Reflections - 16th of November.
When the Pressure in On....
When the pressure is on
When the pressure is on, as seems to be a permanent state right now, I believe the most critical skills we need are not leadership, strategy or transformation, but diplomacy.
Endemic uncertainty narrows our view of the world at the same time as it gives us ever more options, and increasingly less provenance. Separating the mendacious from the meaningful is increasingly difficult. Verifiable facts collide with noisy opinion viewed through ever more fragmented cultural lenses, creating boundaries where friction can produce enough heat to start emotional fires.
“War is nothing but a continuation of policy with other means.”
Carl von Clausewitz. On War. 1832
Whether it is a President who thinks that reputation can be weighed in eighteen-wheeler trucks of money, resident doctors who demand a baseline for pay that goes back to when they were barely out of primary school, or technology companies shedding people as though they were disposables, we are seeing war mentalities emerging as a default, with money as a weapon of choice.
We know that the investment frenzy in AI will end badly for most, and as the dead and wounded are taken from the battlefield, a different world order will be shaped as countries compete with corporations, even as both become less relevant to the way digital economies work. I see very few uses of the term “leader of the free world” to describe either America or its current leader, as Russia practises punk politics and China quietly builds networks of economic and political influence with the long term in mind.
The evolution of species and organisms has always taken place most rapidly where boundaries meet. Now it’s no different as the old order fragments, and we see more and more self-interested islands, and the number of boundaries we are working with is increasing exponentially. What we don’t know is what will emerge from them, but what we can be confident in is that there will be a need for diplomats at those boundaries. People who can act as intermediaries and catalysts, who can see the strengths and weaknesses inside the walls of those boundaries and craft new ways for them to work together.
I think the last time we have seen something like this was during the Enlightenment, in the years before the Industrial Revolution really got underway. It was a time of creative thinking on everything from geography and mathematics to science, the time at which the idea of economics began to emerge, and physiocrats, the predecessors of our current economists, began to speculate on the nature of the economy. Those Enlightenment thinkers themselves operated as diplomats between old and new knowledge systems, translating between incompatible worldviews, creating the intellectual bridges that would eventually transform society.
Writing in eighteenth-century France, the Physiocrats saw the economy as a living system rooted in the land. They understood economies as organic networks where true wealth flowed from the producers, those who worked the soil; it was then facilitated by the merchants, intermediaries who managed its exchange and circulation; while the sterile class, made up of nobles, financiers, and others disconnected from production, merely extracted value without creating it.
Seen through that lens, our technology sector becomes oddly familiar, almost agrarian in structure. Its ‘soil’ lies not in servers or platforms, but in the unseen layers of open-source code, hardware fabrication, and energy generation that make any digital productivity possible. These are the true producers, the ones who work the boundaries of possibility without fanfare, often working in public, financed by Governments, or at the edge of markets that barely acknowledge their centrality.
Around them swarm the merchants, packaging and distributing this fertility on a massive scale. Think of cloud providers, SaaS platforms, consultants, and systems integrators correcting, as it were, the flow of digital harvests from field to market. They are not the creators, but their stories build the myth of value and efficiency keeps the system operational.
And then, of course, there is the sterile class. Rent-seeking capital, data barons, and the algorithms of speculative finance, all of whom have perfected the art of extracting value without ever engaging in production. They absorb the surplus, inflate valuations, and turn the commons of code and craft into fenced estates of profit.
It poses a question we might ask more explicitly: if technology is becoming a sterile aristocracy, what becomes of its real producers?
It is a reminder that systems collapse when extraction exceeds regeneration, and when, rather than generate value themselves, organisations would rather acquire the value generated by others.
Which brings us back to the war metaphor, the default mode that emerges when we lack skilled boundary workers, when acquisition becomes the only strategy we know.
The Craft of Translation
The digital diplomats we need are not unlike the corporate artisans I’ve written about before, individuals with non-replicable capabilities trapped in structures that cannot properly value them. They’re not merely facilitators but craftspeople who translate between incompatible architectures, whether technical, cultural, or economic. They understand that genuine value creation happens through patient boundary work, not aggressive acquisition. The diplomat’s craft lies in recognising that what appears as friction at boundaries often contains the seeds of innovation, requiring careful cultivation rather than elimination.
These new diplomats work like mycorrhizal networks in forests, enabling resource exchange between seemingly separate entities. They create circuits of mutual benefit where the sterile class only knows extraction. This isn’t about grand treaties or universal protocols but about countless small acts of translation and connection that allow value to flow in multiple directions rather than simply upward.
Their skill follows via negativa principles, working through restraint as much as action. They resist the efficiency drive that would eliminate boundaries entirely, understanding that edges are where evolution happens. They maintain productive difference, allowing each domain to retain its particular genius whilst enabling exchange. Like alchemists working at the boundary between material and spiritual transformation, they know that some processes cannot be hurried, and that transformation has its own timing, as we are exploring at The Athanor
From Extraction to Cultivation
We face two possible futures. In one, boundaries multiply into walls, defended through economic warfare and value extraction, where the war metaphors become literal and permanent. In the other, skilled diplomats transform these boundaries into membranes, permeable to innovation whilst maintaining necessary distinctions. The artisan-diplomats we need don’t scale; they propagate, creating conditions where others can develop similar capabilities.
Just as the Enlightenment’s Republic of Letters created informal diplomatic channels between isolated pockets of learning, we need new forms of boundary work that honour both the digital commons and the craft of human interpretation. The question isn’t whether we’ll have boundaries, but whether we’ll have the diplomats capable of making them generative rather than destructive. These won’t be the sterile class’s dealmakers, focused on acquisition and control, but practitioners who understand that sustainable value emerges from patient cultivation at edges where different worlds meet.
The real challenge lies in developing these diplomatic capabilities before extraction exhausts regeneration entirely, before the boundaries harden into barriers. Each boundary managed through conflict rather than diplomacy represents a marginal loss, those small defeats that accumulate toward systemic failure, creating the tipping points I’ve explored elsewhere.
Perhaps what we’re witnessing is not the death of the old order but its transformation at countless boundaries, each one requiring its own diplomats, its own careful translation between what was and what might be.
The pressure we feel is the friction of these boundaries multiplying. The choice before us is whether we’ll meet that friction with warfare or with the patient craft of diplomacy, whether we’ll extract or cultivate, whether we’ll build walls or tend membranes through which new life might flow.
It’s a good time to look around you, at the culture you are working in, and decide where you belong.