Reflections 25th May

On Craft and the Patient Work of Growth

We find ourselves at an interesting moment. As the old relative certainties about career progression and organisational life dissolve, something more vital wants to emerge from the edges. In corporate boardrooms and government offices, the conversation remains constrained by doctrine; quarterly targets, margins, risk and electoral cycles, while beneath the surface, a different kind of value creation is stirring.

I've been thinking about how real value grows over time - not the quarterly returns that dominate corporate attention, but the slower accumulation of meaning through connections between ideas and artefacts that enhance our relationships and experiences. It's the difference between harvesting and cultivating, between extraction and creation, between what we can measure immediately and what we might discover if we're patient enough to tend something properly.

There's something about craft that illuminates this process in ways that our current economic models seem to miss entirely…