There is a historical rhyme to this. When electric motors first reached factories, owners pulled out the steam engine, set a dynamo in its place, and changed nothing else: the central shaft, the drive belts, and the building linked to one source of power. For about thirty years the productivity gains barely showed. They arrived only when someone stopped treating the motor as a better engine and saw it as a different principle, a motor on each machine, the whole floor rebuilt around the flow of the work. The constraint was the old grammar laid over the new power, and it held for a generation.

We are all of us in the latest iteration of that factory now, holding a new kind of power against the layout of an old career.

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Two things are moving and compounding. The first is the fate of the organisations most of us trained to serve. Hagel and Singer argued, a quarter of a century ago, that every corporation is three businesses with incompatible economics bundled into one, held together because the cost of coordinating them apart was too high to bear. When that coordination cost falls, the bundle comes apart, and the part most exposed is the abstraction in the middle, the layer whose product was managing a complexity that is now cheap to manage. Most professional careers were built to staff exactly that layer. We learned to coordinate, to standardise, to hold the abstract picture from the centre, and it was valuable precisely while coordination was dear. That cost is now falling through the floor.

The second thing moving is the purchase of what we know. There is lazy talk of a “half-life of skills”, with figures that shrink each time they are repeated, five years, then two, then a few weeks. Those numbers served a purpose: to draw attention to the originator rather than the evidence. They come off keynote slides more than out of study, and they tend to cite one another in a reinforcing, emotive circle. The real version is duller but of more use to us: foundational understanding does not so much decay as need re-applying in new ground, while the fast obsolescence falls on the specific and the tool-bound. What expires quickly is the technique; what lasts is the judgement underneath it, on the condition that we keep moving it into work we have not done before.

Put the two together and the bind is clear. We were trained for the layer that is thinning, in the techniques that date soonest; the diligence that built our careers is now part of the problem of sustaining them.

The reflex is to reskill, to acquire the next defined competence and bolt it on, and it works, up to a point, but carries two dangers. The first is that a credential earned against a moving target is subject to the same clock as the obsolescence of the system it was trained on, so we must run to stay in place. The second is quieter, and worse. Hard-won expertise is sunk commitment. The more completely we have mastered a way of working, the more it costs us to admit the ground has shifted, because our fluency is invested in the old map. The expert’s mind, as the Zen teaching has it, holds few possibilities where the beginner’s holds many. An organisation discovers this the hard way, tilting always toward refining what it already does and away from the search for what it does not yet know how to do; a career does the same, and the better the career, the stronger the tilt.

A further trap waits for the diligent reskiller into AI. If everyone retrains into the same machine-shaped competence, prompting the same tools in the same way, the work converges. The early evidence is that people given the same assistance produce output that is more polished, yet more alike, individually lifted and collectively flattened. Reskilling into the common competence buys entry to a crowd that differentiates from no one, and we become kitchen hands rather than chefs.

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The attitudes and dispositions that survives this are older than the problem, and the word we have for it has gone soft through misuse. To be a beginner is treated as a deficiency, a stage to be left behind as fast as decency allows. The craft tradition, though, held it differently. The journeyman was so called because they travelled, moving from workshop to workshop to keep meeting work they had not done before; mastery was a standing that made the next beginning richer, the opening of better learning rather than its close.

Pye’s distinction between the workmanship of risk and the workmanship of certainty names it exactly. Certain work runs to a result fixed before the first cut; risk work is held in the balance by the maker’s judgement at every moment. A career run as the workmanship of certainty, a fixed competence executed to a known standard, is the one the machine reprices to nothing. A career run as the workmanship of risk keeps its worth, because the judgement is re-made each time against new material.

None of this means abandoning expertise to begin from nothing, which would be its own foolishness; the master who can begin again is worth more than the novice who has only ever begun. Depth is what makes a good beginning possible, the stock of judgement we are willing to put back at risk. Beginning, in this sense, is the practice of re-opening what we know to what we do not; it is the opposite of starting from scratch. Boyd called the live part of this orientation, the readiness to re-form our picture of the world rather than run a fast loop against a stale one. The constant beginner keeps that step open. The expert who has stopped beginning runs beautifully and arrives at the wrong place.

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A caution, because the same words can be a liberation or a sentence, and which one depends on who is saying them to whom. “Always be learning, always adapt”, in the mouth of an employer who has decided the worker should carry all the risk of change, becomes precarity with a motivational caption.

To become a constant beginner with agency is something we must choose and hold, on a foundation deep enough to begin well from, and best of all in company, in a small group where we can begin alongside others rather than alone and afraid. The difference is partly a matter of power, and partly a matter of where we choose to stand: at the thinning middle, or at one of the ends where something gets made that the machine cannot make for us.

I am left with a question I am holding at The Athanor. We know how to train people for competence, and the institutions for it are everywhere, even as their product dates. We are far less sure how to cultivate the attitude and disposition to keep beginning, where we are supposed to do it, or who carries the cost while we do. If the durable thing is the capacity to re-open what we know, then the work ahead is not another programme, course or curriculum.

It is working out what kind of place we need to be a beginner again without first having to lose everything.

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Five miles east of me, eight metres below the surface of a Derby street, runs a brick-arched Victorian sewer that has been carrying the contents of those houses since the 1860s. A small number of engineers can tell you, with reasonable accuracy, what condition it is in. None of them sits in the rooms where decisions are taken about how much money it might receive over the next thirty years.

Those rooms are in Toronto, Sydney, Riyadh, and the City of London. The people in them have never seen the sewer, and will never see it because the sewer exists for them as a row of figures on the regulated asset base of a privatised utility. Between the engineer who knows the pipe and the analyst who allocates the money, the formal apparatus of British water provision runs sixteen separate companies, a sequence of regulators that is shortly to be merged into one, an investment cycle that turns on five-year price reviews, and a debt structure that the National Audit Office has not yet finished mapping.

As complexity chokes communication, somewhere along that chain, the necessary stops being reachable from the possible.

This is not a story about water alone; it is one of the clearest visible cases of a wider predicament. posted a powerful graphic on his blog, that mapped the issue beautifully:

The water sector is the gap made tangible. The necessary is uncontested and physical; clean water and functioning sewerage for seventy million people, infrastructure renewed at a rate that keeps up with climate stress, and rivers that can sustain the life forms native to them. The perceived possible is contested but visible; more debt loading by the current owners, bills rising thirty per cent over five years, a regulatory reset that may or may not be substantive, and an industry stumbling between insolvencies.

The easy temptation in a moment like this is to name the missing pieces and demand more of them. The public narrative names money, regulation, and technology. Bills must rise so the money is available; the regulator must be replaced so the rules are enforced, and new technology must be deployed so the leaks are fixed. All three of these are true; but none of them, by themselves, will close the gap.

A river of money has flowed through this sector for thirty-five years. Roughly one hundred and ninety billion pounds of capital expenditure since privatisation; eighty-three billion in dividends; and sector debt at nearly seventy billion against an asset base of similar order. The copious flow has not produced the renewal it was supposed to. Regulation has been re-engineered repeatedly, and is being re-engineered again, with Ofwat now being merged into a new super-regulator on the recommendation of Sir Jon Cunliffe’s recent review. Each iteration has reconfigured the apparatus and left the substantive problem largely where it was.

Deckchairs and Titanic spring to mind.

Technology is more advanced and more widely deployed than at any point in the sector’s history, and yet the sewage discharges into the our rivers and elsewhere continue to rise, as people in Kent long for something as basic as a shower.

The gap between necessary and possible is not where the public discourse looks for it. It is somewhere else.

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A pipe in the ground is a piece of physical knowledge, just as a pension fund is a piece of financial knowledge. A river ecology is a piece of biological knowledge, a regulator is a piece of legal and administrative knowledge, and a community living beside an outfall is a piece of social and political knowledge.

These five registers cannot be added together by any formal apparatus; they are not commensurable. The work of holding them in productive relationship is interstitial; it sits between the registers rather than inside any of them, and it cannot be done by an institution. It can only be done by a person or small group of people, formed and motivated by something more than money, in such a way that they can hold the interface and translate across it.

Stewarding is not a job title; it is a sense of social responsibility. Stewards already exist in the water sector, in small numbers: the river warden who has read both the catchment and the financial accounts of the company discharging into it; the engineer who has done a decade with the operator and now sits across the table from the regulator; and the campaigner who has learned the regulated asset base inside out. Each of these is holding an interface no institution can hold, and without them, the sector’s formal apparatus runs on uncorrected error. With them, even imperfect apparatus carries more than it would otherwise.

The gap between necessary and possible is, in part, the gap between the number of Stewards the sector has and the number it needs. It is a structural observation, not a sentimental one.

The mathematics of networks is unambiguous. In any network under stress, the binding constraint is rarely the count of available connections; it is the width of the bridges across the gaps that the connections nominally span. A narrow bridge will carry facts; only a wide bridge will carry trust, behaviour, complex coordination, the kind of work that allows a difficult decision to land and stick. Bridges are widened by people, by the trust those people engender, and by the time they have spent holding the same interface across the same gap. There is no apparatus shortcut.

Set out in those terms, it sounds like a bad thing, and it would be, except for one thing. The thing that has just changed.

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A small group of people with AI can hold interfaces that previously required institutional scale, and is a structural observation about communication complexity. Most of what an institution does is coordinate, and most of the cost of coordination is in the carriage of context across the institution’s boundaries. AI now carries an order of magnitude more of that context, per unit of human attention, than was possible five years ago. Institutions remain necessary; they remain the vessels in which most work is held, but they are aged and brittle, relying on those steeped in a world of status and privilege. What has changed is that small groups, close to the reality of the sector and working at the interfaces that institutions cannot see, can now do work at a scale and quality that was previously closed to them.

Consider what this means concretely for a Steward working in the water sector. Last year, a single person could read perhaps three regulatory submissions in depth in the time it took to brief a board. This year, the same person can read all eighty-eight Cunliffe recommendations against the operating accounts of three companies and the discharge data for five catchments, and present the synthesis in the same meeting. The marginal cost of holding a wider bridge has fallen sharply, whilst the marginal value of holding it has risen, because the wider the bridge, the more of the necessary it can carry across.

The water sector already contains early versions of what this looks like. Citizen-science groups have been mapping pollution events in real time, with data quality that has begun to be admissible in regulatory proceedings. River trusts have been holding the interface between catchment ecology and the planning system in ways that the formal regulator could not, and small advisory firms have been carrying the interface between long-horizon capital and the engineering of the underlying assets, brokering positions that the conventional advisory market is not configured to support.

None of these is large in headcount; yet each of them is a bridge far wider than its size would predict. With AI, that disproportion is about to become structural rather than exceptional. The river trust that could brief a minister last year can brief a select committee, an investor consortium, and a regional planning authority this year, on the same morning, with the same depth.

What is true of water is, in less visible form, true elsewhere. The same pattern appears in social care, the prison estate, primary care, local journalism, food systems, and regional energy. In each case, the formal apparatus has run for a long time on uncorrected error by those who see numbers and reports but not reality. The binding constraint we face is the supply of Stewards; as the new asymmetry between small groups and large institutions is rebalancing in the small group’s favour. The water sector is, for the moment, the sector where this is most clearly legible, because the consequences of the uncorrected error reach the reader of the morning newspaper.

The headlines are still about money, regulation, and technology. The headlines will catch up. What is visible to anyone willing to look is that the most consequential work in a number of stressed sectors is now being done by small groups who would, under the old asymmetry, have been unable to carry it.

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’s graphic describes the gap, and the volatility inside it accurately. Its catalytic response is the set of seven elements that would, in combination, build an arc from the necessary to the possible. The map is right about the components. Seven elements cannot reach each other across the holes between them. They can only be carried into productive relationship by people who hold the interfaces those holes contain, working in small groups, supported by the bridge-widening that AI now provides.

The current moment is not the moment of resignation that the volatility section of the map might suggest. It is the first moment in modern industrial history in which the binding constraint on closing the gap has become amenable to deliberate work at the scale at which the work is needed by those doing it.

Money is downstream of bridge width. So is regulation. So is technology. The bridge is the thing.

The water sector will, over the next five years, be one of the visible tests of whether the deliberate work of widening bridges happens at the pace the necessary requires. Whether it happens depends, in turn, on whether enough small groups recognise what they are now equipped to do, and act on the recognition.

And what is true for water is true for just about every institution. We can only hope that we can have organisations run by those who understand those they serve, rather than those who understand only money.

In The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway has one of his characters asked how he went bankrupt. His answer?: Gradually, then suddenly.

The line has been repeated often enough to have worn a little smooth, and become so familiar it is easy to dismiss, but the structure that underlies it remains fresh, because change does not pause. It is how most large changes arrive: an accumulation of small shifts that go uncounted because each one is small, followed by a moment in which the cumulative weight becomes undeniable.

By the time the suddenly arrives, it’s normally a done deal; we have to accept it and move on rather than fight it. Like grief, it’s a hard road to travel.

We are surrounded at the moment by suddenlies of different sizes and at different scales. Some are personal. We get older knowing perfectly well what is coming, and we still find ourselves avoiding the discussions that would help those affected, as well as us.

People in mid-career are discovering that careers, as their parents understood the word, have quietly become an obsolete category; as the companies that once carried the relationship are no longer prepared to do so, and people approaching retirement are finding that the arithmetic of retirement has changed, incurring a set of intergenerational obligations that the next generation is, understandably, getting tired of carrying.

The cycles run wider still. Britain spent something like a century and a half stumbling toward Empire, which then was catalysed by the Industrial Revolution around 1800, had its purple patch through the nineteenth century, before meeting its own suddenly somewhere in the middle of the twentieth. We are, by most measures, still in denial about that arrival, a point leveraged by populists for their own ends.

America sits perhaps three quarters of a century behind on the same curve, and historians a generation from now may well read the “suddenly” as the rebalancing with China as the hinge between its hubristic gradually and its inevitable suddenly.

Gradually is such a comforting place to be, until suddenly arrives.

“In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.”

―Eric Hoffer

Hoffer’s is a good line, and like all good lines it carries a sting. The sting, on closer reading, is that being learned was not the mistake. The mistake was the assumption that learning, having been done once, had been done. The learned are punished for the posture of knowing. It is the part of the predicament that gets less attention than it deserves. It is one thing to recognise that the world is changing; it is another to notice that one’s own equipment, the hard-won set of frames and instincts that have carried a career, is itself a piece of the world that is changing.

The frames were built for a particular set of conditions at a particular time, and rewarded inside them; they became reliable because the world held still long enough for them to become so. And when the world stops holding still, the same frames continue to deliver outputs to the wilfully blind. They feel as confident as they always did, even whilst they are, quietly, no longer adequate to deal with what they claim to address.

Being ready for suddenly therefore has little to do with prediction, the refuge of consultants, which is mostly what the learned reach for when they have run out of frames. It has little more to do with planning, in the sense the word usually carries; plans assume a stable enough relationship between present and future for the plan to mean something when the future arrives.

Readiness, in conditions of recursive change, is a disposition rather than a forecast. It is closer to a craft than to a discipline of foresight.

A craftsman’s workshop has a particular quality that distinguishes it from a shop. In a shop, or a consulting practice, or a bank, things are arranged for the customer; in a workshop, things are arranged for the work. There are finished pieces, certainly, but there are also half-finished ones on the bench, abandoned experiments in the corner, tools worn smooth with use, and reference books with broken spines. Learning in demonstrable action.

The whole space implies a process, a practitioner who knows things you do not yet know, and a relationship to the material that is ongoing rather than concluded. The craftsman is better prepared for suddenly than the shopkeeper not because they have predicted it, but because their working disposition already assumes the material will not behave exactly as expected, and that part of the work, every time, is to read what is actually in front of them rather than what they were planning to find.

It is what the Greeks called mētis, and what every serious practitioner recognises under one name or another. It is the intelligence that operates in the particular case, that judges when the rule should bend, that reads a room before it reads a report. Mētis is what expertise becomes when it has been held lightly enough, for long enough, to remain open to the case in front of it.

Our challenge, collectively, is that the conditions under which mētis forms have become harder to find. The institutional environments that once produced it through long apprenticeship, sustained exposure to consequence, and the slow accumulation of judgement under stakes have largely organised themselves out of the practice. Dashboards have replaced the noticing; methodologies have replaced judgement; and somewhere along the way the question of whether the frame still fits has stopped being asked at all.

There is a paradox in this. The systems that were built to make work more reliable have, by their reliability, hollowed out the very capacity that would allow the work to remain adequate when reliability stops being the point.

Being ready for suddenly, in practice, is not a frame of mind one decides to adopt on a Sunday evening. It is the slow, deliberate cultivation of a working disposition: a “workshop mind” kept open rather than tidied away into certificates, questions kept live rather than answered too quickly, and a frame held loosely enough to be examined when the case demands it.

It is uncomfortable to sustain, and the reward for sustaining it is slower and less legible than the reward for the posture of knowing. It is also the posture that has the better chance of holding when suddenly arrives.

Somewhere between an awareness that signals change and the workshop where transformation actually happens, there is a notion of craft: where a practitioner does the unending work of staying capable of being surprised. Exploration, and risk is necessary; without it, suddenly finds us unprepared. The workshop, untidy and experimental is necessary; without it, nothing changes in any deep way and is the part of the practice that determines whether the practitioner can still be of use when the world has moved on from what they were taught.

Recognition will not save you if the workshop has been closed. Companies are no longer safe havens. We are all equally exposed to an increase “suddenlies” that will most likely continue for a few generations until we have moved out of this cycle and into the maturity of the next.

The question, then, is not whether suddenly is coming. It is what condition one’s workshop is in. What is on the bench, half-finished. What has been left in the corner because it did not work. Which of the frames have been used so often that they have become invisible, and might no longer be doing the work one assumes they are.

We do not know which ideas might work. That though is secondary. What comes first is generating ideas. That is the readiness that matters. The other kind, the kind built out of confidence in the frames one already has, is what the learned have always relied on. Learning is more of an expedition, exploration in unfamiliar territory.

AI will only tell us what we already know, in ways we have not be able to do before, but that is not enough. It will not rescue us from the impact of suddenly.

That’s our, very human, job.

A recent piece in The Economist (17th May 2026) reports that China is sliding into a third internet era, in which AI “super-apps” no longer merely recommend but choose, purchase and arrange delivery on the user’s behalf. More than 600 million Chinese are thought to have used some form of agentic app already. Alibaba has now fully integrated its Qwen chatbot with Taobao, ByteDance is binding Doubao to Douyin, and Tencent is weaving its new hy3 model into WeChat and the millions of mini-programs that live inside it. The piece notes, almost in passing, that the correspondent asked one such app for a “special coffee” and was duly sent a rose-petal-vinegar concoction — a comic illustration of how readily the act of choosing can now bypass us.

The striking thing is not the technology but the quiet transfer it depends on: each delegated decision is a small piece of agency stepping outside the person and taking up residence in the system.

I’ve been working with AI for about 18 months, not to understand the technology or build agentic systems, but to figure out how I can use it to do the things I don’t want to do. It has ceased to become a novelty and has just become a factor in the way that I can work. What it has emphasised to me, that this article reminded me of, is a discipline of discretion.

The qualities we have that make a difference that nobody else can; our craft, our dispositions, our mētis, are vital and under pressure, it’s easy to make one small decision after another that distances us from them in order to do the trivial short-term tasks we’re being measured on.

Before we know it, we’ve lost touch with what makes us different.

There’s a crack in everything. It’s where the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen

Where the Puck Are We Going?

Wayne Gretzky’s father, Walter, coached him to move to where the puck was going to be, not where it had been. It was a line famously used by Steve Jobs when he talked about the iPhone.

In the frenzy to capitalise on a technology we do not yet really understand completely, I think we may have forgotten this lesson.

When I look around the business press, social media, and increasingly, unfortunately, here on Substack, people are obsessed with where the puck has been. I think they’re missing the point.

The critical factor in any organisation, particularly in volatile and emerging sectors, is not the tools or the technology. It’s the social friction between people. AI can speed up tasks, coordinate, and reduce infrastructure and overhead, but it cannot build trust or relationships or the deep knowledge of who does what and why.

AI does not change the nature of small groups. It changes the relationship between them and large institutions in a way the larger institution’s structure cannot match. The asymmetry has always been there, but AI is magnifying it. AI is collapsing the time cost of cognition: the research, synthesis, drafting, modelling, and experimenting. What remains as the binding constraint is the coordination cost: trust building, mutual legibility, conflict resolution and the psychological texture of who knows what about whom and which questions to ask. AI is lifting the task ceiling but leaving the social ceiling where it is. Return on group size, in terms of work produced — both quantity and quality — shifts towards smaller numbers, probably substantially smaller, for speed-critical work.

Research at MIT Sloan found that organisations may benefit from assigning entire chains of tasks to AI, even when humans could perform some steps better. That is because each handoff requires review, validation, and adjustment, and those checkpoints slow the system more than the quality differential costs. A February 2026 arXiv paper framed AI as “coordination-compressing capital,” a class of capital that does not substitute for labour, but rather reduces the friction between agents. The implication is that human-to-human handoffs have become the expensive operation. Asana’s 2025 research, based on insights from over 9,000 knowledge workers, found that 65% of workers say AI creates more coordination work between team members. That share rises to 90% among the most productive workers. Hyper-enabled individuals generate output faster than the surrounding social system can absorb it. Asana used the analogy of Formula One drivers racing on roads designed for horse-drawn carriages. The bottleneck is not production, but absorption.

Where things are emerging and fast-moving, we can see this in real life. Gamma, the AI documentation platform, was serving 50 million users in thirty days with 30 people and has now scaled past a hundred million dollars with over 70 million users. Bolt, the ride-hailing app, reached $20 million ARR in 60 days with 15 people. (We used Bolt when we were in Malta and never waited more than a minute for a cab. It was remarkable.)

This is not just a productivity story. It creates a schism. Small companies can move much faster than big companies when it comes to establishing new ideas and enterprises, but they can quickly reach a point where they cannot manage the scale they have reached with the structure they have. Big companies have benefits of scale, but have all the social friction that no amount of technical expertise will reduce. They are very good at reducing cost, so that’s what they do, whatever the PR may say.

The challenge seems to come when the big companies buy the small companies and then effectively destroy the culture that has created them. The tech sector in general and the game sector in particular seem to exemplify this. They have become leadership deserts.

The analogy that springs to mind goes back over a century, when Heinz Guderian made a nonsense of the conventional wisdom of trench warfare with Blitzkrieg tactics. By moving around and beyond obstacles without consolidating them, the Germans made startling progress and tidied up behind them as they went. It all then fell apart in the Russian campaign when they used the same tactics but didn’t have the backup to do the tidying up.

I think we face the same issue. The small, fast companies need the big companies as backup, but the cultures are so varied that they cannot work together.

The pattern is visible enough once you look for it. Bungie inside Microsoft, and Instagram inside Meta in its early years. Countless smaller cases that never made the press because the small thing was simply absorbed and forgotten. The acquisition closes; the meeting cadence imposes itself; the people who built the thing leave within eighteen months; what is left is the brand and the dashboards. The acquirer reports the synergies. The acquired returns to the Substacks and the small ventures and quietly starts again.

We have a word for one form of this relationship — acquisition — and the word does the thinking for us. Once we say “acquired,” everyone knows what happens next. What we do not have is a word for the other relationships that would be possible if we were prepared to design them. Partnership tends to drift into dependence or competition. Outsourcing converts the small group into a vendor and strips out the agency that made them worth working with. The relationship the moment calls for has no name yet, and the institutions cannot manage what they cannot name.

Symbiosis is the term biologists use for organisms of different kinds living together in ways that benefit both. The conditions for symbiosis are specific. Each organism must do something the other cannot. Neither must metabolise the other. The interface must remain stable for long enough that both organisms become adapted to the relationship rather than merely tolerant of it. Coral and zooxanthellae. Lichen and fungus. Mycorrhizae and roots. The relationships are not equal, not symmetrical, not negotiated; they are evolved, and they take time.

What the asymmetry between small AI-enabled groups and large institutions calls for is symbiotic, not transactional. The small group needs what the large institution genuinely has: capital that can absorb risk, infrastructure that no five people can build, institutional memory that compounds over decades, and relationships with regulators and customers that no startup can manufacture. The large institution needs what the small group genuinely has: speed, judgment, mētis, the willingness to commit before the picture is complete.

Neither can produce the other’s contribution. Neither survives, in the long run, without something like the other’s contribution.

The historical precedents for this are older than the modern firm. The Jesuit colleges sat inside the Church but operated with their own rule, their own selection, their own pedagogy. The City of London livery companies regulated their crafts without being absorbed by the Crown that chartered them, and the BBC, in its best period, commissioned independent producers who retained their cultural distinctness and were the better for it. The university research group, properly governed, has the protection of the institution without its tempo — though this form, too, is being eroded by the financialisation of education. The form is not new; what is new is the absence of any contemporary corporate vocabulary for it.

The reason large institutions struggle with this is not lack of intelligence. It is impatience. Genuine symbiosis takes years to establish, when the cycles of corporate leadership are measured in quarters. The acquisition closes in months and the integration completes in months after that, by which point the small thing is no longer small and no longer what was bought. What is required is the willingness to leave something alone in a structured way; to give it air, money, time, and protection from the host’s metabolism, and to do this for long enough that what emerges is something neither party could have produced alone. Few institutions are designed to permit this. Fewer still have leaders who would be allowed to attempt it.

Which raises the question of the leader. The symbiosis does not maintain itself. It requires someone who can hold the interface between the two forms — someone with the patience of the institution and the velocity of the small group, who can speak both languages without being captured by either, who is willing to operate in a register that does not pay them in the institution’s coin. They are not a manager. They are not a sponsor. They are not a coach. They are something the modern organisational chart cannot name.

Every functioning symbiosis I can think of in the historical record has had this figure. The rector who protected the Jesuit college from the bishop. The master of the livery company who held the standard against the impatience of the market. The commissioning editor who fought the management for the budget and the time the work needed. They are not always visible. Their work is mostly invisible by design. What they do, in essence, is tend the conditions in which other people can do their best work without being interfered with.

I find myself reaching for the alchemical word, which is “tender”. The tender of an athanor — the slow-burning furnace in which transformation occurs — does not perform the transformation. They keep the fire steady, watch the temperature, and protect the vessel from interruption. They know when to intervene and when to leave alone.

Their craft is not in the work itself but in the conditions for the work. Without them, the fire goes out or runs too hot, and what was meant to become something extraordinary becomes something ordinary instead.

This is, I suspect, the role that the AI-era institution will most desperately need and find hardest to recognise. It does not produce visible output and does not appear on the dashboard. It cannot be measured against quarterly targets. It is the human function that holds the interface between the small fast thing and the large slow thing, that protects the agency of the operators from the metabolism of the institution, that maintains the relationship long enough for both parties to become genuinely adapted to it.

The Elvis (mētis, craft, intuition etc) I wondered about last month has left a great many buildings. He has, in many cases, found his way to small groups working with AI in conditions where his genius can still be exercised.

The question I am now sitting with is whether the buildings he left can learn to host his return without consuming him again. That depends, I think, on whether they can develop the role I have just described — and on whether anyone in those buildings would wish to inhabit it.

I do not know the answer, but I notice that the question is not, in the end, about technology. It is about the kind of leader the moment is asking for. Whether such a person can still be found in the buildings is an open question. Where they will be cultivated, if the buildings cannot produce them, is a question for another day.

It’s difficult to read the label on a container from inside it. Sometimes, we need to find a way to step outside it, and find the freedom to play by different rules. Having just spent a week on the island of Malta, without my tech, it reminded me that holidays can act as catalysts to playing with disobedient thoughts. Nicholas Monserrat’s “The Kappilan of Malta” provided not just a wonderful description of the Island and its history, but a provocation, and as we enter peak holiday season, I find myself wondering what it takes to turn disobedient daydreams to rebellious action.

Given the multiple threads of uncertainty we face, not much, I suspect.

A quick gallop around some research on insurgency throws up some interesting ideas to play with. Ted Gurr’s Why Men Rebel (1970) held that political violence is driven by relative deprivation: the gap between what people expect and what they receive. The argument is that political upheaval is the result of collective discontent caused by a sen…

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I have been thinking about the news that GitHub Copilot is moving to token-based billing. It is a small story, on the face of it. A subscription becomes a meter rather than a licence, and the price of using AI, which has been hidden inside a monthly fee subsidised by enormous quantities of venture capital, is becoming visible.

Where GitHub leads, other vendors will follow; the move is structural rather than transitional, as Ed Zitron has been at pains to point out in this excellent article. The economics have never been in doubt; the marketing effort is evolving as business need turns to addiction; and the bill is now arriving.

What has been turning over in my head is not the price story itself; it is what lies beneath it. For three years we have been told, in roughly equal measure, that AI is a transformative resource and that it is essentially free at point of use. And we have chosen to believe it. We have been encouraged to use it for ever…

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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

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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 …

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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 l…

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“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 consolidat…

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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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