Today has been one of those days when two blog posts collide in my mail to create insight:
A Summary
Strategy is shifting from control to navigation. As
notes, the real question is no longer whether AI will take over strategy, but how we redefine human value within it. Machines can optimise, but they cannot imagine. The strategist’s work—whether in an organisation or one’s own life—now lies in orchestrating meaning: combining data, context and narrative into something coherent and human. reaches the same conclusion from a different direction. His idea of dynamic uncertainty recognises that knowledge and unpredictability evolve together. Each new insight can either narrow or widen what we do not know. The world is not static but alive, changing shape with every step we take.Together, these views suggest that the future of strategy—personal as much as professional—depends less on prediction and more on awareness. Plans become provisional, loops of learning rather than lines to an endpoint.
Advantage comes from sensing change early, interpreting it well, and adjusting with purpose. The strategist, or individual, becomes an explorer in motion, balancing craft with curiosity. Rather than treating uncertainty as an enemy, we can see it as a source of new possibilities, an expanding field that rewards judgement, adaptability and imagination over certainty. In that sense, strategy becomes less about writing a plan and more about holding a conversation, with ourselves, with our tools, and with the shifting world around us.
This is the emerging world I want to consider, with a group of fellow explorers, in The Athanor.
The athanor, the furnace of the alchemists, was never about speed or spectacle. It was built to hold a steady flame, a quiet fire that could burn for weeks without faltering. In it, substances softened, mingled, and slowly became something new. For the alchemist, the athanor was as much a mirror of the soul as a piece of equipment: a reminder that true transformation is less about flashes of brilliance than about constancy, patience, and faith in unseen processes. For today’s artisans, it offers a metaphor for our own work—creating spaces, practices, and rhythms where change can ripen in its own time.