Reflections 22nd June
On the dissolving middle...
When The Sunday Times reported in March 2025 that EY would axe 30 senior partners—the most significant redundancy plan in decades—it wasn't just cutting costs. It was systematically dismantling the middle layer where institutional knowledge lives and innovation breathes.
"Radical Centre... is not neutral, not middle-of-the-road, but a view of the whole road. From this vantage point, we can see that the various schools of thought on any one issue – political or otherwise – include valuable contributions along with error and exaggeration."
The idea of "the middle" is often derided. Middle Ground. Middle Management. Middle of the Road.
The power, we are told, resides either at the hub—where resources are controlled—or at the edge, where radicals and revolutionaries live.
This is wrong. Neither centre nor edge can survive without a vital middle to bridge them. And we're systematically destroying ours.
The Innovation Sweet Spot
There is too much investment in existing systems at the top of hierarchies, whether in organisations, academia, or society. Leaders have built their positions on current paradigms and face enormous pressure to maintain stability. They're mired in the sunk cost fallacy, risk-averse by necessity, bound by stakeholder expectations, and often too removed from ground-level problems to see emerging possibilities clearly.
At the bottom, there are typically insufficient resources, influence, or platforms to develop and spread ideas effectively. While grassroots innovation certainly occurs, transforming local solutions into broader change requires capabilities that extreme peripheries often lack.
The middle zone offers the sweet spot. Here you find people with enough resources and knowledge to experiment, but not so much power that they're locked into defending the status quo. They're close enough to real problems to understand them viscerally, yet have sufficient access to tools, networks, and platforms to scale solutions.
Breakthrough technologies often emerge from mid-tier companies rather than industry giants. Consider how Zoom emerged not from Silicon Valley giants or garage startups, but from a mid-sized company led by someone who understood both enterprise needs and technical possibilities—classic middle-zone positioning.
Or look at ARM Holdings, the Cambridge-based chip designer that became the foundation of modern mobile computing. Neither a hardware manufacturer nor a pure research lab, but a licensing company in the middle—positioned to see what both silicon producers and device makers needed, creating the architecture that powers virtually every smartphone.
And, a personal favourite: Patagonia's evolution from a small climbing gear company to a billion-dollar business that pioneered corporate environmental activism. Too large to be purely counterculture, too principled to be purely corporate—it occupies the middle ground where authentic values can scale without being compromised.
Social movements crystallise in middle-class communities with enough education to articulate grievances but enough frustration to demand change. Even biological evolution shows this pattern—speciation often occurs in populations at the edges of established ranges, not in the protected core or the struggling periphery.
The Great Hollowing Out
Yet everywhere we look, the middle is being eroded.
We are losing the Political Middle as frightened people migrate to the extremes and take comfort from blaming others, and nuance dies in favour of tribal allegiance.
Along with the Economic Middle. In housing, the "Bank of Mum and Dad" has become critical for new entrants, leaving those whose families exist on the edge stranded. In taxation, incomes are targeted while wealth accumulates untouched, creating dynamics that increasingly resemble neofeudalism.
And the Professional Middle. In the workplace, formerly "safe" middle-tier roles—from professional services to technology—dissolve as AI (or often just assumptions about AI) replaces human judgment. Those implementing these changes seem oblivious to the downstream consequences of removing humans from the emotional supply chains that engender the trust that underpins the brand.
We are losing the Institutional Middle. This contagious "unbundling" of businesses, education, health care, and local politics risks throwing unrecognised babies out with the muddy bathwater. When we empty the middle, we lose the organisation's connective tissue.
Whilst we should welcome some of this - few will miss the six-minute legal billing increments of lawyers, accountants and consultants when AI can do perfectly acceptable work, or the "bullshit jobs" that infest large bureaucracies. We are allowing those with short-term, profit-driven mindsets with no connection to those whose lives they impact free rein.
We need to change that because the systematic starving of the middle wasn't an accident—it was policy.
The Policy-Induced Famine
This erosion isn't accidental—it's the predictable result of policy choices that systematically starved the productive middle. After the 2008 financial crisis, the UK Government and Bank of England injected £895 billion of liquidity via Quantitative Easing (QE) into markets. Virtually zero went directly to infrastructure, R&D, or capital projects. Instead, QE money flowed into existing assets—property, equities, art—via portfolio effects, creating asset price inflation without investment-led growth. Roughly 40% of wealth gains were captured by the wealthiest 5%, with no measurable surge in corporate investment or productive lending.
The results are stark: house prices now represent 8.6 years of household income in England, while 20% of middle-income earners struggle to cover basic living expenses.
The middle was starved of what makes it relevant, so it appeared to become irrelevant. But this is an illusion. A healthy middle defines and connects centre and edge. The middle dissolves not because it lacks value, but because it becomes comfortable, bloated and complacent—or because it's systematically undernourished. This financial hollowing-out creates perfect conditions for a second wave of destruction, systematically dismantling institutional middle layers through misguided business orthodoxy.
The Scaling Trap
Prevailing business orthodoxy makes things worse. We encourage new businesses to "scale" and enter beauty contests to be acquired by sclerotic larger companies whose efficiency drives have left them devoid of imagination and innovation capacity. These larger companies seek acquisitions with an interest that lies less in the business itself and more in its potential as a shareholder distraction, providing a temporary image of youthful vigour.
Rather than grow into what they might become, promising ventures get grafted onto the root stock of moribund businesses, overwhelmed by dominant cultures, and dissolve into the mediocrity of the business that bought them.
Our “best practice” dogma doesn’t help. When growing businesses hire coaches, they're typically warned against the "lifestyle trap" and urged to prepare for scale. But when we desperately need a revitalised middle, this advice is wrongheaded. We need new thinking, fresh energy, and innovative approaches in the middle ground, not more of the same that only serves rentier investors. (Keynes famously dismissed the rentier as 'the functionless investor' who gained income solely from ownership of capital, exploiting its 'scarcity value')
Reclaiming Generative Space
I'm all for lifestyle businesses. They possess myriad advantages in uncertain times—they're inherently antifragile and can adapt quickly because they're not constrained by cumbersome, unproductive overhead. They're intimate environments where everybody knows each other. Their investors, if any, are partners in the business rather than remote rent-seekers. They can make strategic decisions independent of those with different agendas. In my experience, they're almost without exception much better places to work than the besuited sweatshops that large companies have become.
They also must, by necessity, provide products and services different from those produced at scale by larger competitors. They cannot afford to produce commodities and need stronger, more personal, and connected relationships with their clients.
The middle isn't just about size—it's about sovereignty. Lifestyle businesses, regional institutions, and middle-scale organisations represent something essential: economic actors who can make decisions based on their own values and immediate community needs, not distant shareholders or algorithmic optimisation.
But here's what we're missing: while we celebrate entrepreneurship and innovation, we've forgotten how to build what comes next—the institutional forms that enable risks to be taken, good ideas to mature and spread without being consumed by the very systems they seek to improve.
The question isn't just how to defend the middle, but how to make it generative again.
The answer does not lie in trying to resuscitate the structures that brought us here. They do not need reviving; they need hospicing.
The middle is key to reviving the life chances of those who find themselves at the wrong end of the neo-feudal system we have allowed to develop. The change we need will not come from the top. The reaction of corporations to the Trump administration is reflected in stark form in what we see elsewhere in the West.. They follow the money and are wilfully blind to the collateral damage they cause.
We're not just witnessing economic restructuring—we're watching the dismantling of the very layer that historically turned ideas into progress and grievances into solutions.
Lifestyle is not a good description for businesses that reflect values and priorities that put money where it belongs - as a means to an end, not an end in itself. Those who think, like farmers, in terms of generations and seasons, not quarters, and in terms of system health, not dividends.
Businesses that are generative, not extractive.
I will term them Commons Businesses until I find something better. All suggestions are welcome.
They require different leadership. Those committed to generative work that feeds and grows communities more than shareholders. They see growth as creating the new rather than hollowing out the tired enterprises that should have been laid to rest long ago.
The middle needs an identity that reflects its importance, gives it agency, and enables it to do the vital connective work only the middle can do. It connects the ideas at the edge to the resources they need.
What, I’m wondering, would an architecture designed for the middle actually look like?
I’m going to focus on that for the next few weeks. I will use notes and chat more to post short-form thoughts, ideas, and observations as they occur, hoping we might develop a dialogue on the topic.
The question at the heart of this is whether we can recreate the vital middle before it's gone.
Please join in. We know from our Wednesday calls that conversation is where ideas are to be found. If you’d like to add to them, let me know:
‘We can’t just double down on the old stuff. It makes our thinking rigid and blinds us to the very problems that got us where we are now. And tech won’t answer all these problems. It’s useful in assimilating facts in a press-the-button way, but it mustn’t be mistaken for judgement. Judgements that really matter aren’t refinable in that way; they need an overlay of imagination and intuition. Most of the mistakes in my career have been when I’ve ignored that and gone with the prevailing narrative, but it’s always, always will be, a mistake not to think for yourself.’
. Embracing Uncertainty.