Reflections 10th August

Shifting Sands

’T is a wild place to fetch, the waves.

Break on the Doombar sands,

And from the hills the eddying winds

Perplex the steadiest hands.”

Excerpt from "The Padstow Lifeboat" By Henry Sewell Stokes

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The shifting sands of the Doom Bar that I wrote about last week have stayed on my mind this week. It seems to me that as humans, we're really not very good with boundaries that shift organically.

We like order. We like lines.

Drawing them gives us a feeling of control, whether that's between departments and disciplines or between work and life. Between professional and personal, between us and them. Work-life balance. Navigating complexity by creating boundaries, hierarchies, and territories that we have decided. They tell us where we belong and where we don't. The seductive idea that drawing a line called Brexit would somehow “give us back control”, or that a meeting at the end of this next week to decide the boundaries of Ukraine will provide a sustainable solution to a complex politics.

We draw lines like comfort blankets to protect us from the reality that we are not in control.

In the book "Trespass," Nick Hayes reminds us that boundaries in nature are fundamentally different from human boundaries. Natural boundaries are semi-permeable membranes where life happens through transaction and exchange. Rivers don't divide landscapes, they connect them. Forest edges aren't barriers, they're the most biodiverse spaces where different ecosystems meet and create something new.

We have a natural human ability to read between the lines, to sense what's not written, and to see what's not acknowledged. We feel rather than analyse the difference between the value statements and the behaviours we observe. Hayes writes about a different way of seeing, about learning to read the landscape not through official maps or ownership and control, but through the patterns of life, flow, and connection. Noticing the unwritten “desire lines” that show where people walk rather than on the paths that we have decided for them.

From “Book of Trespass” Nick Hayes

It matters now, in these times of change. Just as Hayes crosses a farmer's field to follow an ancient right of way, we are learning to navigate by older, deeper patterns than the ones marked in our contemporary organisational and geographic maps.

We do not want to be told where we belong, because belonging is a feeling. When our abilities and enthusiasms are constrained by organisations that want only a tiny part of them, only for as long as they need them, trespass becomes a creative act of self-preservation.

Compliance is only one step away from surrender. Maybe the most creative and necessary work now happens when people step outside the lines drawn for them by others and refuse to be limited by their job description.

"We don't see see things as they are, we see them as we are." Anaĩs Nin

I suspect that never is that more true than in our current organisations. They look to rearrange the boxes and lines in their organisational structures, to take advantage of technology, become more efficient or reduce costs in an attempt to shape their world as they wish to see it.

They don't see those little lines - the desire lines, the paths being trodden outside the sanctioned communication channels, where people talk to each other about things that the organisation isn't even aware of.

According to Gallup, half the people turning up to work at the moment are looking for other jobs, even as they quietly go along with what is asked of them. The ideas, engagement, and laughter that are the feedstock of progress follow different paths to the ones set by work processes in pursuit of efficiency.

When there are no spaces where the uncertainty and fear that exists in an organisation can be addressed, it is hardly surprising that it has the effect it does.

There are so many little paths leading off the ones that we are supposed to follow, so it is not surprising that we go off the track of mission statements in search of something more resonant. People follow paths that lead off those hollow "We're a family" company messages in search of places to belong.

While lines that organisations draw suggest stability, the reality is like those sand bars of the Doombar, they shift with every tide.

Every time we succumb to the power of technology to automate a task in our busy lives, we abandon the art of dead reckoning. Whether as an organisation or an individual, we stop reading the stars, wind, and current, and lose our connection to the reality of our surroundings. When ChatGPT offers to create templates or integrations without being asked, it's like a chart plotter that insists on the most efficient course to a predetermined destination, blind to the fact that the most valuable discoveries often lie in the unmarked shallows that only appear to those willing to navigate by instinct.

Modern organisations have enclosed the workplace, the informal conversations, the cross-departmental collaborations, the time to think and experiment, in much the same way as farmland was enclosed in the 18th and 19th centuries. People find themselves tenants of their work, without rights to it. They find themselves in private plots of efficiency-focused processes, surrounded by impenetrable walls of legal protection, where the artificial fertiliser of technology is used even as it degrades the human experience it feeds off.

It is such a colossal waste. The technology being developed is staggeringly powerful, but incomplete. Entrepreneurs and organisations in search of a valuation sugar rush are deploying it lazily, without curiosity and respect for it. And, as with any youngster, the sugar rush will subside.

That’s when life gets interesting.

Where are those paths leading to? For the half of those turning up to work-as-transaction cultures, what paths are they making, or noticing, on their way to and from the office or sitting in their kitchen? What weak connections are becoming stronger for them? While the official world argues about hybrid work policies, something more interesting is taking root in the margins. Not the rejection of organisation, but the patient construction of new forms that make room for work as something better.

Looking across emerging workplace research, something interesting is happening that feels both inevitable and a bit unsettling. Those neat org charts that once made everything clear? They're becoming semi-permeable, perhaps more human and powering creativity outside the walls.

Scholars have been documenting how complexity is quietly undermining traditional work structures. Rigid job descriptions are giving way to something more improvisational—project-based work that shifts with circumstances. In the week we said farewell to Jim Lovell, it is a reminder that “Workplace, we have a problem” and that we will need the creativity and calmness he exhibited.

I’m interested in the anthropological evidence coming out of tech-heavy organisations. Researchers are finding a new kind of professional emerging: the "boundary spanner." Those who have learned to navigate multiple worlds simultaneously, translating between specialist departments like diplomatic interpreters at particularly complex summits.

Even as complexity demands the capabilities of the arts, deep specialists aren't going anywhere. While we need people who are masters of their field, power is flowing toward a different type: generalists who can connect the dots between disciplines and help different groups actually work together. These are people who're comfortable living at the intersections, who've developed what I like to think of as "fingertip feeling" for how different parts of complex systems really connect.

The workplace is becoming more like a "living marketplace" of skills where status depends less on job title and more on whether you can connect, interpret, and respond to what's actually happening as it’s happening. Whether you can adapt at the boundaries. It's a shift from hierarchies toward something more networked, where the most valuable people are those who are comfortable with uncertainty and good at making sense of complexity.

I can’t help wondering if what we are seeing is an existential threat to the ideal of scale that drove the industrial revolution, and defined our current corporates. Processes scale, but relationships do not, as companies such as Klarna, Zappos, Valve and Spotify have discovered. We need something else.

I am reminded of the film, ‘A Beautiful Mind” and John Nash’s insight that led to game theory. We get the best results when we do not focus on what is good just for us, but rather on what is good for us and those around us.

When adopting AI, rushing into the most obvious, high-profile applications often leads to intense competition, congestion, and diluted returns. A better path may be to focus not on the headline-grabbing, high-risk opportunities, but on areas where we can quietly use the technology to strengthen our own, more specific arena, while others do the same in theirs. This isn’t a winner-takes-all race, but a process of enhancing our capabilities in tandem with others. It’s calculus: differentiation to understand precise, local changes; integration to combine them into lasting impact. By pursuing coordinated, less crowded moves that steadily compound in value, we can achieve meaningful progress without fighting over the same over-exposed ground.

I’m exploring what this might mean at a personal level in New Artisans, but there’s a lesson I’m learning from working with clients that I think is worth mentioning here.

In looking at processes in general, and AI in particular, we consider three “containers”. Container 1 is the routine stuff - process and data heavy, with little personal input, like FAQ.

Container 3 is where the human relationship is paramount - in areas such as health or counselling. AI in support, not in control.

Container 2 is the interesting one. it is where the calculus is, where we face a challenge of “human value at risk”. Areas where we could easily automate to save time, but at the risk of diluting the human connection. Container 2 is double edged: Automate too aggressively and lose chance encounters, serendipitous insights, or emotional signals that surface only in conversation. Delay automation and risk inefficiency, inconsistency, or fatigue that reduces service quality.

Example: In the world of animal health there is a fine line between the connection created through a time consuming personal call on what might seem like a small matter, and the alienation that can be generated in an automated response to a companion animals wellbeing.

Kahneman's research (Thinking Fast and Slow) reveals why the calculus matter so much—some decisions require slow, deliberate processing, while others benefit from rapid pattern recognition. The art lies in knowing which is which, especially when algorithms excel at one but fail catastrophically at the other.

When we find ourselves Outside the Walls, whether by design or circumstance, we face the equivalent of the Doombar between us and finding a place where we belong. The shifting sands of workplace cultures, economic fortune and the tidal forces of technology make navigation difficult. The prospect of finding ourselves shipwrecked in sight of home is all too real, yet the risk of staying where we are may lend only illusory comfort.

So where, I wonder, might some of those faint paths off the road we find ourselves travelling on, lead? Here are some thoughts I am playing with:

Exploration: When the organisations we work with see the world as they are, rather than how it is, there is a role for those who are willing to explore rather than predict. Those who are prepared to ignore the “Here Be Dragons” warnings to explore possibility.

Boundary Reading: I think there is a craft to identifying lines in the shifting sands, and helping others to understand the implications for them. Charles Handy wrote of this in The Empty Raincoat, the paradox of success being that what made us successful often becomes what destroys us. The challenge is jumping to the second curve before the first one peaks, but most of us stay too long in our comfortable prisons."

The Economics of Trespass. When organisations enclose the commons of human connection and creativity, trespass becomes not just creative but economically necessary. When real value creation is happening in the "unauthorised" spaces, there is a need for those who can explore alternative economic models to create value outside traditional frameworks. Perhaps the work consultants used to do before they discovered PowerPoint :-)

Weather (or maybe Whether) Forecasting. When staying where we are is a greater risk than moving, people need those who can read the weather and judge the tides, because missing them has consequences.

Hostelries. Places where people can learn, teach, share and find shelter when they need it.

Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend

Albert Camus

There is, I suspect, an emerging need for something like Wayfinding practice. Not “leaders” so much as curators who can bring together the different threads we are all following at this time, and help us weave something from them we can use. A practice for individuals who shape what is emerging, rather than defend what has become obsolete.

Much as it may feel we are in the middle of change, I suspect we are barely at the beginning, have a long way to go yet, and much to discover together.

Until next week, go well.

"Following the light of the sun, we left the Old World."

From Christopher Columbus's log: