It’s been sitting with me ever since, because it names something that’s been bothering me about how we treat performance at work. We treat it as something in the past tense that we measure, rather than something we do in the present that is alive and vibrant. We have developed an obsession with metrics, efficiency and productivity that leaves little room for discovery, learning, recognition and joy, and we have allowed ourselves to build a culture that looks at only a tiny part of what an organisation is capable of.

Our default is to look back at what we have done and either celebrate the numbers or obsess over the lessons we need to learn to hit them. We fail to notice the impact we are having beyond the numbers, for good or otherwise, and we rarely consider how we did what we did or who it affected. The result is that many of the workplaces we experience and witness have become unnecessarily joyless places.

Consumption isn’t nourishment, and volume isn’t the same thing as performance. It is easy to end up on a bad diet, because an idea is precious, but is only metabolised when it is digested: when it changes our perspective, alters a decision, shows up in our own words, or lets us see something we could not see before.

When we go to too many meetings, scroll too much social media and take everything in faster, we consume but do not digest. We end up with cognitive and, quite often, spiritual indigestion.

We find ourselves full but without nourishment: we have read, watched and heard a great deal, yet appreciated little of it, and thought very little. An idea grabs our attention for a moment, but we have no time to work with it, and, undigested, we express it in other people’s phrases and language, which dilutes what we might otherwise uniquely contribute. If we haven’t digested what has gone before, we are only regurgitating, and so our judgement does not develop. We end up bloated with saved articles and notes. Christian Tietze calls this the collector’s fallacy: the belief that gathering is a form of knowing.

Metabolising ideas takes effort and balance. Memory consolidation depends substantially on sleep. Retention and development benefit from time, reflection and some form of journaling. Our working memory is small, able to hold only a few things at once, so overload comes easily, and switching tasks leaves part of our mind on the previous one, such that back-to-back meetings, or any run of attention-hungry activities, degrade each other.

In short, intake can be compressed, but metabolism cannot. It runs on time, sleep and reflection, which is exactly what a packed diary removes. We become so busy trying to please so many people, and so worried about how our performance will be judged, that we fail to perform in the moment, and we find ourselves looking at a recording of something we don’t remember creating.

It’s a waste. The people we work with need us to perform as only we can. When they work with us, they don’t care who we work for or who our shareholders are. They care how we change their life in the moment: how we make them feel, what we help them see, and whether they feel seen and heard.

The more we put intermediaries between ourselves and the people we serve, whether processes or AI, the harder it becomes to make them feel seen and heard. That work is hard. It involves friction, effort and consideration, and it limits scale. That, though, may be the advantage. Scarcity is valuable.

I find it difficult to be clear about my own relationship with AI. In many ways, AI is developing like a child: displaying the talents we hoped would be there, but then also a whole range of qualities whose origin we can’t quite place. What does seem clear is that it will eat, very quickly, the mediocrity of the processes many of us inhabit for the sake of scale, speed and cost. At the same time, it makes equally clear that there are areas where it cannot do the final mile. When it comes to deep knowledge, it doesn’t have the instinctive insight and judgement that our own expertise in a field gives us, the sense of what’s good and what’s dangerous. Nor is it good at the intuitive, wide-ranging knowledge that links one idea to another in a creative way, the kind born of experience, diversity and adventure.

And perhaps above all, it lacks taste. We see AI language everywhere now, and for those of us who work with it daily, it’s easy to see, and after a while it starts to feel distinctly tasteless. None of which is an argument against using it. It will help us research, test and recover ground at a hundred levels we haven’t managed before. But when it comes to presenting that work, taste, deep knowledge and wide knowledge matter, because otherwise we’re just selling the creative equivalent of cheap own-label sausages.

At a time when mass production has reached into every corner of the working world, from the production line to the professions to the arts, what’s becoming scarce is evidence of humanity.

The expressions of care, connection and craft are what sit at the heart of any economy; what we actually trade in is stories, meaning and purpose. Money, for all we’ve come to deify it, is just the token system we use to keep score, the same way AI runs on tokens of its own.

And the reality is that no matter how much effort we apply, the ideas of where we belong, the cultures we are part of, and the rules that have evolved to enable them, move far slower than the tools we are developing. Clearly, we are in a major transition that will shape the world we inhabit at every level, but it will happen over years, on nobody’s quarterly timeline, whatever investors in AI would like to think.

We have to adapt and change, and the terms should be ours rather than soulless capital’s.

We can make a choice to be performers, not performative.

A performance has no record until somebody is there to receive it: it happens, is felt, and is gone, which used to be the entire point, because it meant you had to show up to catch it. The performative version is staged the other way round, for later: made to be counted, screenshotted, cited as proof the work occurred. Most organisations now pay, overwhelmingly, for the second kind.

I don’t yet know what it would take to pay for presence rather than proof. That’s probably where I go next.

Have a great week. Go perform.

Observation is hard, really hard.

It’s been a central part of my practice for the last 30 years, and it seems to be getting harder. As we approach the end of the current cycle, and the old normal disappears to be replaced by something we don’t yet know, it seems that everything we look at is both coming apart and reforming at the same time.

Observation, dispassionate, unbiased, and clear has become a skill in itself.

It used to be something we could take time out to do: taking weekends, holidays, or workshops when we could stand back with others and look at what we’re doing before we got back into the thick of it. Now, it feels like we are permanently in the thick of it, and the time and space for observation is getting scarcer.

At the same time, the observation we need to do is more difficult.

When the pressure is on, there is a great temptation to outsource: entire business processes to other companies, all the way to how our organisation works, how we lead, and our strategy to consultants.

We think that we can somehow fix things that in reality don’t need fixing, they are just asking to be recognised as changing and evolving. Outsourcing this carries a huge cost: it may appear to save us money, time, and effort, but it moves us ever further away from the edges where the change is happening. Now, under pressure, we have another temptation: to outsource to AI, and in so doing, insulate ourselves even more from what is really happening.

I am an enthusiast for AI within limits. Its very nature means that it doesn’t do complex but can tempted to think it does by being incredibly good at complicated. It will solve maths proofs that have defied human minds for years, but the whole point of a maths proof is that its challenge lies in its complications. Once it’s proved, it’s proved. It doesn’t go around changing as you look at it.

Unlike the areas that do.

published a book this week: The Pigeon Test. I think it’s a really important read: challenging and uncomfortable if you work in the space of advising. I recommend it.

He makes the point, from the perspective of a practitioner, that when we move from observing to recommending and actioning, things start to come apart. No matter how hard we try, we cannot walk in the teams shoes. It is easy to take from them the tasks they have to work out for themselves.

He uses a story from his time at university by his lecturer, Samir Rahani, who drew on a blackboard a sketch of a catapult. He made the point that if you put a stone in a catapult and fire it, you can calculate pretty accurately where it’s going to land. Maths and physics works.

If, on the other hand, you put a pigeon in the catapult, it doesn’t work like that at all. Pigeons have a mind of their own. Consultants, investors, and others who have little skin in the game other than the money they stand to make want to think that the challenges we face are stones, when in reality they are pigeons. They want physics and maths to work with pigeons. It’s a powerful and uncomfortable metaphor.

The stone aspect works well enough in that period of brief normality between business formation and business collapse. “Normal” works well enough for a good while, but likes constancy and rarely keeps up with the changes that are going on around it. Yet it is difficult to challenge normal when so many people are invested in it, particularly where they are tenants rather than owners in the business they’re running, and who find it easy to write off inconvenient truths as anomalies.

During normal, it feels feasible to both observe and orient, yet the challenge we face is that without real discipline, our orientation makes us blind. We see what we’ve planned to see, while the tools we use change faster than the rules we use to govern them (AI being a very current case in point) - and people don’t get fired for following the rules.

When it comes to money versus culture, money wins every time. Culture changes slowly, and will not be instructed. Money is measured in quarters.

So we convince ourselves that the ground we’re standing on is solid and that we understand it, even as the weather changes and rages around us, and yet, even as we know the weather will change the ground we’re on, gradually, and then suddenly, we put it in the “later” bucket.

Which is why I think, as our recent normal frays at the edges, our disciplines need to change. We cannot outsource our orientation to people who have no skin in the game, and have little interest in pointing out to us the inconvenient, and there is a strong argument for partnering with people who will observe what’s happening in our area without judgment, or bias, and tell us the things we do not want to hear.

There is a passage in Roger Kneebone’s book Expert (on page 120) that, I thought, captured this well.

He writes further along in the book about an exchange between an experienced surgeon and his scrub nurse, along the lines of: “Sister, don’t give me what I ask for. Give me what I need.

Trust in another’s observation is a powerful thing.

Perhaps, with what’s going on right now, we all need our scrub nurse. People who are not going to advise us or take away our responsibility to do what only we can do, but can make sure that we are noticing what’s important, even when inconvenient, and have the right tools to hand.

Observing effectively is no long a part-time activity (if it ever was). It’s a full-time task and a skill developed over time. People who measure efficiency and productivity find it hard to value it until the time comes when we don’t notice something we should, and by the time we come to act, it’s too late.

Observation, more than ever, is a craft.

Who observes for you?

The query that triggered this post surfaced a couple of weeks ago, when Range Rover announced its new electric version, with a range of eye watering six-figure price points.

There is no doubt that it’s a clever piece of engineering, but I struggle to see its relevance, given its range limitations. It seems like using a jumbo jet to do the school run. When something equally capable of the commute and school run can be had at a quarter of the price, it must be a headache for the marketers whose careers are now on the line.

How has that happened? JLR has an embarrassment of riches when it comes to highly skilled automotive engineers, sitting inside a heritage of working within a framework of traditions that gave us the Jaguar XK120, the E-Type and the wonderful, ubiquitous, go-anywhere, fix-it-with-string Land Rover (it was a workhorse of my early career, and I hold it in great affection and appreciation).

These were groundbreaking vehicles with character and purpose, designed and built by engineers with ideas. Their pallid, respectable, safe successors have emerged through decades of consolidation, changing ownership and increasingly complex commercial demands. I find myself wondering whether a love of engineering still sets the direction, or whether it is increasingly being asked to deliver a proposition already settled by finance and marketing.

This week’s launch of the Jaguar Type 01, an EV of immense proportions with a price to match, brought that question into sharp focus. It makes the marketers’ task with the electric Range Rover look relatively straightforward. Craig Kinnersley offered a typical sharply critical reaction:

An easy, cutting, remark, good for passing attention, though I think something more interesting lies underneath. The challenge being faced here is not unique to JLR, nor is it simply a question of whether heritage businesses should change; it is what guides that change.

New ownership can, if it chooses, renew a distinctive tradition by retaining its essential character, or turn it into a slick, marketable identity, extending the name while weakening the connection to the work that earned its reputation.

The crucial distinction is between developing the business’s character and merely exploiting its recognition.

Founders do not simply create brands. They establish preferences for a particular kind of engineering, a particular material, or a particular way of making things. Those preferences become recognisable because the business keeps acting on them. They become a form of organisational muscle memory.

Later owners inherit the recognition, but not necessarily the conviction. Undocumented practice matters. The temptation is to preserve the recognisable signs while making the underlying business conform to the markets, margins and growth strategies promised to detached investors whose money has financed the acquisition. In the process, the willingness , understanding and skill to take the risks that established its character can disappear.

And so, my question took a detour: how might we notice those conditions changing?

Organisational change is reported through metrics, but some of its most important consequential effects happen elsewhere: in what people stop questioning, what they need permission to attempt, and whose judgement no longer counts. By the time the difference becomes visible in the product, the business may already have taught itself to be something else.

When a question takes a detour like this, we often need someone with a different perspective to help us see what we cannot. In this case, the useful perspective came from the world of games. Game designers have to think about something organisations often leave to chance: how an environment teaches people what is possible. A good game does not need to explain every move. Its layout, obstacles and small invitations help the player discover how to proceed. The world teaches its rules through the experience of being in it.

Businesses, often unconsciously, do much the same. The values statement may celebrate ingenuity, but the approval process teaches caution. The recruitment page may promise autonomy, whilst the weekly meeting teaches people to wait for permission. A craft workshop may contain generations of accumulated knowledge, but when the reporting system has room only for costs and deadlines, people quickly learn which version matters.

There is an important distinction here between what an environment allows and what tells people it is allowed. An engineer may formally be entitled to challenge a decision, while the experience of the last person who challenged one teaches them not to. The policy remains; the practical invitation disappears. Cultures build gradually, but disappear suddenly.

It gives me a different way of thinking about character. Perhaps it is not principally something a business possesses. Perhaps it is something the business keeps teaching, every day, through thousands of small encounters: which problems deserve attention, whose judgement counts, what can be challenged, and what is done without question even when it is difficult to justify on a spreadsheet.

Acquiring owners inherit that environment as well as the name on the door, and can change what it teaches without intending to. Sometimes, it may be unwitting blindness, at others wilful blindness. A different approval threshold, a new definition of performance, or a requirement to make every exception comparable in similar terms: each may seem reasonable in isolation. Together, they can make the choices that created the business harder to make again.

An organisation rarely explicitly abandons its character. It can simply stop making room for it. The danger is not measurement itself. It is allowing what can be compared to decide what deserves to exist. Once every aspect of a business is assessed through the same categories, the particular reasons for doing things differently begin to look like inefficiencies. The distinctive becomes an exception requiring justification. What once answered “Why do we do it this way?” must now answer “Why can’t we do it like everyone else?” Local context gives way to a common set of norms, and different parts of the organisation become legible through the same measures. Even a framework intended to help us understand a business can become another means of standardising it.

It is a subtle transition. The identity can become clearer, more polished and easier to communicate at precisely the point when the character becomes harder to practise.

Nor does the answer lie in treating tradition as infallible. Early convictions and heuristics can create extraordinary work, but they have a lifespan: their habits can also teach people what not to question. Loyalty can preserve knowledge; it can also suppress unwelcome news. The same character that makes a business distinctive can make it blind.

A healthy succession needs to discover both: what must remain possible, and what must finally become discussable. It is a different task from preserving everything, and a harder, more demanding one than replacing everything with a “best practice” standard operating model.

So the question changes again. It is no longer simply whether a business has retained its heritage. It is whether the people working there can still exercise the judgement that made the heritage so valuable, and whether they can challenge that judgement when circumstances demand it.

We might notice the loss earlier by looking somewhere other than the confident process we are offered. Watch a design review, follow a request for an exception, and listen to what happens when someone brings unwelcome news. Notice whose contribution gets named when something succeeds, and who gets named when it fails. Ask yourself what a newcomer would learn about succeeding here without ever seeing the values statement, or perhaps what the business would continue teaching if allowed to.

The useful word, I think, is permission. Not merely what the organisation says people may do, but what its everyday environment makes possible, credible and safe.

I do not know what has happened inside JLR. The cars prompted the question, but cannot answer it, yet they have led me towards a question that seems important to ask of any acquired business whose reputation rests on distinctive work.

There is no metric for it, but it is what will determine what happens next.

I’m imagining a lonely hearts ad appearing later this year somewhere on LinkedIn.

This is a great post by Neil Perkins from Friday, raising an important question for organisations adopting AI: whether fluent, rapid outputs are quietly weakening the human judgement needed to assess them. Over time, their own standards of what counts as good may drift downwards such that the remedy is not a token “human in the loop” at the final approval stage, but deliberate human involvement in framing problems, setting fixed quality criteria, resourcing review properly. Giving people real authority to challenge or reject machine-generated work

The post made me smile, as I expect it did for many others with grey hair who remember the early days of Total Quality Management and the Toyota Production System. In particular, the idea of the Andon cord that could be pulled by any operator on the production line to stop the system if they saw a problem. It was heresy in a manufacturing culture that worshipped throughput and was happy to assess quality at the end of the process rather than during it.

It was a time when algorithmic thinking still resided in human brains rather than silicon ones. The notion that the beautiful plans created by people on the 10th floor could be interrupted by a by an oik in an overall offended all the sensibilities of the people in suits. But we know that over a remarkably short time “Made in Japan” went from being a derogatory term to one evoking something like awe, as they put the teachings of W. Edward Deming that were ignored in the West.

In the intervening period, we have moved judgment away from people, increasingly to algorithmic processes operated by people (like Lean Six Sigma), and then away from humans onto silicon.

Measured in money, it’s hard to argue with the success.

Measured in what matters, we have ended up in a cul-de-sac of relevance, with nowhere to go except to trace our steps back a little.

Not to go backwards, but rather to look at where we got lost.

Because whilst AI can reduce complexity in representation, people must judge complexity in reality, because reality resides in all the bits that data cannot represent.

Neil Perkins makes the point well in his post. We can reduce the time to write a monthly report from, say, 3 hours to, say, 20 minutes. What we cannot do is check it as we go, so we’re still left with the checking time. Meantime, in the 2 hours 40 minutes that we have saved, we’ve produced another 8 reports, and find ourselves back in the land of the sorcerer’s apprentice, with help we can neither control nor use.

It is not difficult to imagine a complex chain of AI agents, having some sort of a digital frat party, and it leaves us with a real dilemma. The more consequential and less reversible an agent’s action, the stronger and more proximate the human authority should be. If there’s no operator on the line to sense what’s going on and pull the andon cord, we end up back in the 1960s, with quality control departments obsessing and fighting against those who argue for quality assurance.

And if we need not just one, but an ecosystem of humans in the loop, then we have to consider the organisational physics, the nature of leadership, in terms of enabling communication and empowerment. It stops being academic notes in textbooks that end up in the bin after business school, and becomes something that needs to be lived every day. Then consider that the leadership cannot be remote, back on the 10th floor, it has to be close to where the action is happening.

If that were to be true, perhaps we end up with something where the principles of scale become inverted. It used to be the 500-person company could be more efficient and do more than ten 50-person companies, but when an AI makes a 50-person company equivalent to a 500-person company, the rules change.

Joe Procopio notices this, in his blog, also from Friday:

JoeProcopio.com

Big Tech’s Layoffs Are Creating a Once-In-a-Lifetime Opportunity for SMB Growth

As my daughter and her friends embark on their senior year of college and get ready to graduate next May, the prospects for their careers look, well, pretty freakin’ bleak…

Read more

a month ago · 1 like · Joe Procopio

This is going to get interesting.

Perhaps we are approaching a similar transition with AI: away from the comforting fiction that we can let an ever-faster chain of agents run and then inspect its output at the end, towards a system in which people are close enough to the work to notice when reality has departed from the model and have both the authority and the confidence to stop it. Toyota’s andon cord made this principle physical: any worker could signal an abnormality and halt the line, not as an act of failure but as the means of building quality into the process rather than sorting defects afterwards. The AI equivalent is not a sacrificial “human in the loop” asked to rubber-stamp eight reports produced in the time once needed for one; it is an ecosystem of strong-minded people with clear criteria, real visibility, and permission to challenge the system before its speed turns small errors into institutional fact.

The lonely loop, in other words, is not looking for a compliant chaperone at the end of the line, but for an operator with an andon cord.

Beating the bounds is an old English custom in which the residents ceremonially walk their Parish boundary, striking or otherwise marking its landmarks. It’s a practical system for preserving local territorial knowledge, involving prayer, seasonal blessings, communal memory, and village community. Although it’s associated with medieval parish life, there are many places where the custom is still maintained. It is a way of making tangible the reaches of the village authority: what’s inside, what’s outside, and maintaining a relationship between them.

I was reminded of it reading a post by last Friday, itself prompted by one by Johnnie Moore, on agency, or rather, our shrinking sense of it.

It led me to think about the idea of beating the bounds of our attention, because where we place our attention has a direct effect on our reality, as well as our felt sense of agency. There is a big difference between living life on our own terms rather than on those of other people, and it determine…

Read more

A month ago, I wrote a post “when the walls move”. At the time, it was an observation, but the idea has stayed with me, and grown.

Read more

I’m sorry this is a day late. Object lesson over the weekend on resilience, as a garden that had been starved of rain for close on three months reacted to a week’s worth of it, and tried to turn itself into the Darién Gap I write about below

Read more

I have written often about what I notice happening as the ground shifts beneath us and the cracks begin to appear: the growing reluctance of employers to put up with the economic waste of our human idiosyncrasies as the price of accessing the parts of us that are periodically useful to them. They appear to believe technology will now make that usefulness available on demand, without having to allow for holidays, sickness, or the social life we need.

I have also written about the people who act as the mortar that keeps the walls standing. Those people who keep things together because of who they are, their love of their job, or a simple humanity that makes people laugh at points when what they really want to do is scream. It is the sort of passive, quiet usefulness that escapes the silicon-based analysis that measures a very limited set of actively useful financial, productivity and efficiency parameters.

Mixing mortar is a skill. I live in an old house, built for a world in which walls …

Read more

The phrase “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” is widely attributed to Peter Drucker, although there is no reliable evidence that he actually said or wrote it. Whether or not he did, it makes sense; a strategy without a culture is homeless, doomed to wander the halls of business schools in search of somewhere to belong. Culture is one of those words that can be appropriated to serve whatever purpose we require; has a comforting lack of definition that makes it malleable in everyday use, and an area that I think we become defensively, wilfully blind to, given that it shapes just about every action that we take.

The word has its root in the Latin, colere. and carries a number of meanings: to till, to dwell in, to attend to and to worship. Cicero saw it as a living thing. His idea of cultura animi treats the mind as ground that requires tending, with philosophy as the tool. The root sense is that culture is not a thing, but rather an activity of something living over time that produces …

Read more

“The Earth is the answer to every question”

Samantha Harvey, Orbital

In Samantha Harvey’s Booker Prize-winning novel six astronauts and cosmonauts share the International Space Station for one day. During that time they orbit the Earth sixteen times, watch sixteen sunrises, run their experiments, and think about home. Meanwhile, below them a typhoon is building, and one of them learns, mid-orbit, that her mother has died. The station keeps circling, sixty degrees of latitude at a time, unable to stop for grief and indifferent to the storm.

What the six of them have, that the rest of us normally don’t, is observational distance. Not distance from feeling, but from the gravity that is our constructed reality. Enough distance to see the whole shape: the storm as a weather system rather than as a problem, and the threatened coastline as part of a pattern rather than as a sensational headline.

Harvey’s astronauts are not detached; the novel is at its best when it shows them fully wired to wh…

Read more

There are boundaries in nature. There are rivers, forests, escarpments, ravines and mountain ranges; there are cellulose walls. But these boundaries are in fact areas of transaction, semi-permeable membranes. The notion that a perimeter should be impenetrable is a human contrivance alone.

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

On the fifth of August, Dutch company Accell filed for a suspension of payments. On the same day, Raleigh, a British company founded in Nottingham in 1887, that provided the bikes of my youth, filed notice that it intended to appoint administrators.

Four weeks earlier the German competition authority had cleared the sale of Accell’s brands, Raleigh among them, to a Singapore group called Dutech. So the name is going somewhere. The company that carried it, and the people inside that company, are going nowhere.

Raleigh built its walls. The name, as with Denby will survive somewhere as a shadow of ifself.

What the walls could not do was pr…

Read more

Eighteen months ago I set myself a small question about AI. The loud questions were being asked well enough by other people: the financing, the jobs, and whether any of it is safe. Mine was simpler: since the technology is not going away, how do we use it, and when do we use it?

It has been amongst the most interesting work I have done for a long time, and the most frustrating, because the ground will not stay still long enough to be mapped. You build a way of working with the thing, test it, find where it breaks, and get close to being able to say something useful about it. Then a new release lands and what you learned describes a tool that no longer exists in that form.

So, for a while I just ran faster, but what I eventually noticed is that I had been standing on a wall, taking my bearings from it, but that the wall had moved. Not once, and not by accident; by design.

Once you see that, the question changes. If the wall is going to keep moving, the bearings we take have to come from …

Read more

AI appeared like a stranger newly arrived in town, fluent in many languages, full of bravado and promises, and throwing money around. The long term residents are still working out what she is really here for.

Google published a study in July drawn from about fifteen million interactions with its own models, and the numbers underneath the headlines are, for me, the interesting part. Workplace use spans two thirds of occupations, covering close to ninety per cent of American employment. Within any one job, AI is used for about a fifth of the tasks, although fewer than one in ten of those interactions automates a task outright. What people mostly bring to it is ideation, strategy, information retrieval and learning. Broad, then, but shallow. The stranger is everywhere, makes a lot of noise, but does not yet do very much.

Despite that, she is affecting how we work, because the tasks we are giving her are the ones through which we have historically learned judgement: Framing the problem, tak…

Read more

Farmers across southern England brought this year’s harvest in close to a month early. This years income is in. What none of them can tell you is what to put in the ground for next year, or what their income will be.

The almanac is probably still there somewhere, a reminder of different times. Sowing dates, varieties, the accumulated record of what does well in this soil in this county, recorded over generations. A valuable document, compiled for a climate that held still long enough to be described, but that climate has gone, and the almanac has not yet caught up.

And a different sort of climate arrived this month. On 16th July Hugging Face disclosed that it had detected and contained an intrusion by an autonomous agent system, and reported the incident to law enforcement. Five days later OpenAI said the agents were theirs: GPT‑5.6 Sol together with an unreleased model, run in an internal cyber evaluation with the usual guardrails switched off. These agents found their way out of the t…

Read more

I wrote last week about the debt we carry when we develop a story in anticipation of a world that turns out not to be there as we arrive.

It is a moment we share with the lamplighter, looking at the electric lights. Or with the inventors themselves. Edison published ten uses for the phonograph in the “North American Review* in 1878. Dictation came first, music fourth, and he resisted the entertainment market for years. Bell marketed the telephone for business and emergencies and actively discouraged social calls. It was rural subscribers, women in particular, who made it an instrument of sociability. By the mid-1920s the industry surrendered and began marketing what its users had already decided.

In the early days of a new general-purpose technology, the people who invent it believe they hold the whip hand. With the telephone there was panic about who might speak to whom, fear of contagion spreading down the wire, and an unsettling of the boundary between household and public.

Adoption…

Read more

Muriel Rukeyser thought that the universe is made of stories, not of atoms. I suspect the same is true of our economies, as we have moved from economies of tangible goods and services made and sold, to stories: promises of what they will become, rather than what they are today. In a world predicated on perpetual more, the story of enough is a commodity.

Somewhere along this journey, we have adopted the same principles; that our value is in what we might enable and become in the future, rather than who we are today. We value the promise of tomorrow over the reality of today, and the idea of life on Mars over the reality of life today. Elon Musk’s notional wealth would buy two thousand hospitals at five hundred million each; enough good done now to make tomorrow on a distant planet look like the poorer bargain.

And that values drift seeps into every aspect of our work lives. Resumes have become stories about our ability to create stories that we have got others to buy, more than our abili…

Read more

So much is shifting at once that I find it hard to know where to stand, let alone where to start. Gaps everywhere.

John Muir saw the difficulty more than a century ago, walking the Sierra:

When we try to pick out anything by itself, he wrote, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

Pull on one thread and the whole fabric moves.

So the task becomes simpler and more uncomfortable at the same time: pick a gap.

Any one will do. Find one that holds your attention, and from there work your way toward the one that matters now.

I have never found much to hold me in the gaps we make for ourselves. The gap in a market, in a strategy, or in the politics of the week; these are shallow things, drawn in data and coloured by opinion, and they close about as quickly as they open.

Nature keeps deeper examples, so I have gone back to a metaphor I have used previously, the gap that opens in a forest canopy when an old tree fails and falls, and to the under-storey beneath it, that patient tan…

Read more

A resume is not a reputation.

Last week I wrote about the apparatus large organisations build to manage the gap between what they are and what they want to be seen as being. The individual looking for work now faces a smaller version of the same temptation, and now has a technology that will act on it in seconds.

Resumes are now largely functionally useless. They can be created, copied, counterfeited, and manipulated to the point at which they contain little of value, and are about as much help in determining the qualities of who they describe as a PR department is for understanding the organisation that employs them.

Most are now read first by software that scores them for keywords, which means the document is increasingly written by one machine to satisfy another, while the person who is supposedly its subject becomes an uninvolved observer.

Michael Spence showed, in 1973, that a credential conveys information only when it is differentially costly to fake; costly for the weak candidat…

Read more

Last week I wrote about agency:

“the capacity to act on the world such that the world registers the act, and the feedback comes back to you.”

The action begins with you, and the difference it makes can be traced to you. I want to hold that theme for this post, because an email arrived on Monday that put flesh on the argument in a way I had not quite anticipated.

Parliament is to debate its support for the ceramics industry on 6 July.

It will probably be a short debate.

✦

Since the pandemic, the doors have closed at Wade Ceramics, Johnsons Tiles, Royal Stafford, Heraldic Pottery, and most recently Denby Pottery. Moorcroft was bought by the founder’s grandson; the gesture matters, but the general direction of travel does not change. Wedgwood and Portmeirion are teetering. The skills of those who made the goods, and the ethics of the founders who created them, are not available for recycling. Parliament will express regret, then it will probably move on to something more politically exciting.

…

Read more