debt can be rebuilt through patient, sustained work that requires no announcement and no audience. Reputational debt, once it falls due, plays out in public. The gap between the story an organisation has told about itself and the substance behind it becomes visible simultaneously to everyone: employees, customers, investors, journalists, and regulators.

John Muir, writing about the natural world, observed that when you try to pick out anything by itself, you find it hitched to everything else in the universe. The same is true here. The reputations of organisations are hitched to their cultures, their cultures to their systems, and their systems to the decisions made by people who have long since left the building. When one thread is pulled, others follow. The Potemkin village always depended on the audience keeping its distance and maintaining its speed. Stop, and look at the back of the facade, and the picture changes entirely.

The same logic, extended to its fullest reach, describes what is happening to the structures by which nations and societies hold themselves together. The debt here is not paid in developer hours or damaged brand equity. It is paid in something far heavier: in lives, in the slow erosion of trust between peoples, in the fracturing of alliances that were assumed to be self-sustaining because they had endured for so long. The rules-based international order, the solidarity of democratic alliances, the credibility of institutions built painstakingly after the catastrophes of the twentieth century: all of these required continuous investment in things that rarely appear on any plan. Genuine political will. The willingness to bear costs in the present against future stability. The patient maintenance of relationships that only reveal their value when they are tested.

That investment was deferred, repeatedly and across many administrations and many countries, by people who calculated, not always wrongly in the short term, that the structures would hold without it. The facade was convincing enough, and nobody was stopping to look carefully. Now the reckoning is arriving, not as a choice but as a consequence, and the debt is being paid by people who had no say in its accumulation. This is not just a political observation. It is the same structural pattern, at civilisational scale. The logic of the Potemkin village does not change when the village becomes a world order.

What is genuinely new is not the debt. It is the instruments now doing the looking. For most of the period in which these debts accumulated, the people who incurred them and those who might have exposed them were operating within the same human systems, subject to the same professional courtesies, the same institutional blind spots, and the same quiet incentives not to look too carefully. Auditors who depended on client relationships. Consultants whose next engagement depended on the last one having gone well. Boards that lacked either the time or the technical literacy to interrogate what sat beneath the surface. The facade held not because it was convincing to everyone, but because the people with the means to look carefully rarely had compelling reasons to stop and do so.

That condition is changing faster than most organisations have registered.

Tools like Anthropic’s Mythos, mapping the architecture of a codebase with systematic thoroughness, have no career to protect and no relationship to preserve. They work out what is there and where the fault lines lie. They do not know that the system they are documenting was someone’s defining project, built under pressure in circumstances that felt exceptional at the time. They simply surface the debt, dispassionately and at scale, in a form that is legible to people who previously had no means of seeing it.

Review platforms have done to employer brands what Mythos does to codebases: aggregated honest testimony at scale, anonymously, in a form that persists and is searchable by anyone who cares to look. The gap between the culture described in the recruitment brochure and the culture experienced on the inside was always there; what changed was the instrument. Supply chain mapping tools, increasingly AI-assisted, are doing the same to sustainability claims, tracing the provenance of assertions that were previously unverifiable because nobody could follow the thread all the way back. The story was convincing enough for anyone not to stop to look carefully. The looking is now automated, and it does not tire.

This pattern has historical precedent. Socrates worried, in Plato’s Phaedrus, that writing would create the appearance of knowledge without its substance, that people would seem to know things they had merely read, becoming hearers of many things while learning nothing. The printing press, centuries later, revealed how much institutional authority rested not on genuine legitimacy but on the controlled scarcity of information. Each new capability has a way of exposing what the previous arrangement was quietly depending upon. The current moment is no different in kind, though it may prove to be in scale and speed.

What the instruments are finding, then, is not simply code that needs refactoring. Beneath the technical layer lies cultural debt: the accumulated cost of years of choosing appearance over honest reckoning, of managing an illusion of culture rather than building it, of filling roles rather than developing people. Beneath that, reputational debt: the gap between the story and the substance. And beneath all of it, running deeper than any single organisation or institution, the geopolitical debt: obligations deferred, relationships undermaintained, structures assumed to be permanent that were, all along, dependent on investments that quietly stopped being made.

The Potemkin village always depended on the audience keeping its distance. The instruments we have developed no longer do. There is, increasingly, nowhere to hide.

The question worth sitting with is not whether the debt will be called in; that process has already begun, in ways most organisations and most governments are only just starting to understand. The harder question is whether those now facing the reckoning still possess the capacity that the work of underpinning actually requires: patient, local, judgment-laden, and relational, the kind that cannot be automated, cannot be acquired through a restructure, and cannot be dressed up to look like something it is not.

The instruments we have built may yet prove to be our salvation rather than our nemesis, if only we choose to repay the debts we have built up to those who were given no choice other than to finance them.

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There is something deeply unsettling about discovering that the walls we trusted were never quite solid. Those around us believe in them, so we believe in them too. That particular conspiracy holds together perfectly well until the walls are tested, and they are now being tested to destruction.

What we might be facing is less rearrangement, more revolution.

Last week, I wondered about what we might do as the walls were being rearranged. This week I find myself wondering whether they will not so much be rearranged as disappear entirely and new ones replace them. We have become so preoccupied with artificial intelligence that human intelligence is not getting much of a look-in, and I think we need to change that.

“If we were going to define a revolution? - It’s the replacement of elites.”

Jimmy Carr on the TRIGGERnometry podcast. (recommended watch)

Ideas have their own elites, and create their own self-serving dogma. Elites won’t disappear, but they will change as the old order can no longer cope with the changes they are experiencing. As I write this, Anthropic’s Mythos threatens to enable consequential change much faster than the organisations (and management elites) can adapt.

Which brings me to dark matter.

Cosmologists think the universe is roughly five per cent ordinary matter, twenty-seven per cent dark matter, and sixty-eight per cent dark energy. We can observe the effects of what we cannot see, but we still have only a partial, indirect understanding of what most of the universe actually is. The instruments we have built are very good at measuring the five per cent, but largely silent about everything else.

I think the same is true of us. We know more than we can tell.

We have arrived at a convoluted understanding of human potential, shaped at every turn by whatever partial view of wealth happened to be building the walls at the time. Our instruments, our institutions, our measures of productivity and value, are exquisitely calibrated for the five per cent they were designed to capture. The rest of what makes us individually unique, the curiosity, the judgment, the care, and the capacity for wonder, registers mostly as noise, or not at all.

It is not that we have forgotten how to wonder; our organisations have simply made it something to be done in the scarcity of our own time.

Mark Fisher (1968–2017) was an English writer, cultural and political theorist who argued that contemporary neoliberal capitalism has produced a pervasive sense that no coherent alternative to it can be imagined, with profound effects on culture, education and mental health. He also popularised the use of “hauntology” to describe how contemporary culture is haunted by “lost futures” that late capitalism has foreclosed. It is an evocative description of what I think many of us feel, and offered us the simple truth that to live in the twenty-first century is to have twentieth-century culture on high-definition screens. Better technology, static imagination.

He was pointing at something real: that despite the acceleration of our tools, we have been largely recycling the forms and assumptions of the previous era rather than generating genuinely new ones. The evidence is not just cultural. Measures of financial intermediation suggest that, over the course of the last century, finance grew from roughly two per cent of economic output to around six per cent before the 2008 crisis. We have, in other words, progressively shifted from economies that make things to economies that make money from the stories we tell about things.

Extraction masquerading as growth.

The instruments that drive this are very good at what they do, but they cannot track what is lost in the process: the civic capacity, the craft knowledge, the accumulated mētis of people who knew how to make things work in ways that resisted quantification.

That knowledge did not disappear; it became part of our economic dark matter.

Across history, the source of political power has tracked closely with whatever was scarce and therefore valuable. First land, then trade and industrial capital, then the ownership of information and the channels through which it moved. When digital networks collapsed the cost of producing and distributing information, it stopped being the primary scarcity.

Herbert Simon anticipated this: in a world rich in information, the truly scarce resource is human attention.

That insight became the architecture of the last two decades.

But attention is not the final resting place. As AI systems increasingly filter, summarise, and prioritise on our behalf, the bottleneck shifts again. The question is no longer who controls what you see, but who shapes how you think about what you see. In a world flooded with synthetic content, genuinely novel human experience, verified identity, the capacity to make considered judgments in conditions of uncertainty becomes valuable in ways that visibility alone never can. The next scarcity is not attention. It is cognition and the integrity of the processes by which we form it. Judgement, discretion, experience other qualities that are metric resistant.

It is where the five per cent problem becomes urgent.

The organisations we have built are not designed for this. The majority were designed to be as efficient and fast as possible at turning money into more money. Along the way, remarkable technologies emerged, but money has always been in the driving seat, and the instruments on the dashboard measure what money can see.

Much of our organisational inheritance makes sense when you understand where it came from. For a long time, the central problem was reducing the friction of transaction costs and pooling capital. AI is now taking care of much of what we have conventionally understood as transaction costs, but in doing so, it is not eliminating friction; it is replacing one kind with another.

The friction that remains is not logistical. It is cognitive and emotional. It is the work of not knowing, of sitting with uncertainty long enough to find something genuinely new in it, of making judgments that cannot be validated in advance and for which no algorithm will take responsibility.

That is not a problem technology can solve. It can help us think, structure, surface, and connect, but it cannot do the wondering or the caring. It can write poetry, but not feel its impact on our souls. These qualities remain stubbornly, irreducibly human. And there is a paradox worth sitting with: the technology we are perhaps most afraid of may also be the one most likely to free us from the narrowness of the measuring systems that have kept the other ninety-five per cent invisible.

Capital is agnostic. It has no loyalty to the organisational forms we have built, only to the potential for returns. As AI takes care of the frictions that made those forms necessary, the case for the old structures weakens. What that frees up, if we are paying attention, is space for a different kind of work. Capital does not lead; it is the ultimate, submissive follower.

I have written at about the idea of mētis and of craft, about how the nature of human curiosity grasps and shapes what it doesn’t understand in ways that are not clinical, efficient or immediately productive, but which evoke the human power of curiosity, courage, and love of the unknown.

It is these very human, joyous qualities we are going to need.

Science, and the technology it enables, follow human curiosity and wonder, not the other way round. The capacity to embrace a mystery, hold it long enough to turn it into a heuristic, and eventually into something testable is a sequence that begins in a human being who cares enough to stay with something they did not understand. No model generates that from first principles. It has to be given something to work with.

The emerging work ahead is not technological. It is the harder, slower work of recovering our capability to explore the other ninety-five per cent: wonder, curiosity, courage, the willingness to sit with what we do not know, and the patience to find our way toward what only we can do. Not instead of the technology, but alongside it, and in the places where it can only follow.

The walls are rearranging themselves.

Whether we find that a threat to hide from or an opportunity to shape what we might do differently is a choice we all have to make.

“Walls look like order; but more often than not, a wall stands at the precise fulcrum of an imbalance in society. Most walls are only necessary as a means of defending the resources of those who have them from those who lack them. In this way, though they present themselves as mechanisms of security, they are in fact tools of oppression.”

Nick Hayes, The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

Walls, like borders, are only stories.

There is nothing to stop us from crossing a line or climbing a wall other than the story we tell ourselves about it. The system that says what’s behind the wall is mine, whilst I remain perfectly free to access what is on your side, has been given a veneer of respectability by the idea of a rules-based order, even though access to that order has always been a matter of privilege.

And then, around every ten generations or so, somebody comes along and rearranges the walls. Energetic beginnings harden into complex, affluent systems. Elites consolidate, and once credible institutions lose legitimacy. The system becomes unable to respond creatively to new pressures, and moral entropy goes unnoticed until the brute fact of decay imposes itself, personified by openly corrupt leaders. It feels very much as though we are at the end of the latest experiment.

The question becomes who is going to do the rearranging. Not, one suspects, those currently exercising the outer limits of their power and discovering its futility. When power is built on wealth predicated on a story of perpetual growth, and the growth falters, all that is left is the substance of the cultures we have built.

“Only a crisis -- actual or perceived -- produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.” Milton Friedman

The Ideas Lying Around

The broad question collapses into the same local one: what do we actually do on Monday morning? Where do the ideas come from, and who is tending them?

I have spent the last week working with people whose work matters, and is not measured in quarterly profit but in impact over time. Their stock in trade is relationships, ideas, collaboration, and a win-win perspective. They find themselves operating in a world the obverse of their own values, where rules-based approaches seem to be treated as quaint options, and they find themselves deep in wicked problems initiated by wicked people, which morph in real time into any solution applied to them.

We don’t need to look far to see others like them: teachers, doctors, aid workers, and others for whom the work they do can be measured in love but is valued in money by those with different values and who are a long, comfortable way from the reality on the ground.

The people on the ground are where the ideas we need are lying, even if we cannot see them because those who have them are run ragged by those who only see numbers, and are unwilling to do the hard work of growing and creating when they can just take the results.

The ideas we need will be generative rather than efficient, and unlikely to be seen as productive when viewed through the lens of metrics.

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Goodhart’s Law

Getting to the ideas we need means excavating beneath the frantic obsession with short-term returns.

For a while, measured in financial terms, the relentless pursuit of scale and efficiency seems like a triumph, until it runs out of road. We have become extremely good at squeezing every last ounce of value from existing ideas, and so busy extracting the returns that we forget to grow new ones. And the cognitive muscles we need to do that; reflection, critical thinking, art, philosophy, dialogue and patience, are precisely the ones we have been quietly encouraged to set aside.

We leave fragments of ideas lying around all the time: an insight here, a scribbled thought there, a highlight in a book somewhere else. Creative people tend towards productive untidiness. Diversity improves perspective, and the friction of encountering something or someone unfamiliar takes us down routes of the adjacent possible. I am not sure whether any research has been done on the amount of wasted insight left lying around in tidy, process-driven, carefully measured environments, but if there were, I am confident it would be significant.

And just as God laughs at our plans, so has technology given us tools we can use in ways they were not designed for. It is turning out that AI models built for productivity, efficiency, and cost-cutting, if used thoughtfully, are at least as good at helping us excavate the ideas we need as individuals, as they are at rescuing the tired models of organisations. Not because of what they can generate at scale, but because of what they can surface in small, specific, well-considered conversations.

“I wonder if a single thought that has helped forward the human spirit has ever been conceived or written down in an enormous room.” Kenneth Clark, Civilisation, 1966

I can now gather the highlights I have made across thousands of books and articles, and work with them in ways that are specific to the case in hand, not some generalised case. The abstractions of sector and demographic give way to the specifics of location and context.

AI is like having a kaleidoscope of all the ideas I have ever encountered. A tiny twist of the lens and they fall into a different order, with different connections.

And now I can talk with other people doing the same, enabling half-formed ideas to find their partner, a little like those old films where people identified their contact through the other half of a torn banknote.

The ancient Greeks distinguished three modes of knowledge that map well onto our current predicament. Episteme is the knowledge of universal truths: systematic, demonstrable, transferable; the things you can write in a textbook or encode in a formula. Technē is craft knowledge, the competence of the physician or the carpenter: more situated than episteme, bound to materials and purposes, but still teachable through instruction and imitation. Mētis is the hardest to pin down, and for good reason. It is the embodied intelligence of the sailor reading the wind, the facilitator reading the room, or the firefighter sensing that something is wrong before they can say what. It is knowledge that lives in the body, in accumulated experience, a deep curiosity of their subject, and in pattern recognition below the threshold of articulation. You cannot transmit it cleanly; only cultivate the conditions in which it might develop.

The distinction matters because most of what we call AI capability operates in the register of episteme and the more procedural reaches of technē. It becomes conspicuously thin precisely where mētis begins.

When episteme has become effectively free, and the more routine parts of technē can be outsourced, we have little excuse not to invest our human capabilities in the craft, the creativity, and the connection that grow the mētis that feeds meaningful progress.

“The times are urgent; let us slow down.” African proverb

The deep, reflective, thinking work we need is incompatible with urgency. The problem we often face is that what should be deep work becomes shallow work, done in good enough form to keep the metrics happy, producing ever greater volumes of mediocrity while we wonder why we are not making progress.

I have written here before about the groups that formed during Covid as a short-term space and sanctuary to consider what was going on. They proved so valuable that they are still going and growing. Sometimes I think of it as rewilding the imagination: not deciding what to grow there, but letting what grows naturally emerge and connect.

Whilst metrics-driven organisations are using AI to scrape the bottom of the barrel of existing business processes, we can look for the ideas that are lying around, connect them, and grow them together. It means finding the space and the sanctuary to do so, which, whilst it can be difficult, has never been more necessary.

When you slow down and talk to other people doing the same, it is surprising what appears.

The people who got us here are not the people who will get us to where we want to go. To build the organisations we deserve, we will need to do the work. It is no time to cling to fading organisations better off hospiced.

The current experiment is ending. We need to let it go, and grow new experiments from the ideas we can find lying around.

We can only do it if we find the time to look.

Crawford is right, and not just about the lines drawn between nations. The maps we make of our economies, our organisations, and our technologies are stories we have chosen to tell, presented as though they were simply descriptions of what is.

I have been spending time lately with James Cheshire’s wonderful “The Library of Lost Maps”. It is one of those books you keep nearby, not to read straight through but to open when you need to think. It is full of wonderful passages, including this one from Beryl Markham, writing in 1942:

“Here is your map. Unfold it, follow it, then throw it away if you will. It is only paper, it is only paper and ink but if you think a little, if you pause a moment, you will see that these two things have seldom joined to make a document so modest and yet so full with h…

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I think the real genius of children’s authors is their ability to take the complex and reduce it to its essence, not because children need simplicity - they can work it out for themselves - but because we do.

And given where we find ourselves this morning, anybody who can provide clarity is worth their weight in gold, and it took me to Maurice Sendak and his famous “Where the Wild Things Are”.

If you have children or grandchildren, or even if you were once a child yourself, you will probably be familiar with it:

The night Max wore his wolf suit, he made mischief of one kind and another and was sent to bed without his supper. Lying in the dark, his room began to change. A forest grew. A boat appeared, and he sailed away, in and out of weeks and almost over a year, to the place where the Wild Things are. They roared and gnashed and rolled their terrible eyes. Max stared them down without blinking, and they made him their king. He led the wild rumpus: howling, dancing, a moonlit riot that…

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Whatever our stance on geopolitics, AI, the jobs market, or what is happening in our particular sector, we will find plenty of evidence to support our view. Very little of it will be objective, and a great deal of it will have involved some form of social proof that strengthens our conviction. Whether we think the world is collapsing or standing on the brink of a new dawn, we can find the company and the evidence to reassure us that we are right.

Going with the herd is easy when we are under pressure. We can take refuge in the idea that we are doing the same as everybody else, so we cannot be entirely wrong. The protection of the herd is reassuring, if illusory.

Sometimes, though, we need to do the hard work of withdrawing to a quiet place, and as dispassionately as we can, observe what is actually happening, and reorient ourselves.

I wrote last week about the challenges we face when we allow process to become the point. I think process is a herd activity, and understanding why tells us …

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We fail, not because we play the game badly, but because we become so absorbed in the game we are playing that we cannot see the larger game it is part of.

I am sure I am not alone in finding the current situation surreal; in having the sense that we are already on the slope towards a number of epic fails. An epic fail is not simply losing; it is the progressive collapse of possibility to a single, inescapable outcome, while those involved continue acting as though it has not happened. The dread we feel is not about the outcome itself. It is about the widening gap between the possibility we envisaged and the solidifying reality as we watch companies, governments, and even countries making moves in a game that has already been decided.

Companies cutting workforces on assumptions about what AI will do for them, whilst not knowing how, but afraid to be seen not following the herd. Governments capitulating to populists who offer nothing but blame. Countries squandering decades of reputation…

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Most people think that Cortés burned his ships when he landed in the New World.

What he actually did, I find much more interesting. In July 1519, facing a mutinous crew on an unfamiliar coast, Cortés ordered his ships systematically dismantled. Everything reusable, ropes, cannons, timber, even nails, was salvaged and repurposed. The sailors became soldiers. The hulls were scuttled, with only one ship kept back and sent to Spain carrying letters and treasure to the King, maintaining a single line of communication with the old structure while closing off retreat.

He didn’t destroy capability. He recomposed it, redistributing the resources of an old configuration into a new one suited to the situation he actually faced.

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I refer to a number of sources in this piece, and rather than break up the flow with links, I’ve put them all at the end.

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Going Round in Circles?

There are places precious to us, woven into childhood memory. Their contours, their smells, their textures become part of who we are, and returning decades later to find them transformed into executive estates and industrial parks is a shock, indistinguishable from every other development, with personalities reduced to postcodes. Our ancestors must have felt something similar when enclosure acts turned common land into private property. We become strangers in what once felt familiar.

Now the same thing is happening to our skills and knowledge.

Capabilities we thought were ours, protected by qualifications and professional memberships, are being taken and offered for monthly subscription to anyone willing to pay. This is the price of an education that prioritises answering questions without spending time creating them. Graded responses to approved questions, recognised by certificate. Commodities designed for an industrial economy that no longer exists in the form …

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Serial moral failure stupefies. What would once have been scandal becomes Tuesday, as we grow accustomed not through approval but through exhaustion, the normalisation that occurs when outrage itself becomes too costly to maintain. In politics, business, and in other institutions we once imagined were built on something more durable than expedience, we watch the boundaries shift and wonder when we stopped being surprised.

It is easy to feel weary, bewildered and helpless in the face of this constant stream and forget that what overwhelms us is partly a matter of perspective. Henry David Thoreau reminds us it is not what we look at that matters, but what we see.

And what we see is a discipline. Disciplines are choices we make.

This matters more than it might appear; our attention has become commodity, and there is more profit to be had in threat than reward, and more engagement in division than resolution. We are around twice as sensitive to the possibility of threat as to potential gain…

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Have you ever done that thing where you turn up at a party in fancy dress to find everybody else in dinner suits? Or perhaps the other way round? That’s what it feels like at the moment, talking to a lot of people about the changes that we’re facing, whether the subject is AI, wider technology, the changes in geopolitics, climate change, or quite often an exotic cocktail of all of them.

The conversation about how we must adapt, change our business model, and get new qualifications. Cuddling the comfort blanket, hoping that, if we do, when the current turbulence subsides, we’ll be fine on the other side of it. Then we get to the part of the conversation where we recognise that the things we’ve been used to having as building blocks to create our careers are toast.

That is when the conversation really starts.

Most of the time, these conversations are with people who want to have them but don’t know where to start. The conversations are uncomfortable at first, but people are prepared for th…

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Mark Carney speaking at Davos on Wednesday demonstrated that leadership is not a discipline but a personal practice full of risk, requiring clarity and courage. It was a reminder that politicians with purpose are an inspiration. We could do with more of them.

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Our frog knows the water is boiling. It has a strategy, a plan, even a landing spot identified. So why doesn’t it jump?

Perhaps because, like us, it wants to think it’s wrong; that the water isn’t really that hot and if we concentrate, maybe we can convince ourselves it’s acceptable compared to the uncertainty involved in our strategy. Maybe the water will stop boiling. Maybe….Maybe…Maybe.

It is easy for us to be taken hostage by our fears. We are about twice as sensitive to threat as to reward, and easily persuaded that the threat of the unknown is worse than the discomfort of the present. The organisations we work for, and the companies that sell to us have a vested interest in keeping us hostage, and armies of lawyers to keep us that way, using non competes, digital rights management, and a host of marketers and others skilled in the use of softer, and persuasive methods that promote a version of Stockholm Syndrome, as we identify with our kidnappers. In many respects, it is more tox…

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I think, perhaps, that in many ways we’re all frogs; it’s just the nature of the water that we’re sitting in that is different.

For some, the bubbling that’s going on around them is driven by their concern for making the money they’ve already got work in order that they don’t have to. For others, it’s the drive to make money that they don’t need, because that’s what they think they’re supposed to do. And for others? It’s a matter of staying afloat, and for far too many, just plain survival.

For companies, and increasingly for countries and those who lead them, it’s about recognising that what they’re doing is not sustainable, and doubling down to try to bend to their will what will not be bent, even as they know, deep down, that it is futile over the medium, let alone the long term.

I wrote last week about the idea of frog soup, or more accurately, not becoming frog soup. About being aware enough of the changing temperature of the water in order to jump while we can. That needs us to …

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This is later than I intended. I had a perfectly good post prepared for today, but yesterday’s events made it feel like turning up at a fancy dress party, where the host has spiked the drinks, wearing a dinner suit, during Dry January. Wrong post, wrong place.

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I love this time of year, as we pass through the winter solstice into Christmas and begin a New Year.

It’s a time of ritual and ceremony, setting aside the day-to-day to give full attention to those we love.

I’ll gather my thoughts for the year we’re leaving in a post before the end of the year.

Right now, whether you’re already where you spend your holiday, or travelling there, I wish you a safe, joyous, and wonderful Christmas.

Richard

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Myths create powerful temporary truths. They make the incomprehensible manageable, give shape to uncertainty, and coordinate action across communities. But they are not truth itself; they are signposts towards it, provisional agreements that serve until they don’t.

Max Planck once remarked that new scientific truths don’t replace old ones by convincing established scientists that they were wrong; they do so because proponents of the older theory eventually die, and generations that follow find the new truths and theories to be familiar, obvious even.

We are in a time of new truths and theories, yet we cling to old myths with remarkable tenacity.

Myths Around Metrics

Peter Drucker is alleged to have said that “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” (although, to be fair to the great man, there is no clear evidence that he ever wrote or said it. )

Whether he said it or not, it has become dogma.

There is another view on the record. In “The Tyranny of Metrics”, Jerry Muller shows how a f…

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