I find it interesting, at a time when we are overwhelmed by data and obsessed with measurement, that the posts that generate the most interesting responses use words that are evocative, not specific. Words like “resilience,” “sanctuary,” “language,” “coherence.” So, I’m going to add another one today:
Saturation.
At the end of a busy or particularly interesting week, I like to take the time to let my mind settle and look for a single word that captures what it has felt like.
This week, the word was saturated.
It’s not just a question of volume, but mix. Every conversation, every app, every news source, a tributary. A turbulent mixture of content and opinions generating thoughts and possibilities, good and bad.
At some point, the flow bursts its banks.
It reminds me of Csikszentmihalyi’s idea of “flow”, that intersection where our capability meets the challenges we face. When it’s balanced, we find ourselves generative, creative and productive, our task a deep pleasure. Another way for me to think about it is coherence; everything moving together in a virtual dance.
But it takes only a tiny change in that balance, such that the challenge overwhelms our capacity. Or, on the other hand, to find our capacity is nowhere near stretched enough, and the torrent of low-level, routine, soulless tasks, nowhere enough to challenge our capabilities, but more than enough to exhaust our capacity.
We find ourselves being some sort of intellectual production line worker.
It irritates me because I have no excuse. At this point in my life and career, almost everything I do is a choice; so finding myself getting close to saturation is a matter of discipline, or rather, a lack of it. Some of it is doubtless a hangover from a career where being saturated was a sign of commitment, and sometimes it can also be an avoidance tactic, a way of not dealing with the things that I really should deal with.
I, though, have the benefit of a floodplain, the space to let the overflow escape to, while I deal with the essential, so I can come back to it later.
That floodplain is capacity.
So, what is it like for those who have less of a choice? Whose work has to cope with an incoming stream from Slack, social media and work cultures that ape the idiocy of “hardcore” and “996”, the idea of working from 9 to 9, 6 days a week.
Those who don’t have the benefit of a “floodplain” to take care of the excess, and instead are forced to rely on longer hours, apps, and other digital drugs to try and cope with the flood of tasks within unforgiving performative cultures.
Floodplains, like bogs and marshes, play an essential role. They store the excess until we need it or have time to deal with it. They develop their own distinctive flora and fauna. When it comes to our workloads, I wonder how many really great ideas, our own creative flora and fauna, just get swept away in the stream of performative “work theatre” cultures? Cultures that would rather drain the swamp or the bog and build on the floodplains in pursuit of more now rather than better later.
It is common sense. Sponges only work when there are holes in them to absorb more. Without tides, it’s all flood, no ebb, no chance for the sediment of ideas and insight to settle.
Instead of natural tides, we end up with constructed ratchets - one-way devices where every “might” becomes “should” and every “should” becomes “must,” with no reversal possible.
We pay the price in a loss of discernment where everything feels equally urgent, and we lead a reactive rather than an agentic life. Our lives become incoherent when performance replaces purpose, and exhaustion is disguised as productivity.
The rush to invest in AI rather than do the hard work of looking for alternative areas of growth, is resulting in a super-saturated market. Everybody chasing the same thing in a mimetic FOMO frenzy. There will, of course, be a correction. We have no idea what exactly will happen, other than that a lot of people will find themselves swept away.
In ‘What Is AI’s Place in History?’, Carlota Perez argues that AI isn’t a new technological revolution but the next chapter of the ICT revolution that began in the 1970s. The crucial question isn’t invention but direction: will we shape this mature technology toward inclusive prosperity, or will it harden existing inequality? Perez places AI at a crossroads—either a bridge to genuine deployment or another missed turning point.
It’s a double tragedy.
Those committed to “work theatre” are looking for AI to replace mundane jobs, and in the process, losing the sources of imagination that, properly handled, come free with the employees they will throw overboard.
Meanwhile, the floodplains that are the overspill from our narrow-minded profit obsessions will end up containing vast numbers of those people with great imaginations. Given the opportunity, their ideas and connections will make the land they occupy fertile, but with limited access to capital to realise potential, whilst the rivers of short-term profit flowing to the ocean of investors become increasingly sterile, inhabited by technologies that only understand where we have got to, profit today, and not where we might go tomorrow.
I cannot help but think we’re heading for an inflection point, an inversion. Instead of defining ourselves in terms of credentials, job titles, and employers, we will increasingly be valued for what cannot be measured. As technology does the “grunt work” of the everyday process and the professions, the stuff of Graeber’s “bullshit jobs”, our roles will evolve.
In her book “The Work We Need”, Hilary Cottam identifies six principles of work that grow us rather than reduce us to “labour”. The nature of our Basic Needs, and the idea of “enough”. Then Meaning, Care and Repair, and our relationship with Time, Play, and Place. It’s an interesting and provocative book, not least for the fact that what it identifies is beyond the reach of analytical technology. Through my optimist’s telescope, I like the idea of people choosing their work rather than work choosing their people. As technology levels the playing field in terms of process and design, it will be people who make the difference through the generation of ideas and, more importantly, their delivery.
We don’t know exactly how it will happen, but it will likely be in increments, or as one of my favourite Hemingway quotes reads, “Gradually, then suddenly”.
The challenge for us already in the workplace will be how we deal with the organisations we currently find ourselves in, whilst we prepare for the opportunities of what may emerge. Perhaps more importantly, it will be how we look at our education system so that our children and grandchildren are ready for what might be open to them, not just prepared for a world that no longer exists.
I started this blog during the pandemic, together with its sister blog
. This one is to explore what is happening beyond the boundaries of our conventional organisations and New Artisans to consider what the role of craft in an emerging world of work might look like.It feels now as though they are converging, and that it’s time to go beyond observation to something more tangible. That’s why I’ve started The Athanor. It’s a small experiment with a few handfuls of people, to explore the possibilities of making work come to us, rather than us going to the work. Of fully harnessing all the parts of us that the current workplace neither utilises nor values. Working together to find our own individual paths to the places that Hilary Cottam writes about: meeting our basic needs, whilst expanding our presence in what really matters. Meaning. Care. Time, Play, and Place.
I’ll let Kurt Vonnegut have the last word, via John C Bogle:
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer now dead, and I were at a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island. I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel to know that our host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel ‘Catch-22’ has earned in its entire history?” And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.” And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?” And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”
John C. Bogle was the founder of The Vanguard Group. He originally delivered this speech as the commencement address for MBA graduates of the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University in May 2007. He died at his home in Pennsylvania in 2019. Source: James Clear