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

Sometimes, we can look at the data for as long we like and still not find the answer to the incomplete question we are pursuing, as, in many cases, the question itself morphs as we chase the answer.

I suspect that, in part, it is because we have become so obsessed with data and its management that, on a day-to-day basis, we discount what holds the data together.

This morning, as we look at the thousands of jobs that will be displaced at Jaguar Land Rover, the reasons that are being rolled out are the obvious ones. The tariffs in America, which are clearly going to be true, and the cyber attack, which is also true. These are within the bounds of normal business risks, not outliers, and a strategy failure with the staff rather than shareholders paying the price.

What we don’t talk about is what Jaguar Land Rover has become. We look at it sentimentally, as though it is still an integrated business with a clear identity. It no longer is. It went through a series of restructures before being sold off to a multinational domiciled outside the UK, and we watched as, gradually and then suddenly, its identity became eroded to a point where it is no more than a manufacturing unit with a synthetic brand, following the data to the extent that in the same week as the job cuts are being advanced, it launches an electric Range Rover.

Personally, I cannot imagine anything more ridiculous than an electric Range Rover.

In 1971–72, two early Range Rovers undertook the British Trans-Americas Expedition, travelling from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego in a dramatic demonstration of the new vehicle’s capability. Its defining challenge was the Darién Gap; the roadless, rainforest-and-swamp barrier between Panama and Colombia, where a British Army-led team spent 96 days forcing the heavily laden vehicles through terrain that often permitted progress of only a mile a day. The crossing demanded trail cutting, improvised bridges and rafts, winching, mechanical repairs and a rethink after oversized swamp tyres and heavy loads damaged the vehicles’ differentials. Emerging into Colombia in 1972, the expedition became a foundational episode in Range Rover history: less a conventional drive than an extraordinary feat of engineering, logistics, persistence and courageous people that helped establish the model’s enduring reputation for go-anywhere durability. It was an astonishing feat that set the Range Rover’s identity for decades.

Its successor will not be able to make a journey from London to Edinburgh without a stop on A roads or motorways for electricity, and unlike petrol, you can’t carry electricity with you. It is a remarkable triumph of marketing over substance, designed for an audience where image is everything. With a price starting at £150,000 for the basic model rising to £225,000, Range Rover is now a classic Veblen good, where demand is negatively elastic to become more attractive the more expensive it is, hoping to survive in a market where cars have more in common with white goods as they become, in effect, washing machines with wheels.

The Erosion of Care

This is what measurement does when it is left unexamined. Efficiency is not a thing, it is a ratio, that requires three decisions: a numerator, a denominator, and a timescale. The first two get argued about. An owner who cares about what their business will look like in twenty five years thinks and measures differently from a manager on a three-year posting, and both think differently from an investor planning an exit in five. They are not disagreeing about the facts. They are using different clocks. One cares about the business, one about their career, and one about the money.

Consider the Darién Gap crossing. Ninety-six days to cover a distance that could have been done in a helicopter after a leisurely breakfast and arrive before lunch. Why all the trail cutting, improvised rafts, winching, differentials wrecked by tyres that turned out to be the wrong answer, with a full rethink halfway through? By any measure it was a catastrophe for productivity. What it did produce, though, was not the film footage , the advertising or even the story. It produced knowledge held inside particular people about the soul of Land Rover, and where it might go next. At that time, Range Rover was a risk, and what it produced was metis; the situated knowledge that comes from exposure to challenging conditions and which no amount of data can capture.

Mētis is expensive to acquire and cheap to destroy. Acquiring it requires years of people caring enough about something to pursue it while things go wrong, until they uncover the secrets about what they are working with. It is slow, painful and largely unbillable. Destroying it requires only a cost saving exercise, or ceasing to care beyond short term returns. The asymmetry is why it gets sidelined. The case against it is always in the data. The case for it never is.

It is why the word craft has become marketing decoration, a font choice, applied to area where process long ago eroded the craft ethic. When we want to create something important, rather than a shallow, highly processed sequel to something we already know how to do, the outcome is not predetermined by a plan; it remains continuously at risk in the hands of those creating it, and depends on their judgement in the moment.

Care is not a sentiment attached to skill, it is part of its makeup, not an optional extra. A craft practised without it is different and is no longer a craft, it is a soulless process boundaried by data. I can think of no better description of a £200,000 vehicle designed to be looked at rather than used.

English is an unhelpfully generous language when it comes to the word “care”. On one hand, it can be a care package, sold as an option, or somewhere we put old people to be monetised by venture capital, or it can be the engine of what teachers, doctors, explorers and others for whom what they do is calling more than “work”. The moment care becomes data it becomes a process movable between suppliers, with every improvement recorded as data while leaving core to rot away.

Something similar happens to identity. When we turn it into data, identity becomes a brand that can be bought, licensed, relocated to a different jurisdiction and managed by people who do not care. What cannot be relocated is what built the brand . Jaguar Land Rover kept the noun, whilst the verb was restructured out of existence somewhere between the third reorganisation and the fourth.

It matters. A surgical checklist of nineteen items was introduced across eight hospitals by the team who did the surgery driven by care as a reaction to adverse data, and was followed by a halving of thirty-day mortality.

It was, understandably, adopted everywhere, but when adoption was later mandated across a hundred hospitals in Ontario, with self-reported compliance above ninety per cent, there was no significant change in mortality, complications, length of stay or readmissions. The same nineteen items. One result driven by care and a sense of identity; the other by compliance to a mandated process.

Several things could explain it, but the difference I think is authorship. In the first case the practitioners were pivotal in design and implementation. In the second they received it. The difference is agency, between a standard we have authored and a training programme.

Efficiency programmes are not wrong, but they are partial. There is always substantial ground to be won in administration, duplication, coordination and handovers, and most of the credible gains of the last thirty years have come from exactly there. It is where AI can have real impact, and more power to its digital elbow.

What no process, AI included, can do is manufacture the attention driven by care. Where organisations have created space for attention at the expense of short term efficiency, the results have been awkward for the management orthodoxy: better nurse-to-patient ratios producing lower mortality and costs avoided at more than twice the cost of the staffing; as well as district nursing teams running at a third of the industry’s overhead with better outcomes. Care of that kind is not a cost the system carries despite its need for efficiency. It is the means by which we discover what is happening to it in time to act.

The part of any craft we can delegate to technology is the process is the support act. We have always been able to delegate it to other people; it is where apprenticeship came from.

Now, we can delegate to a technology that will perform in seconds what used to take hours, and which improves recursively on the data it generates but leaves no space for care. The early findings are consistent and should give us pause for thought; where we treat AI like an apprentice, our work gets faster and measurably better. Where we assume competence, we check less, accept more, and do not improve our own skills over the course of the work, while the ones worked with an “apprentice” stayed sceptical and got sharper.

It is a care gap. Judgement is formed by our exposure to consequence in real time. Treating an apprentice as a master good enough to be trusted removes the exposure while leaving the consequence invisible because it becomes remote, and beyond our care boundary. We record the apparent gain, whilst the cost lands on the erosion of judgement over time.

So where does the line actually fall? Perhaps between execution and answerability. It started with scientific management, and grew through process by stretching the gap between those who do the work and those who receive end product or service, with management as shock absorber for failure.

Two components of care do not delegate. First, attentiveness, because it cannot be subcontracted, and secondly, answerability in being the one who is responsible.

That gives a usable test. The question to ask of any delegation we make, to a supplier, a subsidiary, an outsourcer or a machine, is not whether the output is good enough. It is whether the delegation has removed an opportunity to learn something that data cannot record.

Which returns me to the thousands of people who will leave Jaguar Land Rover over the coming months. The headcount will be reported, because it is data. What the company loses beyond data will not. It is the difference between using the Darién Gap as marketing collaterlal, and being there to understand what a new car would and would not do. That sort of knowledge is expensive, acquired one particular situation at a time, and is about to be removed at the stroke of a pen by people using a three-year time horizon.

The Darién Gap was crossed by people who could be identified by name, in vehicles they had to keep repairing themselves, in a place where nobody could take the consequence off them. That is what set the identity on which a brand was built.. The successor to those vehicles is a beautifully executed but sterile object, usable only in places where a car costing a quarter of the price would be equally functional, and whose fragile identity is the impression it makes on arrival.

It’s a logical conclusion to what happens when we prioritise data over care.

The next step feels inevitable. Countless brands built by those who care have found themselves acquired by those who do not have a founders care, and find the identity and brand eviscerated by those who want to extract value measured in one very particular dimension.

It is easy to see Jaguar Land Rover following Aston Martin, Lotus, Morgan, Bristol, and a whole variety of other businesses, including manufacturing ones like Denby recently, into a place where the brand sits as a line item on the intellectual property register somewhere rather than a living, vibrant entity; something that like an ageing celebrity, depends on sequels and prequels of work previously done, rather than doing something original.

It doesn’t make me angry so much as sad. These brands deserved better end-of-life care. The people in them who do the work deserve a better organisation.

Sources

McHugh et al., “Effects of nurse-to-patient ratio legislation on nurse staffing and patient mortality, readmissions, and length of stay,” *The Lancet* 397 (2021): 1905–1913. Aiken et al., “Hospital Nurse Staffing and Patient Mortality,” *JAMA* 288 (2002): 1987–1993.

KPMG International, *Value Walks* (2016), on Buurtzorg; Rasmussen et al., scoping review (2024), on transferability.

Haynes et al., *NEJM* 360 (2009): 491–499; Urbach et al., *NEJM* 370 (2014): 1029–1038.

Tronto, *Moral Boundaries* (1993) and *Caring Democracy* (2013); Hochschild, *The Managed Heart* (1983); Hülsheger and Schewe, *Journal of Occupational Health Psychology* 16 (2011): 361–389.

Dell’Acqua et al., “Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier,” HBS 24-013 (2023); Dell’Acqua, “Falling Asleep at the Wheel” (working paper, 2022); Lee et al., CHI 2025; Stanford Digital Economy Lab, on apprenticeships.

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 moved a little, got wet, dried out, and were repaired over time. Its lime mortar is not intended to be stronger than the brick or stone around it. It is softer and more permeable: it accommodates small movements, lets moisture escape, and acts as a sacrificial material, taking the strain so that the structure does not have to.

Cement mortar can look like the obvious modern improvement. It sets quickly, is hard, and can appear cheaper at the outset. But in an old wall its very hardness can be the problem. It does not readily accommodate movement or moisture, so stress and damp are transferred into the older masonry; the part of the wall that is hardest and most expensive to replace.

There is a metaphor here for how we design short-term work architectures. The strongest-looking system is not always the most resilient one. Organisations need interfaces that can flex, channels through which information and pressure can escape, and routines that are easier to renew than the people, relationships, and capabilities they are meant to protect.

Cement mortar is cheaper, readily available, and can be mixed and used by those with basic training. It is the stuff of process, recipes, technology, and global sourcing. Lime mortar, on the other hand is the stuff of craft, character, experience, communities, adaptation to local soil conditions and the very human qualities that allow organisations to flex under pressure.

As we rush to replace old ways of working with efficient modern processes, we are making ourselves increasingly vulnerable to the complex and increasingly unpredictable changes we are experiencing as the ground moves beneath us. At some point, as with old houses where cement mortar has been carelessly used by inexperienced, poorly trained (or cynical) builders to replace lime mortar as a matter of cost and convenience, it will need to be ground out and replaced if the building is to stay healthy. There are many organisations out there right now whose equivalent of lime mortar is being replaced by the cement mortar of technology and temporary gig workers, and the cracks are already beginning to appear.

Reuters reports that Meta’s 2026 Project OT (”Organisation Transformation”) explored making the company “AI-native,” including scenarios that would shrink some teams by up to 60% through layoffs, redeployments and AI-supported “pods.” In the end, though, rather than replacing 60% of the whole workforce, Meta went ahead with a roughly 10% workforce reduction in May, and Zuckerberg cancelled planning for a larger second restructuring wave, previously envisaged for November, only hours before that second round was due to begin. The reported drivers were employee backlash and weak or disruptive operational results from AI-assisted workflows. We have seen recent parallels at Klarna, Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) and, in a softer form, Duolingo, with each moving from a public or operational “AI-first” posture toward restoring human roles, reframing AI as augmentation, or withdrawing coercive implementation rules. I suspect we will see a returning demand for the human equivalent of lime mortar. Experience, judgement, craft, commitment and above all a respect for the people who do the work.

It carries a cautionary tale. AI, in its many varieties, represents transformational technology easy to think of as somehow automatic, yet it needs to be used with skill and craft. Embracing it mindlessly for the sake of a quick hit to the profit and loss will carry a price as organisational structures built on it start to show the cracks. And it is people, not technology, that will have to do the repointing.

After the best part of a century spent gradually removing people from making judgements within the workflow, perhaps we’re going to have to return to them. I have written elsewhere about the gradual erosion of judgement in the workplace as we went through the algorithmic processes from scientific management through total quality management and on to business process re-engineering, Agile and Scrum. All of these have helped us make real progress in efficiency and productivity, but not in considering what is emerging, what comes next, or what needs to be left behind. The cement mortar of process works well in some structures, but less so in ones that have to adapt to the land moving beneath them.

As we are often told, planning is essential; plans quickly become pointless, and we have no idea, at the levels that matter, of how AI, in its many manifestations, will affect our work. I’m curious about the generalities and the abstractions, yet for each of us, as individuals at this moment in this place, it is more difficult to see. Difficult to plan, but that should not stop us planning. The skills and experience we have that do not get recorded in the algorithms of process are the difference between cement mortar and lime mortar, as the cracks begin to appear in the idealistic plans of those who would replace people with technology on a generalised basis.

So what do we do? I think the answer, in part at least, lies in the very technologies we’re wary of. Where we can use it to automate, where the processes are clear enough and well tested enough, we will end up doing it because it makes sense. Where we choose to delegate to it but retain responsibility for the outcomes, and where we use it to sharpen our thinking, that is something different. We need to become familiar with its textures and idiosyncrasies, its strengths and weaknesses. We can only do that as individuals, because often the people we work for are only really interested in our productivity, not our creativity and curiosity. It’s something that is very difficult to be trained in because what we would do is pick up somebody else’s view of how to use it rather than develop our own. To bring back the metaphor, we need to learn how to mix our own particular lime mortar. Experience, craft, perspective, commitment, and all the other things that the data does not capture.

It will be needed. Precisely when, where, and how, it is too early to say. But now is a good time to recover the innate skills we have in critical thinking and judgement and craft that process has worn away.

Visit the Athanor.

Finding ways to do that is what we’re focusing on at the Athanor. We will share what we’re finding there on a regular basis, as well as running workshops with groups of individuals and businesses, focused on what makes each of them different.

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 an outcome that cannot be specified in advance.

Conditions for a healthy crop can only be created, not assembled. Culture is not a product.

Cultura animi is the horticultural root of the word. Running alongside it is Herder’s pluralising of culture into cultures in the 1780s, and that is what gave the anthropological tradition its starting point. It takes us down the winding path to the way we often currently use it: in a sense of production, performance from the arts or a sector, as something curated and displayed as achievement.

I think it’s difficult to see business as a culture, rather than as an artefact of the culture in which it takes place. Which, given the way that business is shaping our world at the moment, I find an unsettling thought.

So I thought I’d unpack it a little further, as part of my current experiments in where AI fits into my work. I used Perplexity for research and Claude for refining to give me the ideas to write this post by hand. I don’t think for a moment it saved me very much time, but it did give me more substance and texture to play with. (If you want to play with the ideas, I’ve put some of the sources that I used at the end of this post.)

There is a view that culture is a whole way of life, that it is ordinary, and that it includes the car park, the tea round, and the ten minutes before a meeting starts. And then there are those who see culture as meaning, an idea of webs of significance which we have spun and in which we are suspended; something to be read rather than measured.

Then there are those who see culture as repertoire. Culture supplies the habit, skills, and styles from which we assemble our strategies, and determine how things get done rather than addressing what people want. Something performative. The very stuff of business schools.

Some economists see culture as equilibrium. That our firms and corporations exist because culture is, for a while, a more efficient way to organise production than detailed contracts, with the boundary drawn around the areas where we can choose culture as an organising device. It is what governs our conduct when the contract runs out.

Perhaps that’s one of the biggest issues for business. That it becomes easier to define and measure a strategy and then claim a culture which cannot be measured. We end up espousing a culture in terms of artefacts, media, presence, and advertising, claiming rather than living sets of values to which we adhere. Underneath it all is the genuine culture of what we actually do when we turn in the morning.

It’s perhaps one of the main reasons why so many acquisitions fail. You can buy a nice shiny strategy and a set of performance results, but you can’t acquire a culture. I’m sure there are strategy and culture consultants out there who would violently disagree with me, but I’d hold to the idea that you can only use artificial fertiliser for so long before you ruin the soil. Sustainable cultures take time and grow naturally. Anything that is forced is temporary, and not really a culture at all, so much as a marketing tool.

Culture matters because it shapes who we are, how we’re seen, and how we will be seen after we have gone. In a business culture, where everything is driven by data and facts, we leave little room for emotions and identity, even as we develop processes and technology that call our individual identity into question.

To be part of a healthy culture, we need to be seen and witnessed, recognised for doing things that are part of that culture and help develop it. It is the stuff of small ceremonies and rituals that grow and evolve rather than something designed, where people can learn and adopt and shape what they do. It is the culture of the atelier, of craft, and the power of apprenticeship.

And it requires people to pass it on to. A culture with nobody to inherit it is no longer a culture. It is dead on the vine, and I think another reason that when established performance-driven corporations acquire entrepreneurial startups, it almost always ends badly. The ideas and energy that have caused them to grow become foreign bodies in an established organisation, and unless we are careful, corporations become where we exhaust old ideas, and ideas go to die. Corporations end up exhausted.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Ideas are like children. If we try to shape them too early, we just make them clones of what we’re trying to change. As the old line goes, “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” The fastest way, I think, to destroy a healthy culture is to measure it. “Goodhart’s Law” applies, in that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure*. Never is it more true than when we make money the measure.

So, if we need a healthy culture for a meaningful life, but find only synthetic, highly processed ones in the workplace, where do we go?

Outside The Walls.

Somewhere where the soil has not been artificially fertilised out of nutrition. Somewhere where conversations and ideas can be allowed to emerge and grow and, when necessary, fail. Somewhere we can ask, “What’s really going on here?” and work it out for ourselves without being told a truth by those whose interests it serves.

We don’t need to pack up and leave. We just need to find the spaces where we can get the time and space for a while to entertain the possible and give ourselves time to notice what’s emerging. There are no books, no instruction manuals, no experts. We just need to start conversations with people we want to learn from. No agendas. Places to learn on our own terms.

I’ve been running these sorts of experiments for years now, and they always work. Normally in ways that we don’t expect and couldn’t possibly predict at the outset.

It does not require anything other than a willingness to share a space for an hour on a regular basis to ask “what’s really going on here?” Staying with the question does the work; because the answer is always changing.

There is something of the alchemical about it, turning the base materials we are working with into something rather more valuable. You don’t need help, but if you want to see what we’re working on, visit The Athanor. It’s small scale, one group at a time, working it out as we go along.

Visit The Athanor

Somewhere we can grow the cultures we want. Without the artificial fertiliser.

Sources

Herder, Johann Gottfried. Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 1784–91. The pluralising of culture into cultures, and the opening of the anthropological line.

Williams, Raymond. “Culture is Ordinary,” in Conviction, ed. Norman Mackenzie. London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1958. Culture as a whole way of life, including the parts nobody thinks of as culture.

Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Webs of significance we have spun and are suspended in; culture as something read rather than measured.

Swidler, Ann. “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies.” American Sociological Review 51, no. 2 (1986): 273–286. https://doi.org/10.2307/2095521 Culture as a repertoire of habits and styles shaping how things are done, rather than a set of ends.

Gorton, Gary B., and Alexander K. Zentefis. “Corporate culture as a theory of the firm.” Economica 91, no. 364 (2024): 1391–1423. https://doi.org/10.1111/ecca.12537 Culture as the organising device where contracts run out, and as an explanation for why acquisitions fail and why cultures resist change.

Guiso, Luigi, Paola Sapienza, and Luigi Zingales. “The value of corporate culture.” Journal of Financial Economics 117, no. 1 (2015): 60–76. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfineco.2014.05.010 Advertised values showed no correlation with profitability; integrity as perceived by employees did, and was harder to sustain in publicly traded firms.

*: The formulation is Marilyn Strathern’s. Strathern, Marilyn. “’Improving ratings’: audit in the British University system.” European Review 5, no. 3 (1997): 305–321.

“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 what is happening below. We can learn from that.

Elsewhere on my bookshelf, in “An Astronaut’s View of life on Earth”, Chris Hadfield (who sang ‘Space Oddity” from the Space Station) describes a discipline he practised for years before he ever left the ground: asking himself, of any situation, “what’s the next thing that might kill me?” He’s writing about spacewalks and re-entry, and the discipline itself isn’t about fear; it’s about attention, held with a kind of confidence that comes only from having already prepared.

It may be the best book on coaching I’ve read, maybe because it makes no claim to being one. It describes, patiently and without any talk of “leadership”, what it actually takes to keep your head once the environment becomes unforgiving, and there is nobody to rescue you.

John Boyd would have made a good astronaut. His OODA loop, (observe, orient, decide, act), has been horribly flattened by three decades of management slideware into a simplistic, inaccurate and unhelpful four-step method for making fast decisions, riding on an appetite for misplaced military metaphor as a crutch. His enormous body of research, preceding the current fashion for critical thinking, holds observation is a discipline, with orientation as the shaping act. Being Prepared. Calmness under pressure, where raw observation gets filtered through experience, culture and preparation into something we can use to make the best decision we can with incomplete information.

That’s the discipline the astronauts have, which the rest of us can learn to apply in rather more forgiving environments: that we do not need more information, we need a more grounded orientation to the information we already have.

Each of us needs our own space station; somewhere we can visit to build the picture we need to make sense of our world. A place inhabited by people we trust, whose opinions we respect, who are there to help us observe and orient without judgement.

We tell ourselves we can’t build our own space station because we don’t have the time, even as reality suggests the opposite. We don’t have the time because we don’t have a space station to help us see what matters.

Worldwide, people now spend more than two and a half hours a day on social media; the better part of a full waking day each week, taking in stories built to make somebody else money. Immersing ourselves creates our personal weather, convincing us that every gust is a personal deficiency. Climate change that has been building in plain sight for half a century, technological disruption that is in reality a permanent feature, not a bug, and the felt sudden uselessness of a CV created for a world that has disappeared in an instant.

These are real conditions, and experienced entirely from inside them, at ground level, they can feel like fate rather than weather. Something being done to us rather than something that will change, with its own patterns, that from a distance we could see forming.

We are neither victims, nor helpless, even though the profitable stories told by those who stand to benefit would prefer us to think so.

Media is not our friend. We are a market.

In the book, Harvey’s astronauts try, and mostly fail, to think a new thought up there. There are no new thoughts, one of them tells herself, they’re just old thoughts born into new moments. That’s not defeat, it’s closer to what an orbit can teach us: not novelty, but recognition, seeing an old pattern clearly enough, from far enough back, to know it as a pattern rather than as a crisis unique to us.

We do not need to be billionaires with oversize egos. Building our own space station needs something much smaller and already available to us: a handful of people we trust enough to be open with, or whom we are prepared to learn to trust, met with enough regularity and enough distance from targets, hierarchy and urgency to look at our lives as a whole rather than as this week’s inbox. Not to escape the world of work below, but to see it properly: its patterns, its actual contours, as against whatever story is currently being told about it.

It is a station any of us can build, that nobody else is going to build it on our behalf. Nobody is coming to rescue us, because we do not need rescuing. The orientation we need is in our own gift.

As St Augustine is supposed to have observed; “Hope has two beautiful daughters: anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain as they are.”

Make the time.

Note: I have disabled AI detection. It tells me that this was 24% Ai generated, It was not. It is perhaps the most pointless use of AI I have come across. Complexity for the sake of it. If we can’t discern what we read for ourselves…

if you want to build your own space station, visit The Athanor.

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…

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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 …

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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.

…

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Last week I wrote that we are all beginners now. The thought has stayed with me, and changed shape.

The relationship we have with our work is starting to feel like the relationship horses had with the plough when the tractor arrived. We are putting AI at the centre of the argument about work, much as people put the tractor at the centre of theirs a hundred years ago. I think it is the same mistake. A century ago the thing at the centre was the farm. The thing at the centre now is the way we make and create what we need. What did not change then, and I doubt will change now, is that human life still has to be fed, and housed, and somehow held together. What changed was how we organise to do it.

I have begun to wonder whether our attention is in the wrong place. We watch individuals, when we might do better to watch organisations, because if the analogy holds, organisations are the horses. They are what the new machine acts upon most powerfully.

And as organisations change, we will have l…

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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 eac…

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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 mapp…

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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 understo…

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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 un…

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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 re…

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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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