There is something quite sterile about the conversations in the world of business and politics at the moment. I sense more fear than curiosity, as though we have been swept overboard from a vessel of normality and are thrashing around, looking for something to hold on to.
Just because we sense that the things we have been told to cling to are disintegrating around us, it does not mean it is true ; just that we are looking in the wrong places.
For most of this century, we have been telling ourselves a story that technology is the determinant of our futures. That Silicon Valley is the centre of the material universe, that we are helpless in its presence, and must shape ourselves to technology rather than the other way around. We have allowed technology to shape our education systems and our economies, and paid for it with our sense of self.
Technology does not offer us a home. We must look elsewhere.
“The individual is not the social atom of modern theory, but a social being deeply embedded in a network of groups, customs, and traditions.”
Robert A.Nisbet. The Quest For Community (1953)
In a conversation earlier in the week, the thread led us to consider the power of origin, and I found myself wondering how much our obsession with material trivia has distanced us from the network of groups, customs, and traditions that have shaped us into who we are today.
The notion of origin is central to the ethos of the artisan. Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes artisans as having soul in the game.
Anything you do to optimize your work, cut some corners, or squeeze more “efficiency” out of it (and out of your life) will eventually make you dislike it. Artisans have their soul in the game. First, artisans do things for existential reasons first, financial and commercial ones later. Their decision making is never fully financial, but it remains financial. Second, they have some type of “art” in their profession; they stay away from most aspects of industrialization; they combine art and business. Third, they put some soul in their work: they would not sell something defective or even of compromised quality because it hurts their pride. Finally, they have sacred taboos, things they would not do even if it markedly increased profitability.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Skin in the Game. p34.
As we dismantle the work of those who brought us here, in manufacturing, agriculture, and healthcare, and reassemble it wherever it makes temporary economic sense to maximise returns for those who own the assets, we also dismantle stories of origin; we become lost souls, and find ourselves adrift, searching for somewhere to belong.
At its best, our work offers us a place to belong, but only if it is an expression of who we are.
Over the last few weeks, I have been thinking about boundaries and the nature of tides and sandbars that shape how the sea arrives on land. There’s something about the nature of the sea, and the words of Adam Nicolson when he wrote that “The sea is not made of water. Creatures are its genes” that resonates with me.
Our economies are like oceans that flow around the world. Aristotle introduced the concept of economics in his Politics, distinguishing between oikonomía (natural household management) and chrematistiké (the art of wealth acquisition, often through trade or money lending). He viewed the former as necessary and virtuous, while the latter was seen as potentially corrupting if pursued without limits.
We have lost sight of the difference. Economies are not made of money; they are made of people. We have lost touch with the idea, expressed by Keynes, that beyond the mechanics of exchange, it is our animal spirits that drive economies, embodied as confidence, trust, fairness and stories that give rise to a spontaneous urge to action. Economies are emotional things.
Yet we have caged the animals and ceded their power to algorithms that unemotionally measure and predict the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.
Our economies have become soulless.
In the single-minded pursuit of wealth, we have allowed the soul of our communities, where the deeply embedded network of groups, customs, and traditions resides, to atrophy.
If we want to find somewhere to belong, we need to set the animals free.
And the animals, of course, are us.
Animals, Algorithms and Three Decimal Places
During the winter of 1961 at MIT, meteorologist Edward Lorenz made an accidental discovery that would revolutionise science. Lorenz was using a Royal McBee LGP-30 computer to simulate weather patterns with 12 variables representing temperature, pressure, wind speed, and other atmospheric conditions. To save time, Lorenz decided to restart a simulation from midway through a previous run. He entered numbers from the computer printout, typing 0.506 instead of the full precision value of 0.506127 that was stored in the computer's memory.
Three decimal places. This seemingly inconsequential difference of 0.000127, equivalent to one part in 10,000, doubled in size every four days. Within two months of simulated time, all resemblance between the two weather patterns had disappeared.
It feels like a metaphor. In pursuit of speed and efficiency, the three decimal places were dropped. In today’s workplace individuality is those three decimal places. The insights, flaws, energies and other very human characteristics of the individual that we remove through processes and technology lead to a completely different result than the one we might have had if they were included. The difference between the employee and the artisan is perhaps those three decimal places. Would the result be better or worse? I don’t know - but they would be different, and we should give ourselves the chance to explore.
I wonder whether that is the challenge we face as we wrestle with the wonder that is AI. To me, it has a sense of the uncanny valley to it.
The Uncanny Valley is the uneasy feeling people experience when something looks almost, but not quite, human, like a lifelike robot or digital avatar. Because it is close to human but imperfect, the brain picks up on subtle flaws that trigger discomfort or even revulsion.
Entrepreneurs, investors, and increasingly politicians see the sea, not the creatures that are its genes. And that is fundamental, because the creatures sense what the algorithms do not. Ed Zitron’s” Better Offline” Podcast has been raising this for weeks. Here is a summary of his Friday post (listened to by me, summarised by ChatGPT. The original is the best.)
When Growth Looks Like Failure
Nvidia’s recent earnings show how dangerous inflated expectations can be. The company grew 50% year on year, yet markets punished it for “missing” analyst hopes of even more. The same pattern plays out in organisations adopting AI or driving transformation: progress is real, but if expectations are set by hype, achievement looks like failure. The lesson is clear — managing the narrative matters as much as managing the numbers. Hype creates fragility; grounded expectations build resilience. Sustainable success comes not from chasing wild projections but from framing progress in ways that allow it to compound over time.
Setting the Animals Free
Our power lies in who we are, understanding it, taking responsibility and using it. It is at the heart of the sister blog to this,
.New Artisans understand something that both pure technologists and traditional managers miss: those three decimal places aren't bugs in the system, they're features. The capacity for heuristic thinking, contextual judgment, and serendipitous connection is what algorithms will not replace. It's what makes human collaboration irreplaceable.
Releasing the animal spirit of the artisan is a serious undertaking in a world where economics compels us to be someone else to play our part in a process-driven economy.
But I’m not sure we have a real choice. Oscar Wilde is supposed to have said, “Be yourself, everybody else is taken”, and whilst there is no evidence he actually said or wrote this, he surely thought it.
“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” (De Profundis, 1905). Oscar Wilde.
One hundred and twenty years later, his truth still holds:
The economic models we have grown up with would prefer us to be other people, on the one hand, to be consumers in markets and, on the other, to be algorithms in the workplace. And so we find ourselves in that uncanny valley, with just those three decimal places separating us from algorithms.
Evolution quickens at the threshold, in places where boundaries blur and new combinations become possible. Steven Johnson describes this as the “adjacent possible,” the zone where existing forms are recombined into new ones. Nature shows us this most vividly where the sea meets the land: estuaries, tidal pools, and mangrove shallows, teeming with improbable life because they are neither one thing nor the other. These edge-worlds remind us that creativity requires both stability and disturbance; enough structure to sustain life, enough flux to force transformation. It is in the restless meeting places, not the calm interiors, that possibility multiplies.
Perhaps the conversations in business and politics feel sterile, not because we lack answers, but because we've forgotten how to ask questions that honour the three decimal places. In pursuing limited goals of short term efficiency and productivity, we forgo the potential that exists when we bring our whole selves work worth doing, and find ourselves working at the edge of our abilities in pursuit of what matters to us.
The little boy in the photograph at the header is my grandson. He sees the sea, but I know he wonders about the creatures that inhabit it. He reminds me that we need to do the same.
Those 'three decimal places' - the irreducible complexity of who you are - aren't just what algorithms and LLMs can't capture. They're where your real leverage lies. Over the next month, I'm exploring how people who understand this can work together at the edges of change, not trying to fix broken systems but building the adjacent possible where new forms of meaningful work can emerge. If you're ready to move from observation to action, something is building here.