For a long time, the technologists who built AI have deserved the attention. So too, perhaps more accurately, have the investors who funded them, often drawn from industries that were themselves built on extracting value from earlier digital platforms. That helps explain why…

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The Athanor is now in transition to a practice as much as a publication. We work with founder-led organisations, individual leaders and small groups on the thinking that has to be done as we reach the edges of the maps we have been using, and enter territory defined by febrile geopolitics, changing climate and a technology that we do not yet trust.

For those who want to go to source, I have included links at the end of the post

The Road Ahead

At the end of last week, Indy Johar published a provocation called What If the Future Cannot and Shouldn't Be Controlled? His claim is that the central failure of our systems is a wrong theory of change. The modern world still works from a control-based imagination of progress: futures designed from above, intelligence gathered near the centre, and people and places expected to adapt to plans made elsewhere.

Complexity defeats this, he argues; no centre can sense the whole. His alternative is distributed agency, resting on four conditions (capacity, capability, intention, imagination), with justice reframed as the fair distribution of future-making power, and sovereignty exploded outward to wherever reality is made and remade.

"Growth is not simply the enlargement of the system. Growth is the deepening of agency within it."

His essay is welcome company here. It is our October diagnosis conducted at the scale of the polity: the architecture is the problem, control is a spent instrument, and what matters now is that the potential capability of the people inside a system is accelerating faster than their employer's. His pairing of capacity and capability will be familiar to readers here.

Sitting with it a while, though, a gap opens: the context in which we work. Johar's essay is about conditions; it can say what a society must distribute, but not how an individual, carrying real expectations, in the middle of a working life, becomes someone able to use that agency once it arrives. In a volatile system, agency is sometimes thrust upon us whether we are ready or not. Distribution can be legislated; our individual and community deepening cannot. That happens slowly in small groups as we feel our way forward, with opportunities to fail in private before we exercise it in public. Johar's essay is a powerful call, with a logic that requires work it does not yet describe.

For the Athanor, that work is a practice we have spent ten months feeling our way into.

The sealed vessel

The vas hermeticum was the alchemists' vessel, a sealed container inside which change took place out of sight. Our vessel is AI. The practice has been learning how to think with Claude, to draw on its capabilities without surrendering agency; to keep it as emissary, and not allow it to aspire to becoming master when it comes to our thinking. That has been true since the first experiment, as the spring's posts recorded what we did and learned because, in the words of Stephen Covey, we needed first to understand, before seeking to be understood. Working with these systems is alchemical, in the strict sense that we work with a technology whose inner nature we cannot observe.

For a couple of decades during my career, I spent a lot of time working in cultures that were strange to me, in languages I had limited capability in. The lesson learned was not to let ego get in the way; the gap between what we think we have said and what we assume has been understood is often a chasm that is easy to fall into. Spend money on the best translator you can find.

Whatever language you use to engage with a large language or reasoning model, it is working with us, in effect, in a second language. We can now say this with more confidence, because researchers have been trying to look inside. They traced prompts through the layers of a large model as the words ceased to be words in any language; the middle of the model works in an abstract geometry of concepts, and only in the final layers is the result dressed again in the language of the question. Ask in French and French is applied at the end, the way a translator drafts in thought and renders in speech. Whatever language the machine speaks to us in, it speaks it as a second language, translated out of a place that has no mother tongue at all. Every exchange is a translation twice over, and important parts of what generated the intent of our question can get lost in translation. We choose what goes into the vessel; we read what comes out; we caanot watch the working between.

The old alchemists knew this predicament in their bones. The vessel was sealed; and the transformation happened out of sight; all she or he possessed were their inputs, their tools, and whatever emerged when the vessel was opened.

From that position the old craft built two disciplines we can learn from.

The first was the preparation of the materia prima: the endless washing and grinding of what went in, on the understanding that the work could be no better than its beginnings, and AI turns out to be more sensitive than its fluent confidence would suggest. The robustness research keeps finding that changes we pass over in our haste; formatting, punctuation, the order of examples, swing results by margins that should embarrass everyone involved; a rephrasing that preserves every word of our meaning can flip the answer. Clarity of input is a material condition of the work, and a slow hour spent preparing it is where a good deal of the outcome is decided.

When it comes to AI, the thinking we do before we start matters a great deal.

The second was the assay. The touchstone, the cupel, the acids that part gold from what merely gleams. An entire craft built on the hard-won knowledge that outputs lie, and that the ones which lie best look most like gold, especially when gold was what was being hoped for. The translation across time is exact, because it has now been shown, formally, that fluent falsehood cannot be engineered out of these systems; whatever the architecture or the training, they will sometimes produce confident error, and it arrives in the same polished costume as the truth. If we measure the quality of the output by its fluency, and nothing else, we are exposing ourselves to a real risk of Fools Gold.

Constructive scepticism

Scepticism, in this practice, is not suspicion of the tool but the stance of an assayer toward any material we have brought out from an AI.

We need to think as critically about what we accept from an AI as we do about what it we send it, because the AI will always assume there is value present in what it offers. If we challenge what it offers, it will often apologise and offer another version, because it is designed to flatter and please. That does not diminish its astonishing capabilities, but it is wise to treat it as a political animal, and make sure we have a strong enough understanding of what we ask of it to be able to appraise it.

It distinguishes the assayer's stance from the two easier positions on offer: refusal to engage and learn, which gives us temporary respite from the work of engaging with something that will not go away, and credulity, which abjures agency and delegates responsibility to others. Both are ways of avoiding judgement, which is the one thing the situation will not let us outsource. This is Pye's workmanship of risk in an unfamiliar setting: the quality of the results we get depends on the judgement we exercise at every moment in working with AI, and the moment of the assay most of all. If we are not confident of the quality of what went in, we are vulnerable to what comes out. As those of us around in the early days of programming remember: GIGO. Garbage in, garbage out.

One more thing. AI does not deal in meaning, or mētis. The relation between an expression we use and what we intend by it, the purpose a piece of work serves, the person it is for; none of that survives the prompt, because none of it was ever in the training material. AI supplies structure and unexpected adjacency, drawn from an inhuman geography of everything we have said to one another. Responsibility for who the work we produce is for, and who it will affect, remains ours.

These models are the most widely distributed instrument of thought since print, and distribution is what this argument calls for. I am working on the basis that using AI in creative pursuits, including leadership, strategy, and anything that involves thinking more than process, is a craft.

AI will deepen agency only in those who have learned how to use it. For those who prepare what goes in and assay what comes out, the vessel extends their reach; for someone who takes fluency for truth, it produces dependency wearing the costume of capability. The difference lies wholly in craft. If the future is to be made by many, as Johar wants and I do too, then the assayer's disciplines are part of the justice he describes, and they are learned the way craft has always been learned: beside someone, on real material, with the possibility of failure kept constantly in view.

And so,

Going forward: the writing continues, and will keep it open as public inquiry and observation, with additional material for paid subscribers.

Alongside that, the practice is developing at the speed of trust: individuals and small groups, working on their own questions in their own contexts, with the unlike mind that is AI as third participant, and the assayer's craft as the discipline. Selecting what we put in with care, testing what comes out before we build on it. Judgement always ours.

What we cannot yet say is what fluency with AI does to the one acquiring it; whether structure without meaning proves a poor substitute for thought or, handled with the right scepticism, something useful, an inexhaustible supply of new material on which our own intent can be worked. The alchemists laboured for centuries ahead of the theories that would explain their material, and their disciplines were what kept their integrity in the face of scepticism.

Using AI is an inexact science and emergent craft. We are all Alchemists now.

Sources

For readers who would rather test the assertions than take them on trust. Each entry notes what it carries in the piece and how hard it can be leaned on.

Indy Johar, "What If the Future Cannot and Shouldn't Be Controlled?" (5 July 2026). The provocation the opening section engages. The quotations are verbatim; "exploded sovereignty" and the four conditions of agency (capacity, capability, intention, imagination) are his terms.

Wendler, Veselovsky, Monea and West, "Do Llamas Work in English? On the Latent Language of Multilingual Transformers" (ACL 2024). The traced prompt. Intermediate layers of a large model work in an abstract concept space, with the language of the question applied only in the final layers, and the space leans toward English semantics. Peer-reviewed at a top venue; the finding is on one model family, though later work has broadly confirmed it.

Wu et al., "The Semantic Hub Hypothesis" (ICLR 2025). Extends the shared inner space across languages and modalities (code, arithmetic, vision, audio), and shows that a nudge applied inside the space moves the output in every surface form, so the space is used rather than incidental.

One caution belongs here rather than in a footnote: "no mother tongue" is our reading of what these two papers describe, not a claim either of them makes. The evidence shows a shared non-linguistic representation space with an English tilt; the interpretation is ours to defend.

Bender and Koller, "Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data" (ACL 2020). The argument that a system trained only on the form of language cannot recover what a speaker intends by it; this carries the claim that meaning, and mētis, stay on our side of the table. It is the careful version of the argument for which "stochastic parrots" is the weaker slogan. The philosophical dispute remains live; the interpretability work above complicates it without settling it.

Sclar, Choi, Tsvetkov and Suhr, "Quantifying Language Models' Sensitivity to Spurious Features in Prompt Design" (ICLR 2024). Formatting alone produced performance spreads of up to 76 accuracy points in few-shot settings, and the sensitivity survives model scale and instruction tuning. Later robustness work (for example arxiv.org/abs/2504.06969) confirms that meaning-preserving rephrasings can flip answers. The direction is consistent across studies; the magnitudes are not.

Xu, Jain and Kankanhalli, "Hallucination is Inevitable: An Innate Limitation of Large Language Models" (2024). The formal result behind the claim that fluent falsehood cannot be engineered out of these systems, whatever the architecture, training or prompting. The paper's definition of hallucination is broad; the safe practical reading is that confident error cannot be eliminated entirely, only managed. OpenAI's "Why Language Models Hallucinate" (2025) reaches a compatible conclusion by a statistical route.

David Pye, The Nature and Art of Workmanship (Cambridge, 1968). The workmanship of risk: quality that depends on judgement exercised while the work is in motion, as against the workmanship of certainty, where the outcome is fixed before the work begins.

A review. Part three of three.

I left winter with a question hanging: what do we bring to the container that the Athanor is?

The spring answered it in the way this space answers anything, through experiment, in public, with the results posted whether they flattered us or not. This final part of the review runs from late February to the present, and has disclosures to make; about the experiments, about a colleague the archive has kept off stage, and about what the Athanor has become while nobody was announcing anything.

The Turn

One disclosure first. In October I wrote that the intention was “not to build a business for me”. Yet the Athanor is now, among other things, a emergent practice; it has pilots running, and a practice model in its third draft. What changed is that the idea at the centre of this work needs expression beyond writing. We are in the midst of perhaps the most deep-seated change we have faced in Europe for ten generations. Macro changes, from climate to ecology that the conditions I am writing this in bear witness to, to the global as accepted ideas of alliances dissolve in self interest, to the irreducibly local as the whole idea of careers, jobs and the communities they support is called into question. We can feel the ground moving beneath our feet, the maps we were brought up with no longer reliable, and find ourselves coming ashore in a land we do not understand.

The theory of the Athanor requires testing.

What did not change is the commons. The writing stays open, what we learn tending the fire, and what a piece of work reveals about the territory we find ourselves in stays shared. While the maps we make belong to the people who sponsor the expeditions, what we learn is shared. Theory turned into practice because some of the people who gathered round the fire that is our conversations, asked for something more intentional, and refusing them would have been a strange way to honour the work.

Experiments in Public

The experiments had begun to change gradually before the change became evident. In late February I stopped reading about what AI could do and built something with it: an application shaped around my own thinking, shared with others and written into existence in plain English. I called it a Gutenberg moment, a structural shift in who gets to make things. “What I built will not scale, nor do I want it to.” The point sat at the opposite pole from scale: our tools shaped to those individual needs and idiosyncrasies that scale must sand off in order to work.

Then the experiments proper. The first was published whole: one prompt to an AI (Claude, in our case), with the output posted unedited, a taxonomy of communication from the informational to the artistic. The lesson learned was that the machine produced a competent first draft at speed, and in doing so it put us on notice: if our own communication only sits at the level a machine reaches in seconds, the mediocrity is ours. It also has a limit that no quantity of compute repairs: It has no scars, no regrets and no accountability. It has no social texture.

A fortnight later those limits became a working rule: “It is difficult to defend what you did not build.” Our inner circles, where accountability lives and someone can push back, belong to those people who carry that social texture. As I wrote in March, other people’s recipes, no matter how famous the chef, will not save us.

The Unlike Mind

The deeper lesson of the spring was relational. In the early 1990s, in Shanghai, I spent three years of meals, conversations, and small acts of reliability dissolving a single word, escrow, which two worldviews did not share. Working with AI asks for the same patience: it is an unlike mind, and unlike minds repay relationship rather than command. The alchemists knew this territory; they worked in small, serious communities, the Sodalitas, writing to one another about what the material had said when it refused to behave as expected. Paracelsus held that “the practitioner’s own character was a variable in the work”: greed and impatience produce, structurally, a poorer quality of observation, and that conviction is now built into how we use these tools.

The instrument matters less than the hand and the attitude that guides it.

Working in the Dark

April pointed to the core of the emerging practice. There is a difference between uncertainty, where our map has features even though the path forward is unclear, and ignorance, where the categories needed to draw a map do not yet exist. We find ourselves working in the dark.

Most advisory work is tooled for the first and silent about the second. The April piece, the first to call this “The Athanor Project”, chose the second: the offer is “not just the insight that follows the darkness but the capacity to hold the darkness itself well”. It gave Nigredo, the dissolution of what we are familiar with working markers a practitioner can recognise: frameworks rather than foundations; someone attending the athanor; waiting for what turns out to matter rather than hurrying it.

That brief has a designer, which is the second disclosure: there are two of us. Benjamin has been architecting the environment this work runs inside. He starts from a background of building AAA open-world video games; worlds with enough internal coherence that meaningful things can happen in them without being scripted, where no direction is privileged and the map extends outward from wherever the explorer happens to stand.

Each person we work with holds a private space of their own, including a personal working relationship with an AI, and a shared space with others in a dedicated AI space, which has been the third participant in this work since the first experiment.

Movement between private and shared space is manual and deliberately slightly effortful. The friction is the point; choosing what to carry across the boundary is part of the thinking.

The philosophy of games also puts in an appearance now. Huizinga, one of the first to look at play as a discipline, held that play is the condition under which new things come into being. His “magic circle”, the bounded space inside which different rules apply, is the fool’s licence I wrote about in December and the "Thin Space" of February given a theoretical home.

The environments we are building are constructed as one: bounded, and made to provoke. From the Reggio Emilia tradition of early childhood education comes the other half of the thought: a rich environment does not passively teach; it actively encourages the curiosity from which we learn. This is not process, it is the work of turning mysteries into heuristics we can work with. The algorithms of process come later, much further down the path.

Prima Materia

And so the winter’s question got its answer. What we bring to the Athanor is material already partly worked: people who, in the post’s words, “have taken the time to do the reading, taken the walks, and sat with their unease”. The discipline that follows is stream before structure; refusing the easy, tidy outline until the thought has actually arrived at sufficient clarity to yield a prompt that is itself the product of critical thinking, because “what comes out depends more than anything else, on what went in” It is all too easy to let the machine work its magic and believe that is is thinking. But thinking alone is not enough. Progress worth making requires not just thinking, but feeling, sensing and patience. The slow hour at the start belongs to noticing. Used that way, AI can shoulder the episteme, the knowledge, and give mētis, craft and soul, room to grow.

For those of us who advise, what this makes possible is closer to the older sense of counsel: a substrate built slowly over years, brought to bear on one person’s actual question, in their context, on their terms, to make the difference they seek.

The Cut

The last post of this tranche found its core, serendipitously, in an airport restaurant. The Alembic sat beside the athanor in the alchemist’s workshop: the fire controlled the heat, and the alembic distilled what was put into it. (the alembic is used to produce the finest spirits; less efficient than than the industrial stills used by big companies for speed and volume, the alembic requires craft)

The craft is in the cut; telling the “heads”, the early weak yield from the productive “hearts,” from the over concentrated “tails”, a judgement made in seconds on the strength of craft born of experience. “Fast thinking is downstream of slow thinking.” A generative model is a continuous still, fluent, tireless, and average; combined with a human however, it as an alembic instead, it refines in a way data alone cannot. Conversations are our Athanor, and provided the heat. The way we work is the Alembic, the way we distil those conversations.

The judgement that separates heads, heart and tails, as it must, stays with us.

And so here we are. The practice is running trials with “real people with real challenges”. The work is done in three-month tranches, and the shortening from October’s idea of twelve-to-eighteen month tranches is deliberate. A tranche ends at a waypoint or with a conclusion; both are clean endings. The discipline of choice, to continue or to stop, belongs to both parties; it removes the drift that advisory relationships breed when nobody names the day.

The long arc still takes the time it takes. What changes is that continuing is a choice as a series of hypotheses made at the start encounter unexpected realities. As my mountaineering friends have it. “The summit is optional”. Returning safely, and wiser is the aim. We can always look for another route.

This is a practice, more than a business. We will not pitch, and this series is not a prospectus. The people who find this work are usually directed to it by someone who knows them well enough to recognise the moment.

Which leaves the door open. The Wednesday conversations keep the fire alight, and our next tranche has begun whether we are ready or not. If you have read these three parts and recognised yourself and your situation, the invitation is the one this place opened with.

Ten months have not changed it: show up, and bring some kindling.

Notes

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be reconfiguring the Athanor space as we move from theory to practice. As part of that, we’ll be moving over to Substack, and we’ll keep you informed of the moves that we make and make sure you’re fully informed. If you have any questions or just want to catch up on what we’re doing, just drop me a mail. richard@richardmerrick.co.uk

Part one of this review ended on a question: what forms, when you decline to force the form? This part is the answer that formed over the winter, between November 2025 and February 2026, when the Athanor had no programme to run; only a name and the fire of Wednesday conversations. The claim that the furnace metaphor simply worked is the kind a writer should distrust, so what follows lets the dates do the arguing.

The first thing was a change of register. October’s writing was diagnosis, aimed outward at structures. From mid-November the posts grew longer, arrived less often, and turned their attention from what was failing to what was forming. The heat had been turned down to where the work could actually happen.

The Second Apprenticeship

The winter’s first contribution was a better account of who the work was for. In November I wrote about the two apprenticeships. The first is the one we all know: it trains us to succeed in the world as it is measured, through exams, credentials, careers, and legibility to systems built for scale. It is necessary and compelling, yet only half the story. The second begins quietly, often in the cracks between meetings: “the apprenticeship of emergence, of who we might become, not just what we were trained to do.” It has no institutional home, curriculum, or formal rite of passage; it lives in a third space, outside the walls of the first.

This redrew October’s portrait more carefully. The people gathering at this fire had completed their first apprenticeship, often with distinction; the second had begun for them whether they had named it or not.

“We realise that we have become highly competent in a world that cannot see the whole of us.”

That sentence, from late November, has since done more work in subsequent conversations than anything else I wrote during that time.

The Fool’s Permission

December asked what acting on any of this would cost us, and answered: the willingness to look foolish. The fool of the medieval court was licensed to speak truth through humour and play, living at the edge, revealing the cracks in certainty.

“Stupidity is passive; foolishness is a craft. One narrows the world, the other opens it.”

I claimed the licence and used it, setting out my own foolish view of work, a set of boundaries to explore, and a laboratory to explore them in.

Play, I have come to think, is the word doing the work in that post, although I did not give it that much heft at the time. The fool’s licence is the player’s licence: a bounded space in which the ordinary rules are suspended, so that things can be discovered rather than performed. Everything the Athanor had refused in November (the schedule, the curriculum, the predetermined outcome) is what play refuses by its nature. The practice would later build on that idea deliberately, but that winter it arrived dressed as self-deprecation, which is perhaps how the important ideas prefer to travel.

The laboratory was agriculture, a subject I have listened to at 05:45 most mornings for twenty-five years without ever farming an acre. “Farmers do not act directly on the harvest; they act on the conditions that make a harvest possible.” A week later the metaphor came home to the idea of allotment: individual plots, shared ground, knowledge passed over the fence, the olive press as a common resource. I used the metaphor then set it down, but it remains the best description of how the practice now handles what it learns, although I could not have told you that in December.

The Alchemist’s Vessel

Then, in the shortest days, the theory started to take shape. Conversations as Ecosystem argued that conversations are developmental. They have childhoods of abundance and play, adolescences of identity and heat, adult phases where divergence and convergence balance, and old ages of precedent and protective politeness; they can mature, calcify, or renew.

Organisations rarely fail for lack of intelligence or effort; they fail because their conversations stop developing. And then the sentence the whole winter had been revealing:

“Our conversations are our Athanor.”

The vessel was never the website or the idea of a programme; it was the quality of the conversation itself; everything else followed from it: the smallness, the rhythm, the curation of who sits at the fire, the refusal to scale. “Transformation is not an act of will. It is a process of attention.”

Alchemy in Earnest

The start of the new year sharpened the framing, with some help from the weather. January’s news was hard power in every register, and the writing’s response was to treat it as climate rather than crisis: something to read and dress for, since it could not be managed. Against that background, the idea of alchemy started working for a living. The sequence was laid out: nigredo, the necessary decomposition; albedo, clarification by subtraction; rubedo, reintegration at a higher level. The frame is fractal, the same at the scale of a person, a group, and a society, and it gave the practice its grammar of patience.

Roger Martin’s funnel gave it an increased definition. We have spent decades perfecting the conversion of heuristics into algorithms while starving the other end of the funnel, where mysteries become heuristics, with the result being an economy productive in exploitation and sterile in exploration. The work of this place, I argued, sits at the mystery end: “the economic inefficiency of being approximately right is far preferable to the sterility of being precisely wrong.”

Value followed a week later, through Kurt Lewin’s two regions and James Scott’s mētis. Region Alpha is the world as it can be measured; Region Beta is the world as it is lived, where beauty, fairness, and trust reside, known by their absence more than their presence. Mētis is the knowing that comes from being embedded in particular places and relationships, the kind that cannot be shortcut without being destroyed: “We can buy a building, but not a culture, and acquire a company, but not its trust.” Reading those two posts back, the offer of the practice started forming in plain sight: the holding of the space between the measured and the lived, on behalf of people who must answer to both. And the line we now use for the relationship itself, attributed to Camus, appeared in the new year post:

Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.

Presence, and a Seed

February made it concrete. The Alchemy of Presence drew on a Thursday group that has met since the beginning of Covid, over five years of “online meetings that explore and test, physical gatherings that complete and transform”. The conditions it identified have become the practice’s working checklist: voluntary participation, rhythm, a sufficient degree of ritual, small scale (around eight, plus or minus two), and a kairos relationship with time that lets things emerge when they are ready.

And then, almost in passing, the seed. “I am convening a small group experiment: two or three practitioners, each with a client or two, meeting online and physically over a six month period.” The sentence carries more weight than its placing suggested. Practitioners, with clients, for a fixed period: the room I described in part one as a workshop with members had quietly acquired a different shape. I barely noticed at the time; it matters more in hindsight.

What the Fire Is For

A week later I finally asked the question I had been circling since August, which is what the Athanor is actually for. The answer turned out to be that it sits outside any notion of purpose: it exists as “a space to host possibility”, and kin to the thin places of Celtic folklore where the boundary between states wears through, places where mysteries become more tangible.

The moment you define the possibility, you have moved from alchemy to project, and whilst both are needed, the mistake is to let the second colonise the first. The post closed with Hennig Brand, the alchemist who boiled down everything he owned in search of gold and instead got phosphorus. “Not what he expected, but unexpectedly valuable.”

The working answer to the purpose question was a single sentence, setting the terms for everything the spring would do: “the Athanor will be shaped by what we bring to it, not what we expect of it.”

Which raises the question the third part of this review takes up. If the vessel is the conversation, and the work is shaped by what we bring, then everything depends on the quality of the material. The experiments with AI, the tools, the unlike minds, the practice and its pilots; all of it follows from that one dependency, and the spring was spent finding out what it demands.

We do not provide answers; we distil them from what we bring to the conversation.

Like any exploration into new territory, the Athanor project started with an idea and an aspiration, not a map. Or, as Antonio Machado, had it:

"Traveller, there is no path, the path is made by walking."

So it’s a good time to look back and see where we are, and where we’ve been.

Fourteen posts in October 2025. One last month. The publishing record tells its own story of attention moving from writing about a thing to building it. What began here ten months ago as a metaphor and an unease has become a practice in formation, with pilots under way and an architecture half-built around it, so before the building of it absorbs all the light, I thought I’d set down how we got here; partly because the record deserves it, and partly because the way it happened is the best description I can offer of what the practice actually does.

In the work we now do at The Athanor, engagements run in tranches of three months, each with defined endpoints. A tranche ends at a waypoint; a place to stand and look back over the terrain before deciding whether to climb on. Base camp, in the image we keep returning to, is where you sort the kit and read the mountain. When things change quickly around us in can be easy to be absorbed in what we are doing, rather than taking stock, in case we need to change direction.

This, and the next two posts, is the Athanor’s own first tranche review, conducted in public, in three parts. This first part runs from the founding post in August 2025 to a decision in early November that, looking back, determined everything.

Kindling

The first post said what the name meant, and very little else. The Athanor, the furnace of the alchemists, was never about speed or spectacle; it held a steady flame for weeks while the materials inside it softened and became something new. 

“Craft is slow fire.” A metaphor I trusted, and a sense sharpened over a thousand posts at Outside the Walls and New Artisans that something in the architecture of work was giving way. A plan, though, I did not have.

September furnished the space: a library, a set of sources, a commitment to three principles, and a standing invitation to a Wednesday call. The closing line of that founding commitment still seems to me the most accurate sentence I wrote all autumn: “The first step is simple: show up, and bring some kindling.” The Athanor began as a workshop held in common, an offshoot of the two blogs, addressed to companions. I need to be clear about that, because the question of what this place becomes, and for whom, runs under everything that follows.

Diagnosis

Then October happened. Fourteen posts in thirty-one days, the most I have written in any month before or since. The ideas arrived in a gang, and read back now they amount to a single argument made from several directions, though no single post knew it at the time.

The argument took shape like this. The structures we trained for are ageing faster than we are. Professional development teaches theory disconnected from consequence; corporations optimise for extraction rather than for the capability of the people inside them; content scales, and judgement does not; and the credentials we collect certify knowledge that technology now retrieves in seconds. Our careers turn out to be tenancies, and had my own renter’s moment when my blog host locked me out of my email list, and the post that followed, Going Freehold, found enclosure everywhere it looked: in our platforms, our software, our subscriptions, and the working lives we rent out on terms set by others.

Attention, meanwhile, was revealing itself as the scarcest luxury; the wealthy had already worked this out, and were quietly trading luxury watches for experiences that cannot be resold. Underneath it all sat the increments, the small degradations and displacements that gather unnoticed until, as Hemingway’s Mike Campbell said of bankruptcy, things change gradually and then suddenly.

The month also supplied a historical lineage. The Lunar Society met in Birmingham by the light of the full moon: fourteen core members, no constitution, no minutes; practitioners with skin in the game who crossed each other’s disciplines for fifty years and created the conditions for the Industrial Revolution, and I wrote about them in October as a precedent. What I underestimated was how much of what we are now building would turn out to be a translation of their conditions: small numbers, high trust, crossed boundaries, and real consequence.

There was a portrait of the watcher, too. On Precursors argued that the people who sense what is coming are rarely the people the dashboards reward; they are embedded outsiders, trusted enough to be heard and independent enough to see. Most of the people now in the Athanor’s orbit answer to that description, which is not a coincidence.

By the end of the month the posts had converged. The shift we are living through is “Not the surface details of which skills matter or which tools to use, but the architecture underneath: how work is bundled, priced, coordinated, and controlled.” Nothing in the year since has weakened that claim, and a good deal has confirmed it. We are unfamiliar territory, we are all beginners in understanding it, and we need each other.

Who It Was For

Threaded through the diagnosis was a portrait of a different kind, and it was the part readers answered. As the Cracks Appear described a person who had done everything right: career capital accumulated, professional autonomy earned, an excellence recognised within the walls that housed it, income at last exceeding expenditure; and then a ground-shift they had not anticipated, which arrived precisely when they had most to carry.

James Hollis calls it the Middle Passage. Our working lives moving faster than they once did, I suggested it now arrives more than once, and that the standard advice was written for people travelling light. Follow your passion assumes the freedom to take risks. Reinvent yourself assumes you can afford to be a beginner again. “This is the predicament we face: transformation under constraint. Change while carrying weight.” The post ended with an invitation that has outlived almost everything else from that month: you don’t have to do it alone.

Notice, though, who was being addressed. October’s reader was one of us; a companion at the same fire, in the same weather, invited to bring projects and shape the work in common. The room was a workshop with members. Hold that thought. It matters in part three.

The First Plan

Diagnosis demanded a response, and I did what a working lifetime had trained me to do: I wrote a prospectus. It is all still in the October archive, published in real time as it formed. Eight places at the fire. A commitment of twelve to eighteen months. Three tiers of membership and a sliding contribution based on capacity. Five possible configurations for the work, with one of them, the Emotional Architecture, chosen as the way in. A core group to be formed in November, settled over December, working by January. Readers responded; fourteen project proposals arrived. Anyone watching would have said a programme was being born, and for about three weeks, so would I.

The prospectus was sincere, and it was wrong. The error was in kind rather than in content. It assumed the work could be summoned on a schedule; that a group could be assembled the way a course is assembled; that the form could precede the trust it was meant to contain.

The Hinge

On the first Wednesday of November the group met as usual, and the conversation did what good conversations do: it told me something I was not ready to hear. The group we had was, as I described it at the time, “curious, questioning, and willing to take risks”, and it had formed itself. Trying to close it into a cohort to the beat of a calendar was an act of Kronos in a space that ran on Kairos; time as measure imposed on time as quality. Two days later I wrote Making Haste Slowly and set the plan aside. “I think we need to trust the right group to form of its own accord in Kairos time.” And then the sentence that became the hinge of the whole year: “This is much too important to rush.”

I want to be accurate about what that felt like, because the retrospective temptation is to dress it as wisdom; at the time it felt like failure, lightly worn. I had announced a structure in public, invited people into it, gathered their proposals, and then declined to build it, in front of the same people, with nothing to offer in its place except a conviction that forcing the form would kill what the form was meant to hold. A fool’s position, in the proper sense I wrote about later that winter: exposed, slightly ridiculous, and correct.

David Pye’s distinction between the workmanship of certainty and the workmanship of risk has since become load-bearing in the practice, and it names what happened that week. A prospectus is workmanship of certainty: the outcome specified before the work begins. What the Athanor needed was the other kind, where the result depends on judgement exercised while the work is in motion, and where the possibility of failure is the price of anything worth having. The November decision was the first time this publication applied that standard to itself. Launching would have been easier; launches are legible, and waiting is not.

From Base Camp

Looking back from the waypoint, the sorting is simple enough. The diagnosis held; nothing since has weakened it, the Wednesday fire still burns, and the lineage has deepened. The calendar, the tiers, and the cohort did not survive the winter, and are not mourned. What was set aside in November went into the compost rather than the bin, and the second part of this series follows it through the cold months: the two apprenticeships, conversations as living systems, the question of what an Athanor is actually for, and the answer that finally arrived, from an unexpected direction, in February.

For now I want to stay with the November moment, because the question it forced on this publication is the question the practice now holds on behalf of everyone who comes to work with us, at exactly the point where they are most tempted to reach for a plan because a plan would relieve the discomfort of not having one.

What forms, when you decline to force the form?

When did you last wash your car with bottled water?

The question surfaced in a recent conversation, as we talked about the habit of reaching for what has been processed rather than tending to the raw material in front of us. It stayed with me, because that is increasingly how we seem to be turning to AI. The remarkable thing about these tools is not that they can do, more cheaply, much of what people already do; it is what lies beyond that. Yet under pressure, and perhaps under the weight of mimetic forces, we find ourselves using them to do, a little worse, the very things we might have done ourselves. And like bottled water, the more we grow used to them, the more we will default to them; we will treat them as a consumable, use them carelessly, and stop asking after the quality of the source.

I have always disliked the word “consumer”. It defines us by our appetite; it makes consumption, rather than creation, our first purpose. What troubles me is that the same habit now threatens to attach itself to intelligence. We risk treating AI as something to consume rather than something to use; a kind of super search engine, drawn upon for the quick and the average, rather than an instrument for pushing thought into places it has not yet reached.

This train of thought began, of all places, at the start of a holiday. We set off for early and found ourselves at a surprisingly good restaurant at East Midlands Airport called The Alembic. Serendipity, perhaps, doing its quiet work; for the alembic was a central part of the alchemists’ toolkit, and it has one or two things still to teach us. It worked alongside the athanor. The athanor was the furnace; it supplied the slow, steady heat. The alembic was the vessel; it held what was to be distilled. Between the two of them, patience and refinement.

The alembic has three parts. First the cucurbit, the lower vessel of copper or earthenware, where the wash, the wine, or the macerated petals sit and the heat is applied. Then the anbik, the head, which sits over the rising vapour and lets it cool against its walls; this is where the first separation happens. Finally the receiver, reached by a downward-sloping spout, where the condensed liquid trickles down to be gathered. What strikes me about the device is the assumption built into its very shape: that you cannot reach the essence of a thing by going faster, and that you must instead accept several patient passes of going slower.

So much of the alchemists’ language has since become ordinary speech. By the fourteenth century, “alembic” was already a metaphor for the mind; for thought and memory; for the place where raw experience is refined into wisdom. The instrument had become a figure for slow refinement long before any faster alternative was so much as dreamt of.

The alembic has a long lineage. It reaches back to Maria the Jewess in the early centuries of the common era, the Alexandrian alchemist from whom we also inherit the bain-marie, that gentle water bath still beloved of French cookery; the first contribution to the art of a kinder way to apply heat. From there it travelled: refined in eighth-century Persia, carried into Christendom through the school of Salerno, brought at last to Scotland and Ireland, where it gave us uisge beatha, the water of life, whisky. At no point on that journey did anyone try to make it faster. Every hand that touched it sought greater fidelity, not greater speed.

Then, in 1830, Aeneas Coffey, an Irish exciseman turned distiller, patented the continuous still. It was not a refinement of the alembic; it was an entirely different animal. It was, in effect, a factory: capable of enormous output, distinctive because it produced a continuous flow rather than a batch. Within a generation it had transformed gin, whisky, and industrial alcohol, and it is now responsible for the overwhelming majority of the world’s spirit by volume.

But not by quality.

What Coffey gave us was continuous operation; very high strength in a single pass; far less labour for every litre. The result was a near-perfectly reproducible neutral spirit, and the economics of scale. What it took away was character. It took away the congeners, the heavy volatile compounds that carry character: the esters, the aldehydes, the fatty acids, the fusel oils. The slow, inefficient pot still keeps them, and gives you a spirit with a face; the continuous still strips them out, and gives you a spirit with a function.

Here, perhaps, is where my bottled water belongs. Bottled water is a continuous-still product: stripped, uniform, endlessly reproducible, consumed without a thought for its source. The alembic stands for the opposite habit of mind. The one is industry; the other is craft.

Working the alembic is a craft, and the craft is in the cut. Each distillation gives three parts. First the heads, the first vapour off the still, volatile and harsh, to be discarded or held back for the next run. Then the hearts, the middle cut, the clean spirit that carries the flavour-giving congeners; this is the point of the whole exercise. Last the tails, oily and dull, where the run is allowed to end. The art lies entirely in the timing: in knowing when the heads give way to the hearts, and the hearts to the tails. It cannot be settled in advance, because every batch is different. There is even a kind of second thinking built into the copper itself; vapour that rises too heavy meets the cooler neck, fails its test, and falls back to be distilled again. Revision, rendered in metal.

And here is the lesson I take from it. The master distiller makes that cut in seconds; but he makes it well only because of the thirty years standing behind it. The speed is real, yet it is only the visible tip of a great deal of accumulated patience. The fast judgement is earned, slowly. This is what Kahneman would recognise as the two systems of mind: System One, fast, intuitive, pattern-matching, almost effortless; and System Two, slow, deliberate, serial, expensive to run. We are tempted to think them rivals, and to prefer whichever is the quicker. But the truer relation is that the slow system lays down the patterns the fast one later runs. Fast thinking is downstream of slow thinking. There is no fluency that was not, at some earlier point, paid for in patience.

Those of you who have watched YouTube videos on using Claude or any other AI will recognise the pattern. Commitment to manic output rather than quality of content, unless we're really careful and race to the bottom. A generative model is a spectacular continuous still: it runs without pause, pouring out vast volumes of fluent, neutral, broadly competent work. The temptation, under pressure, is to take whatever comes off the still as finished; and what you get, if you do, is high volume and an undifferentiated average. It is fluency without the apprenticeship that ought to have earned it; System One with nothing of System Two behind it. The work, as ever, is in the cut: in knowing what to keep, what to discard, and what to put through again. We can treat the model as a continuous still, and consume what it pours; or we can treat it as an alembic, and use it to refine our thinking; knowing when to begin, and, just as importantly, when to pause. I have written at New Artisans and Outside the Walls about the importance of Craft and Métis as the things that no amount of technology can replicate.

I wonder whether they have ever been more important or more at risk?

For those of us gathered here, the parts fall into place. The conversation is the athanor: the slow, steady heat; the patient warmth in which anything worthwhile can develop. The athanor had an old nickname, fittingly enough; the alchemists called it Piger Henricus, Slow Henry, and there is a quiet dignity in an age that could praise a thing for being slow. The model is the alembic, the instrument of refinement; and we are the distillers, standing at the receiver, making the cut.

So much for the theory. It is time to put it to the test. Over the coming month or so we will run a few trials with real people in real businesses; the conversations serving as the athanor, Claude Teams as the alembic, and the judgement, as it must be, left to us. The craft will be in the cut.

I will keep you posted.

Slow conversations, without agenda have been a central part of my practice for so long now I had almost forgotten they were deliberate choice made during a difficult time when we did not know what was happening. Not slow in the sense of being short of pace, but slow in the sense that the people in them have taken the time to do the reading, taken the walks, and sat with their unease for long enough that what they bring is not raw material but already partly worked.

We do not have to have a goal when we think, thinking is an exercise in autopoiesis; an exercise worth doing for its own sake. The best conversations are ones that surface, and help complete “ideas in progress”

I have been turning this over for a while. The Athanor, as I have been using the word, is the slow furnace of alchemical practice, the kind of fire that holds at temperature for as long as the work requires. Inside the vessel sits the crucible that holds what is being prepared, the vas hermeticum, sometimes called the philosophical egg which holds the prima materia, the material being transformed. Around the athanor sit the participants.

What comes out depends, more than anything else, on what went in.

The quality of the prima materia determines what the work can become. No tool, no ally, no clever process recovers inferior material. You can run a degraded conversation through the most sophisticated machinery in the world and the answer at the end of it will still be a degraded answer, only delivered faster, with more confidence, dressed in the shape of a finished thing.

What counts as material? Three things, layered. The first is the qualities of the people in the conversation: what they have read, how long they have thought, what they care enough about to argue with. The second is the relationships between those people, and the conversational habits they have built together over time. The third is the quality of the material being drawn upon. The books, notes. and the half-formed ideas in the margins. The working papers nobody has yet finished, containing ideas that have not yet found a home.

Each of these is upstream of anything we might call a strategy, a philosophy, or an analysis. None of them is automatic, and none of them can be outsourced. We have to do the work. Thinking is a craft in itself. 

The reason this needs saying now is that we are at a moment when the temptation to skip the thinking has never been stronger. The tools have arrived that make it possible to begin with the deliverable. Type the prompt, get the document. The machinery is becoming ever better, and markets hungry for efficiency and productivity reward speed.The incentives run entirely in one direction.

The argument of this post is the opposite. The arrival of these tools is, for the practitioner who notices, an opportunity to do the work of thinking more deliberately, not less. What follows below the line is an account of what that looks like when I try it: the new old skill of stream before structure, with the inner critic out of the room, when curiosity more than profit fuels the fire and what this changes for those of us who advise.

Stream Before Structure

There is a habit I have found myself aware of, so familiar it was almost unnoticeable until I started the work I am now doing. I notice it when I sit down to write, or preparing for a conversation I expect to be difficult, or on a schedule determined by someone else. I begin, almost without realising, to structure. I find myself reaching for the shape of the argument before I have the argument, rearranging the order of points I have not yet written. I draft headings, sketch a trajectory, and focus. 

Of itself, it is not a bad thing. There are pieces of writing for which it is the right approach, but for the kind of thinking that has to happen at the boundary of what I do not yet understand, structure-first is a trap. It commits me to a shape before I know whether the shape fits the territory. It exchanges the discomfort of not yet knowing for the false comfort of a tidy outline. It encourages me to lean on the familiar, the recognised and reputation and tame the heretic in me. The thoughts that would have surprised me, had I left room for them, stay quiet.

I think of this as an instilled template, a product of school, professional life, and a long training in producing legible outputs to a deadline. It is one of the things David Pye would recognise as the workmanship of certainty making itself at home in places where what is needed is the workmanship of risk. The inner template knows what an expected document looks like, but is frightened of what a deliciously heretical thought feels like at the moment of its first arrival. 

This new, old, skill as I have come to think of it, is the deliberate refusal to structure too early. It is the choice to put down the thought as it actually came, in fragments if it came in fragments, without rehearsing it into the shape it will eventually take. To walk around it, share it with those others around the athanor, and let it take shape of its own accord. This is what stream of consciousness offered the modernists, and what has been more or less unavailable to people in working life since, because the cost of producing two drafts, one a stream of thought, and one structured, was prohibitive in a world where the structured one was the expected deliverable. Clients often want a ready meal, not a tray of exciting, unfamiliar ingredients that need the preparation only they can do. 

That is changing. The cost of accommodating the stream has come down. Structuring can be done later, with the help of technology. What we are being given back is the slow hour at the start, where the thinking can happen at its own pace.

The danger is that we use it to produce more mediocrity.

The Inner Critic, Out of the Room

There is a related move, harder to describe and just as important. The inner critic is the part of our mind that thinks it knows in advance how what we are making, or doing, will be judged. It edits before the sentence is finished, and stops a half-formed thought because it sounds half-formed. It sends a fragment back for revision before it has had time to reveal what it was actually about.

For most of my working life, the inner critic and the structure-first habit have been the same instinct, working in tandem. They are both, in their own way, anticipations of an audience we want to please. They are both forms of premature legibility, and they are both the wrong instinct for the early stages of any work that lives in the territory of dynamic uncertainty we find ourselves in. Mervyn King and John Kay make the point in adjacent terms in Radical Uncertainty: when the situation is genuinely beyond the reach of probability, the disciplined production of plausible-looking analyses can be worse than no analysis, because it disguises what is not known.

What I have noticed, working this way for a while, is that the inner critic loses much of its grip when the structuring is no longer my job at the moment of writing. It lets me put down things it would otherwise have refused, lets me leave loose ends, and lets fragments stay fragments. The patient dialogue Donald Schön located at the centre of reflective practice, the long loop between thinking and doing in conditions of ambiguity, depends on this. The critic does not need to be silenced; it needs to be moved further down the line.

What the AI Does, So I Do Not Have To

I have come to understand how AI (in my case, Claude Opus 4.7) used with care, takes the episteme side of the work for a while, and gives me back the mētis side. This is an unusual division of labour, and worth explaining a little. The episteme is what can be written down and recorded; it is the explicit, codified, and the structurable, born of the need for evidence. The mētis, in James C. Scott's reading and in the older Greek sense, is what cannot. It is the embodied feel for a situation, the judgment that survives in practice and resists the rule book, and is born of a love of the work we do.

The capacities most at risk in a default-mode, performative AI deployment are the mētis capacities; the capacities crowded out when I spend my slow hour on the structuring task, because structuring is an episteme operation.

If the structuring can be deferred, so that an AI ally can carry it later, on demand, from a body of fragments I have produced freely, then the slow hour at the start is freed up for the work I am best at. The work of noticing. The work of holding a question open longer than the inner critic finds tolerable, and the work of letting the next thought arrive on its own time.

AI does not do the thinking. It is the opposite. The thinking is mine to do, and now I can do more of it, because the formatting has been moved downstream.

Texture, and What Does Not Travel as Fact

I broke off from drafting this piece for a while and had a conversation with someone whose thinking I trust and value. What came to me afterwards was that the material I have been describing is not flat; it has texture. It is not just a matter of facts, even good facts; it is the layered presence of mētis, of psychology, of the small signals that accompany an idea as it travels and need time to find their right place in a sentence.

Some of this is what Iain McGilchrist has been arguing in Ways of Attending: that the mode of attention we bring to something shapes what we are able to see in it. The narrowed, grasping attention sees one thing. The open, contextual attention sees another. Both are available, even if most institutional life selects for the first.

Some of it is what Daniel DeNicola gets at in Understanding Ignorance, where he distinguishes the kinds of not-knowing that are productive from the kinds that are merely empty. A practitioner who has lived inside a question long enough to know its shape carries a different ignorance than someone who has not yet asked it. Both can say "I do not know." Only one of them is in a position to do useful work with the not-knowing.

Some of it is closer to what Richard Sennett locates in The Craftsman, in the slow conversation between hand, eye and material that no instruction manual can substitute for. The craftsman knows things about the wood that the carpenter's training manual does not contain.

The reason this matters for the prima materia argument is that an answer trained only on the explicit will reproduce only the explicit. Texture does not travel unless we put it in, and it arrives in conversation through the off-hand observation, the half-laughed aside, the reading list someone shares because they happened to remember it, or the discussion paper that has been sitting in a drawer for two years. None of this is on the company intranet. Most of it is barely written down at all.

The work of turning material into usable substrate, then, is not a matter of accumulating more inputs. It is a matter of cultivating the kinds of inputs that carry texture. It is closer to gardening than to process.

I made some of this argument at greater length in a Prima Materia discussion paper I wrote to myself that sits in the Athanor working files. That paper read three contemporary articles on AI philosophy, and pushed at the place where they stopped short. This piece picks up where that one left off, but moves from the diagnostic register to the practical one. If substrate is what the work depends on, what does building it actually look like.

What This Changes for Those of Us Who Advise

For those of us who work in any kind of advisory capacity, there is a specific shift worth naming: The traditional path for the advisor was to abstract upwards. You took what you knew and you turned it into a proposition, a book, a presentation, or a training programme. The audience was assumed to be plural, and the deliverable had to be portable enough to travel across that audience without requiring too much rework. The artefact, in other words, was always at one or two removes from the conversation it came out of. The cost of taking the conversation that derived the artefact to a single reader was prohibitive.

That cost has come down too. With substrate of sufficient quality already in place, a body of working papers, a reading list, a record of conversations, the writer's own back catalogue, it becomes possible to filter that material against the precise question a single person is bringing. Not a generic version of their question. The actual question. In their context. With their constraints. Framed in their terms. AI has a bigger working memory than we do.

This is a different shape of work from anything the consulting model was built around. It is closer to the older sense of counsel, and it depends entirely on the substrate being there in the first place. Without it, the same operation produces only generic plausibility, dressed up to look bespoke. The model cannot give back what was never put in.

This is where the discipline of the long, slow build matters. The reading, the writing, the careful conversations, and the discussion documents that no one has read yet; all of this is the substrate from which contextual counsel becomes possible. It is also the work the market has the hardest time pricing, because it has no deliverable until somebody comes looking for it.

Nigredo:What the Athanor Burns Away

The athanor's function, in the original sense, is not to produce. It is to transform. It holds heat over time so that whatever is in the vessel can become what it has it in itself to become. There is no shortcut to this, and no improved version of it that runs faster.

What I have come to think the athanor is also doing, in this present moment, is burning away an unwanted legacy that is the set of structuring instincts I have been describing. The inner critic, the instilled template and the assumption that legibility comes first. These were not stupid habits, they were appropriate to a working life in which the deliverable was always the shape of the work. They are, though, in the new arrangement, often in the way.

The athanor's slow fire does not destroy underlying capacities. It burns off the sediment that has built up around them. What is left, in the better cases, is the older thing, practitioner's stance. That slow hour and the unhurried question, in a form that can finally meet the tools without being absorbed by them.

I do not think this is a conclusion, it is more like a position from which to continue working, and the questions I left open in the Prima Materia paper are the questions I am still holding. What does a philosophy that is not a deliverable actually look like? Where, in the present market, does substrate get formed at all? What practices would constitute an athanor for the kind of thinking the new tools both threaten and enable?

I will keep working at these, knowing that by the time I come back to them, they will be different. Change is not episodic.

References drawn on in this piece, from the core booklist and Athanor working files: David Pye, The Nature and Art of Workmanship; James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State; Mervyn King and John Kay, Radical Uncertainty; Iain McGilchrist, Ways of Attending; Daniel DeNicola, Understanding Ignorance; Richard Sennett, The Craftsman. Also: the Prima Materia discussion document (Athanor working papers, April 2026), and Donald Schön's account of the reflective practitioner.

The Athanor Project — April 2026

We have been using the Athanor metaphor gently. It appears in the foundational documents of this project as a description of patience: the slow, steady heat that holds conditions for transformation without engineering the outcome. The blast furnace forces; the Athanor waits. The adviser provides the vessel, but the work is the client's.

Whilst all of that is true, I have been sitting with something that the gentle version does not quite say. I want to try to say it now, partly because I think it matters for the practice, and partly because the process of working it out is itself a demonstration of the thing I am trying to describe.

The Athanor does not just hold the beginning of a process and its hopeful end. It holds what happens in the middle, and what happens in the middle, in the alchemical tradition, is nigredo: the blackening, the apparent death of the prior form, the dissolution of the material before it can reconstitute itself into something new. The alchemists were not romantic about this stage. They did not soften it or try to make it painless. Without genuine nigredo, they believed, what followed was not gold; it was gilding, a surface transformation that left the underlying structure unchanged.

I want to argue that this distinction matters more in coaching and advisory practice than we usually allow ourselves to say.

Begin with a simpler problem. There is a difference between uncertainty and ignorance that most frameworks treat as trivial, but which turns out to be fundamental.

Uncertainty, understood properly, is a condition in which outcomes are unknown but the space of possible outcomes has a shape; it has boundaries. We may not know what will happen, but we can specify what kinds of things might happen. We can build scenarios, attach distributions, and identify the variables that matter. Uncertainty is uncomfortable, but it is navigable with the right tools. We have a map, and the edges of the territory are legible, even if the path through it is not.

Ignorance is categorically different. It is not a gap within a known map. It is the condition in which the categories required to make a map do not yet exist. The territory is not unmapped; it is unrecognised. You cannot enumerate what might happen, not because the data is thin but because the vocabulary of possibility does not yet include what is about to occur. The philosopher Daniel DeNicola makes a useful distinction here: there is the ignorance we know about, the ignorance we do not know we have, and the ignorance that is constitutive of genuine uncertainty, the kind that no additional research would eliminate, because it concerns irreducibly open futures.

That third type is the one that most advisory practices quietly refuse to look at. We are trained for uncertainty. We are equipped, reasonably well, to help people navigate a space they cannot fully see. We are much less comfortable with the condition that precedes that space: one where the space itself is not yet visible, where the question cannot yet be formulated, where the most honest thing that can be said is that we do not yet know what we do not know.

The difference is not merely conceptual. It determines what a useful response looks like. Uncertainty calls for better intelligence, more careful observation, richer scenario-building. Ignorance calls for something quite different: a quality of open, receptive attention that does not impose existing categories on what is being encountered. The adviser who arrives at a situation of genuine ignorance with a taxonomy and a facilitation framework is not helping. They are, at best, moving the conversation efficiently towards a set of conclusions that the framework was always going to produce.

This is the workmanship of certainty applied to a situation that requires something else entirely.

Most of what passes for transformation in advisory and coaching work is, I believe, a form of sophisticated rearrangement. The scenario process takes what the client already knows and exposes it to new configurations. Peer groups offers productive adjacency: the friction of one person's experience against another's, and something better sometimes emerges.

None of this is without value. Rearrangement done well is genuinely useful. But there is a category of challenge for which rearrangement, however sophisticated, is not sufficient. You recognise it when you encounter it: the founder whose entire identity is built around a business model that the world is quietly rendering obsolete; the coach whose practice is organised around a theory of change that is not quite working, but whose investment in that theory makes the evidence hard to receive; and the leader whose previous success has calcified into assumptions so deeply embedded that they are no longer visible as assumptions. They have become, instead, the shape of reality itself.

For these people, a better scenario set produces a thin result. The new configuration is still drawn from the same palette. The reframe uses the same categories. Insights arrive, but they do not quite stick, because the underlying structure that generated the original difficulty remains intact. You can see this in a room when it happens. The conversation goes through all the right motions, then the meeting finishes, and three weeks later, they are back in approximately the same place, because nothing that would require their existing framework to dissolve has been allowed to enter.

The problem is not that they lack intelligence, or courage, or willingness to engage. The problem is that genuinely transformative thinking requires a prior act that looks, from the outside, like loss. Before the categories can be reconstructed, they have to be relinquished. Before the new map can form, the old one has to go dark.

This is what nigredo names.

I need to be careful here because the argument can easily become mystical in a way that is not useful. Nigredo is less a spiritual experience and more a structural description of what has to happen before genuine reconstitution is possible, and it has markers that are recognisable in practice, even if they are uncomfortable to name.

The first is that the dissolution is of frameworks rather than foundations. There is a difference between a person who is letting go of a professional or strategic identity ("I have been the person who built this kind of business, and that is no longer sufficient") and a person whose basic sense of self and stability is under threat. These are different conditions, and they require different responses. The first is productive; the second is a crisis. The advisory relationship has to be able to tell the difference and to hold the space appropriately for each.

The second is that something is still attending. Keats' negative capability, the capacity to remain in uncertainty and doubt without an irritable reaching after fact and reason, is not numbness. It is a heightened, receptive quality of awareness in which the usual structuring has become temporarily unavailable, but the person is still there, still watching, still capable of noticing what is actually in front of them. The lines are fading on the existing map, but the navigator has not disappeared.

The third, and perhaps the most important for this project, is that the Athanor is present. Dissolution that happens in isolation, without the trust, continuity and quality of attention that a sustained coaching or advisory relationship provides, is more likely to be destabilising than generative. The Athanor is not decorative; it is what makes the process safe enough to enter, and what ensures that the heat is steady rather than either too low to do any work or too high to allow the material to reconstitute.

Group work, properly facilitated, is a collective Athanor. The one-to-one coaching relationship is another. What they share is the quality of holding: the willingness to be present at the difficult middle stage, without rushing to provide a framework that would make the dissolution feel managed before it has done its work.

The argument that follows from all of this is a practical one: what does the Athanor look like when it is not a metaphor but a design brief? That is what the rest of this piece is about, and it is where I want to introduce two things we are currently building that are direct attempts to put it to work.

The advisory relationship provides the Athanor during a session. It can provide it, with more difficulty, in the days following a session when something has genuinely come undone, and the client is sitting with a question that has not yet found its form. But there is a gap in the architecture, and it is one I have become increasingly aware of in my own practice.

Most digital tools available to coaches and clients are designed for the albedo phase. They are knowledge management systems, action trackers, resource libraries: places to organise what has already been understood, to capture the insight that emerged from the conversation and give it a home where it can be retrieved and built upon. They are, in the language developed in the first part of this piece, rearrangement environments, optimised for the condition in which things are already taking shape but silent about the condition that precedes it.

What I am imagining is something designed explicitly for the boundary territory between uncertainty and ignorance: a collaborative digital space in which coaches and clients can think alongside material that is not yet ready to be organised. Not a knowledge base, nor a project management tool. A held space for the kind of thinking that exists before it knows what it is, where a half-formed question can sit alongside a relevant provocation, where an observation can be left without any pressure to turn it into an action, somewhere the coach and the client can return over days or weeks and notice what is developing without rushing it towards resolution.

The design principles follow directly from the argument. The space needs to resist closure: no completion states, no prompts to wrap up a thread or convert a reflection into a next step. It should make it easier to add a question than to answer one. It should hold rather than store: storage implies retrieval on demand, whilst holding implies a kind of sustained presence, an attentiveness to what is in the space that does not require it to arrive at a destination. It should be shared but not public, because the trust that genuine nigredo requires is not compatible with a forum or a broadcast channel.

And it should be sovereign: locally run or at minimum private and controlled, because the thinking that belongs to this space is the most genuinely exposed kind a person produces, and the conditions under which it can happen depend on knowing it remains contained.

I am aware that this is easier to describe than to build. A space that resists closure is in tension with almost every assumption that goes into the design of a digital tool. Platforms are built to produce engagement, completion, and resolution. What we envisage would have to work against that grain deliberately, and that is not a small design challenge. I am putting it here honestly, as a live question rather than a finished proposition, because I think the most useful thing I can do at this stage is to think in public about what it would require, and to invite the people reading this to think alongside me.

I want to close with something about where this thinking currently stands, because intellectual honesty about the state of one's own inquiry is part of what this project is for.

I am not yet certain that the prototype tools we are developing are the right answers to the problem I have described, but they feel like a beginning. I am confident that the problem is real: that there is a genuine gap between the quality of holding that a good coaching session provides and the tools currently available to sustain that quality in the space between. I am less certain about exactly what filling that gap requires, and I think that uncertainty is worth preserving rather than resolving prematurely.

What I am more confident about is the underlying argument: that genuine transformation requires a prior act of dissolution, and that the most important thing the Athanor Project can offer is not the insight that follows the darkness but the capacity to hold the darkness well. That is harder than it sounds in a culture that rewards confidence and completion, and in a profession built, as advisory and coaching both are, around the performance of usefulness.

The Athanor burns slowly. That is not a limitation; the slowness is not merely about patience; it is about what the steady heat is actually for: not to accelerate the process but to make it possible for the dissolution to happen at all, without the person inside it reaching prematurely for the light.

What would it mean to design a digital tool around that principle, around the idea that the most important conversations are the ones that have not yet found their form, and that the most useful thing a space can do is hold them, without resolution, for as long as they need?

That is the question we are trying to answer. I am putting it here as an invitation rather than a proposal, because the best way to develop it is in the kind of thinking-together that this project exists to enable. Bring your experience of the dark. Bring your questions about what holding actually requires. Bring your scepticism about whether a digital tool can do any of this at all.

That conversation is where the work begins.

The Athanor Project | April 2026

This piece is a stepping stone, not a conclusion. Responses and challenges are welcome.

In the early 1990s, I was negotiating the acquisition of a state business in Shanghai, before it was all the rage. The tension in the room on The Bund boiled down to one word: escrow. The convention we use in the West to deal with asset-based purchases, to cope with dynamic work in progress. The problem was that there was no parallel Chinese convention. For them, it signalled distrust. We resolved it only because I had spent a long time building a relationship with the people I was working with, and they were prepared to trust me rather than the company. It was an uncomfortable time because my trust in my corporate leadership was considerably less than my trust in the people across the table in Shanghai. My masters dealt in numbers. The Chinese worked in relationships. The gap between them was what I would now recognise as mētis, the “cunning intelligence” that sits in between what we can measure.

There was no right or wrong, just difference. Until we could find a way to establish common ground, all the different parties could do was look for someone to blame. That makes being the one in the middle uncomfortable, but critical. There is real value in evidence-based judgement, but it is incomplete in the same way that depending entirely on relationships is incomplete. Each needs the other for completeness and resilience under pressure.

Working at the boundaries of AI feels very similar. The fundamentalists on both sides, efficiency, productivity and profit on one side, human values on the other, are making all the noise. Neither are wrong, but neither are listening. The result is a complex mess driven by the defence of what is known, rather than curiosity and openness to what is not. One of the biggest challenges in working at the edge of things is dealing with real differences of language, culture, worldviews and values, and finding ourselves struggling to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable. It has been a consistent theme of my work for decades, but never has it felt quite as ubiquitous as it does now. Sitting in the tension is hard work, but when we can manage it, the meeting of unlike minds has an alchemy to it.

David Pye's distinction between the workmanship of certainty and the workmanship of risk gives one way of naming what is at stake. Bill Sharpe's Three Horizons framework gives another; the chasm between what we know we are doing in Horizon One and the uncertainty of Horizon Three is precisely the territory where neither camp's tools are sufficient on their own. Iain McGilchrist's work on the difference between attending to the whole and attending to the parts has given me a framework I return to constantly. In recent years I have developed a profound respect for diplomats, who work in all these spaces simultaneously, managing boundaries and continuing to function despite the pressures exerted by those for whom life is simpler when they can take refuge in the familiar. What these frameworks share is a recognition that the space between unlike ways of knowing is not a problem to be eliminated. It is where the serious work happens.

AI is an unlike mind. 

I think we have to put as much effort into developing a relationship with it as I had to in those endless meetings over three years in Shanghai, because when we hit unexpected challenges — and we will — we will need those relationships to hold. What does it actually mean to build a relationship with a mind that has no continuity, no memory of yesterday's conversation, no stake in the outcome? That tension is not a technical problem waiting for a software solution. It is the human problem of working with genuine otherness, which is something we have always found difficult and have never been able to shortcut. The assumption that those fluent in the logic of what created AI therefore understand its implications and its second and third order consequences strikes me as, at best, hubristic, and at worst, dangerous.

That does not mean either side can be discounted, that those arguing for the primacy of human relationships as the anchor for AI are simply right. Technology has always required us to adapt, from language to our first mark-making, and I cannot see AI as any different, other than in the speed at which it will impact us. 

AI shows no signs of patience and is accelerating the evidential side of the equation at exponential rates. This creates an imbalance, and I think we need to address our relationship with what data does not understand if we are to make what is happening a genuine source of human growth.

Perhaps the most significant challenge is what I think of as a cognitive illusion. AI is very good at parsing, reassembling, and playing with what we know, but it cannot peer into what we do not. The difficulty is that nobody has told it that, and it is easy under pressure, when AI has become such an important part of our lives, to assume that it can. AI is very good at Horizon One but has no conception of Horizon Three. The bridge between the two, the emergent, uncertain territory of Horizon Two, is our job. We can probably automate much of the workmanship of certainty, but none of the workmanship of risk. It can feed us options but it cannot negotiate. The real impact of AI, I suspect, is that it reminds us of the things we are capable of but have stopped doing. Exploring the space between things needs the constructive conflict of unlike minds, not memetic repetition.

The tension we are holding here is as old as time. We are dealing with polarities where two opposing sides each believe they are right and the space in the middle is genuinely difficult to occupy. Adam Kahane writes about it in his work on power and love, the situation where we lack the power to overcome, the willingness to accept, and the ability to leave. McGilchrist frames it as the mental experience of sitting with uncertainty while the parts-focused mind demands resolution. These are local versions of challenges that are not local at all but global, from climate change to inequality to exhausted economic models. This, if we play it intelligently, works in our favour. The easiest way to reconcile warring parties has always been to introduce an external threat that unites them, and if climate change, inequality and aspiring hegemons do not qualify as that, I am not sure what does.

It is why I find alchemy as a description, rather than a metaphor, so useful. It is the workmanship of risk rather than certainty, following a path we believe will work, but which could fail at any point if we do not pay attention to what is happening around us. It is the fast feedback of the OODA loop and the discipline of mindfulness as we distil new heuristics for the change we face. There are no guarantees, and nobody is coming to rescue us. It is the knowledge that we have the capability if we can exercise the will.

So what does it actually look like to hold this tension in practice, rather than simply naming it?

In Shanghai, it looked like three years of meals, conversations and small acts of reliability before a single document was signed. The escrow problem was not solved by finding a better legal mechanism, it was dissolved by the quality of the relationship that had been built around it. The numbers people in London never fully understood what had happened or why, because what had happened was not in the numbers. It was in the accumulated weight of presence, of turning up, of being someone the people across the table had learned they could trust even when it was inconvenient to do so.

The Buurtzorg nursing model in the Netherlands offers a more recent version of the same principle at an institutional scale. By dismantling the layers of process compliance and metric-driven management that characterised conventional care, and returning decision-making to small teams of nurses working directly with patients, they achieved thirty per cent higher patient satisfaction at forty per cent of the authorised care hours of traditional providers. Their overhead runs at eight per cent against a competitor average of twenty-five. This is not soft. This is what happens when you trust the people closest to reality to exercise their judgement rather than comply with systems designed to manage institutional anxiety. The mētis was there all along. The institution had simply built structures that prevented it from operating.

The alchemists understood this problem. They were not solitary eccentrics. They worked in small, serious communities they calleded the sodalitas, bound not by institution or credential but by shared commitment to a problem that could not be solved from the outside. They wrote to each other across Europe with remarkable precision about what they had observed at the furnace, what had failed, and what the material had told them when it refused to behave as expected. Their literature was deliberately obscure, not to exclude but because they understood something that took philosophy several more centuries to name properly: the knowledge they were after could not be transmitted to someone who had not already begun the work. It was readable only from inside the practice. What they developed, over years, was not a methodology but a discipline of attention, the capacity to read failure as information, to sit with a material that was changing in ways they could not yet name, to distinguish the rhythm of the work from the impulse to conclude it prematurely.

Paracelsus (1493-1541) was a Swiss physician and alchemist who burned the works of the ancient medical authorities in public, insisted that knowledge belonged to practitioners rather than scholars, and spent his life travelling Europe learning from miners, healers and craftspeople. His central conviction was that the practitioner's own character was a variable in the work: greed, impatience and the desire for quick results did not merely reflect poor attitude but produced, structurally, a different and inferior quality of observation. The vessel mattered as much as the material. The heat had to be sustained at the right temperature over a long period. And the work began not when you understood it but when you started.

In many respects, the alchemists were heretics. Across five centuries, a particular kind of figure recurs with striking consistency: the practitioner-heretic, whose transgression is not primarily political or theological but epistemological. Da Vinci dissecting corpses illegally because he needed to know how bodies actually worked. Faraday, the blacksmith's son with no university education, seeing relationships between phenomena that trained mathematicians had missed because his eye had never been disciplined into their blind spots. McClintock befriending her corn plants and waiting thirty years for a Nobel Prize that finally confirmed what her quality of attention had shown her decades earlier. What connects them is not rebellion for its own sake but a particular orientation toward knowing: they trusted what they found over what they had been told, they developed their understanding through sustained, embodied engagement with their material, and they paid the price that institutions reliably exact from those whose evidence contradicts the identity of those who would need to act on it. Their heresy was, in every case, a form of fidelity — to the thing itself, to the work, to what the material was actually showing them.

The evidence for the power of unlike minds is not merely felt. Scott Page, a complexity scientist at the University of Michigan, has spent two decades demonstrating mathematically what the alchemists understood practically: that unlike minds working on a genuinely complex problem outperform groups of similar experts, not despite their differences but because of them. When no single perspective can hold the whole problem, you want people getting it wrong in different ways. The diversity is not the difficulty to be managed. It is the capability. His Bletchley Park example makes this concrete: the team that cracked the Enigma code drew on mathematicians, engineers, linguists, historians, crossword puzzle experts and classical scholars working together, and it was precisely their cognitive differences that made the breakthrough possible. No single discipline could have reached it alone.

But the research is equally unambiguous about the conditions required. Unlike minds only produce their particular alchemy in environments where people feel safe enough to bring what is genuinely different about them into the room rather than leaving it at the door. That does not happen by accident or by announcement. It happens through the slow accumulation of trust that comes from showing up, from being present through difficulty, from demonstrating over time that the differences are not merely tolerated but actually needed. This is what I was attempting in Shanghai over three years of meetings, and it is what the sodalitas, at its best, is designed to make possible. Not a room of people who agree, but a vessel strong enough to hold people who do not, for long enough that something none of them could have reached alone becomes possible.

This is where we find ourselves. In the space between an unacceptable old and an unfamiliar new, the only way to discover what possibility looks like is to engage with it. There is no uniform way to do it. We will each find our own path, but we will find it better in a community of practice that shares what it has found, challenges what it has been taught to accept, and experiments with what it does not yet understand. From AI to ways of working and everything beyond.

The space that neither side can name is not a compromise. It is where the work actually happens.

Evolving Experiments...

• What does "right brain" AI look like?

• Creating offline "Sandboxes" for experiments

• The Power of Play in Uncertainty

• What do we really want from "work"

More on this in the next couple of weeks......

​

John Boyd talked about "fingerspitzengefuehle". The fingertip feeling, the ability to sense changes as they are starting, but before they manifest.

Now feels like such a time, and it requires us to pay attention. For my own part, I think it requires longer posts, slightly less often, as we poke into the corners of the changes that we're sensing to see if we can make sense of them.

To give myself the time to think. I'm going to change the cadence here to two posts a month rather than four, starting in April. I'll share my ideas on where we might go with this on Friday.

A thought for this Tuesday....

Our vision of the possible and the feasible is so restricted by industrial expectations that any alternative to more mass production sounds like a return to past oppression or like a Utopian design for noble savages. In fact, however, the vision of new possibilities requires only the recognition that scientific discoveries can be used in at least two opposite ways. The first leads to specialization of functions, institutionalization of values and centralization of power and turns people into the accessories of bureaucracies or machines. The second enlarges the range of each person’s competence, control, and initiative, limited only by other individuals’ claims to an equal range of power and freedom.

Ivan Illich. Tools for Conviviality

In the alchemical tradition, the athanor was the furnace at the heart of the practitioner's work. It was not glamorous. It was not the philosopher's stone, nor the dramatic moment of transformation; it was the steady, patient vessel that maintained the conditions in which transformation could happen. Holding the right temperature, sustaining the right pressure, day after day, while the work proceeded. The athanor made everything else possible.

I think that the Mac mini with Apple's latest M4 chip might be a modern athanor, and its timing feels significant. It sits quietly on the desk, not much larger than a hardback book, consuming less power than a light bulb. If you didn't know what it was, you might mistake it for a speaker or a paperweight with ambitions above its size. I'm exploring its potential not as a technologist but as a practitioner, in the sense that The Athanor has been developing: someone interested in what becomes possible when the right conditions are held steady long enough for real work to happen.

A Clarifying Moment?

We are experiencing what I would call the Great Rationalisation. Artificial intelligence is sweeping through organisations much as mechanisation once swept through factories, reducing roles, merging layers, standardising tasks once considered skilled and specialised, and leaving in its wake much fear and uncertainty.

The middle tier of most professions is shrinking. Anything that doesn't involve doing the actual work is being delegated to a team of small computers. Tasks that once required a team of twelve over a couple of days might now be completed by a well-configured AI system in an hour, with three people.

For many people, this is frightening, and I understand why. There is, though, another way of reading it that requires us to look not only at what is being lost, but at what is being left behind, because the rationalisation is not total. It is, in fact, quite selective.

What AI handles well is procedural work that can be described in steps, follows patterns, and produces outputs checkable against a template. What it handles poorly, still, and perhaps structurally, is work that requires considered judgment in genuinely messy situations. The kind of knowledge that lives in hands, instincts, and long experience. The kind of reading of a room, a landscape, or a person that cannot be reduced to a data set.

The Greeks called it mētis. Cunning intelligence. Practical wisdom. The knowledge that only comes from having done the thing repeatedly, in conditions that never quite repeat.

This knowledge is not disappearing. If anything, it is becoming more structurally valuable precisely because AI cannot replicate it. The question is how the people who hold it might put it to work.

A Digital Athanor?

Until recently, running sophisticated AI tools required either expensive specialist hardware or complete dependence on cloud services, meaning your work was processed on someone else's computers, under someone else's terms, at your expense. For large organisations, this was manageable. For individual practitioners and small groups, it was often unaffordable or simply not worth the complexity. And there was a further cost: to work with those services, you had to fit their model. Large organisations want people who fit their existing offerings. They are not interested in idiosyncrasies or small, interesting projects. They want volume, not complications.

The M4 chip quietly but profoundly alters this. It enables a small, affordable, desk-sized device to run AI assistants locally, on your own hardware, in your own space, and under your own control, while integrating seamlessly with more powerful cloud-based tools like Claude when the task demands it. I think of it as a local craft workshop, an atelier, that can summon a master craftsman when specialist input is needed. Someone who will work with us on our terms, rather than a consultant keen to reuse work they've already done elsewhere.

It can run multiple AI processes at the same time: one handling research, another managing documents, a third monitoring a project workflow, while you get on with the work only you can do. Continuously, without burning through cloud costs, and without sending sensitive client material anywhere you haven't deliberately chosen to send it.

This is not just a performance upgrade. It represents a shift in what can be achieved. Small, innovative clients and genuinely unique projects can now access resources that were unavailable just a few years ago. We can collaborate with individuals directly. There's no need for the old labels of product sectors, demographics, and psychographics.

We can simply work with interesting people, on their own terms.

Selling Shovels

There is an old observation about gold rushes: the people who reliably made money were not the prospectors, but the merchants selling shovels. The prospectors were betting on finding gold. The shovel merchants were betting on the near-certainty that people would try.

Apple is making shovels. Mac mini sales have been accelerating sharply as the AI wave has gathered momentum, not because Apple has built a flagship AI product, but because it has built the infrastructure that serious practitioners need to do their own AI work. They are not betting on which applications will win. They are betting on the near-certainty that capable, independent people will want to work seriously with these tools, and will want to own rather than merely rent the means of doing so.

That distinction matters. Most of the AI industry is built around services: you depend on someone else's system, your work passes through their servers, and the relationship is ongoing and extractive. They sell a service and create dependency. Apple is selling you a forge. Once you own it, the work you do is yours. All you need is to understand how to wield it, and AI has now made that considerably easier than it was. I am no technical wizard, but setting up a Mac mini with low-cost tools like Ollama and n8n, which handle local AI processes, looks achievable with a little learning.

Shovelling the Wreckage into the Athanor

When industries rationalise rapidly, they don't simply compress; they discard the things and people that were bundled inside them because it was administratively convenient to bundle them. Ways of working, local knowledge, relationships, specialist expertise that was never quite visible enough to be formally valued: all of it gets left in the rubble.

That rubble is where the gold lies. Not everything discarded in a rationalisation was genuinely obsolete. Much of it was simply inconvenient for the new model. And the almost comic part is that we don't have to do the digging, just the sifting. The people best placed to retrieve what matters are those who understood its value in the first place: practitioners with deep experience, boundary-dwellers who have worked across multiple worlds, craftspeople whose knowledge lives in practice rather than procedure.

What has historically limited these people is not insight or capability. It is bandwidth and access. A skilled independent practitioner has always been constrained by the number of hours in a day, the clients they can hold in mind, the administrative overhead of working without institutional support, and the expense of tools that only large organisations could previously finance. AI, used with imagination and genuine intent, can change this. Not by replacing the practitioner's judgement, but by handling the bureaucratic surround that eats into the time available for actual work.

The Mac mini as an athanor makes this practical rather than aspirational. An experienced consultant, a skilled adviser, a researcher: each of these people can now maintain a personal AI infrastructure that operates continuously in the background, preparing briefings, monitoring relevant developments, drafting correspondence, managing documents, and flagging connections between clients and contexts. The practitioner's day becomes more fully dedicated to what only the practitioner can do. The infrastructure is in service of the mētis, not a substitute for it.

Agency, Not Just Efficiency

The productivity case for personal AI infrastructure is real, but it is not the most important case. The more significant argument is about agency: about locus of control, about who shapes the tools of your practice, and on whose terms your work proceeds.

The AI being rolled out across large organisations is designed to standardise. Its purpose is to make outputs more consistent, more predictable, and more auditable. This serves the institution, but often sits in direct tension with individual practice. The experienced professional who has developed a distinctive way of reading situations, a particular method of building trust, a hard-won feel for what works in their domain: none of this transfers well into a system optimised for uniformity. When I look back at how much value was left on the table in projects I led, simply because it was too inconvenient to explore in the time available, I wince.

Personal AI infrastructure, by contrast, can be shaped around the practitioner and the client, not the institution. The athanor serves the work, not a standardised production schedule.

This matters especially for those working in fields where trust, nuance, and judgment constitute the entire product. For those challenging convention and operating at the outer edge of what is currently considered best practice. Big Tobacco was not an isolated case; the tendency of large corporate cultures to protect the status quo rather than engage with what comes next is widespread and well-documented.

What is emerging from the wreckage cannot be improved through standardisation. It will be developed by deepening individual expertise, widening personal reach, and attending to the small, specific details that make work genuinely useful to real people. Which is exactly what a thoughtfully configured personal AI infrastructure can support.

The Steady Heat

The alchemical athanor worked because it was patient. It did not produce the transformation. The practitioner, the materials, and the chemistry produced that. The athanor simply held the conditions steady, day after day, so the work could proceed.

This is, I think, the right way to consider what the Mac mini offers. It is not a magic box. It will not transform an unskilled practitioner into an expert, nor replace the years of experience that generate genuine mētis. What it can do, quietly, continuously, at very low cost, is maintain the conditions in which excellent practice becomes more fully achievable.

In the next post, I want to explore what this means in practice – for small cohorts of practitioners working together, and for what a modern Lunar Society model might actually look like when it has its own forge.

Hard power breaks things.

Right now, we find ourselves in a hard power world. The dominant power is overwhelming for us, whether that's in a geopolitical sense, a technological sense, or an economic sense. Geopolitically, everything else comes a distant second to the projection of military power. In technology, application comes a distant second to the power of compute, and economically, it's all about capturing resources. There seems to be remarkably little conversation about what happens once all these things have been achieved. It seems to be all about winning, with very little idea of what we'll do once we've won, whatever that means.

In the language of alchemy, hard power is a nigredo force.

The framing needs careful handling, because nigredo is often misread as simply destruction, something to be survived and moved past as quickly as possible. The alchemists understood it differently. Nigredo is neither failure nor aberration. It is the necessary first movement, the process without which nothing that follows can be real, and so the destruction is the precondition. What is being destroyed was never the substance that mattered; it was the attachment to form, the hardened structure, and the comfortable fiction that things can remain as they were.

The problem with the current moment is not that we are in nigredo; the problem is that we are in a nigredo that appears to have forgotten its own purpose.

The alchemist submits material to calcination because they are working towards something. The furnace is not an end in itself; it burns purposefully, and there is a theory of what comes next. What we are witnessing now, however, across the geopolitical, technological, and economic registers simultaneously, is a calcination running at full heat without any coherent account of what the ash is for. Hard power projection without political legitimacy, compute without considered application, and resource capture without a theory of what might be achieved beyond a story of more as an end in itself. The destruction is intense, but the intent beyond it seems remarkably thin.

Consider the geopolitical register first, because it is the most visible. The dominant logic is military projection and the credible threat of force. This is not new. What is new is the degree to which it has become self-referential, its own justification, disconnected from the question of what it is supposed to achieve. The United States military spent the better part of two decades learning, at enormous cost, that tactical dominance and strategic legitimacy are not the same thing. Boyd understood this. FM 3-24, the Counterinsurgency Field Manual published in 2006, tried to codify it: the population's orientation matters more than your weapons systems. Winning every engagement is not the same as winning. What you do to the material is not the same as what you do to the meaning.

That hard-won knowledge appears to have been largely set aside in favour of the simpler logic of overwhelming force. It is instructive that this should happen at precisely the moment when force has never been more overwhelming. The nigredo is at full heat. The question of what it is transmuting towards has been quietly dropped.

The technological register has its own version of the same pathology. The dominant discourse is about compute: scale, processing power, the race to build systems that are faster, larger, and more capable in narrow measurable terms. This is not wrong exactly; compute matters, but compute is episteme, formal codifiable knowledge scaled to extraordinary heights. What it cannot do is cross into mētis. The organisations capturing the most data are often the ones least equipped to read what it means. The Gaussian copula used for creating collateralised debt obligations was mathematically elegant but empirically catastrophic. Ratings agencies had all the data they needed in 2007; what they lacked was the contextual judgement to read what the data could not tell them.

We appear to be repeating the same category error on a larger scale, with more sophisticated instruments and equivalent confidence.

The economic register is perhaps the most structurally significant. Resource capture has become the dominant mode, but enclosure is not production. The historical record of resource-extractive economies is not a story of compounding advantage; it is a story of short-cycle gains and long-cycle fragility, of systems that become very good at managing their own internal processes while losing the ability to read the environment they depend on. Stafford Beer's diagnosis of systems that stop tracking reality and start tracking their own internal model of reality applies here with uncomfortable precision.

What unites all three is the same structural failure: nigredo without teleology. The burning has become the point.

This is where alchemy offers something that conventional political analysis does not. It names not just what is happening but what is missing, and what must follow if the work is to produce anything other than ash.

The operation that follows nigredo is albedo. The whitening. The clarification that emerges once the calcination has done what it can do. Albedo requires something that hard power cannot supply, and cannot be made to supply through more of itself. It requires reflection, discrimination, and the capacity to sit with what has been broken before reassembling it. A willingness to distinguish what is essential from what was merely habitual, to separate what matters from what was simply there because it had always been there.

Albedo requires a different energy.

Soft power, in Joseph Nye's formulation, is influence through attraction rather than coercion. Nye, who bridged theory and practice as Assistant Secretary of Defense under President Clinton, was describing something more than a diplomatic instrument: nations and individuals draw others towards them through the quality of what they embody rather than through the credible threat of what they can do. It is the albedo capacity; it clarifies, attracts, and makes the dissolved material available for new combinations. It is not weak, conciliatory, or the absence of force. It is something structurally distinct: the operation that makes force's gains durable rather than temporary.

This is the point that tends to get lost in accounts of soft power, particularly in a moment when hard power is so comprehensively dominant. Soft power is not what you reach for when hard power is unavailable. It is not the consolation prize. It is the operation that determines whether calcination produces transformation or simply ash. Without albedo, nigredo produces nothing that survives. It generates compliance without legitimacy, and suppression without resolution. Structures held in place by force rather than by the considered assent of those inside them, which means structures that will reorganise themselves the moment the force is withdrawn or distracted.

The United States discovered this in Iraq. The Soviet Union discovered it in Afghanistan. The Romans knew it well enough to build a system of citizenship and law that made their conquests mean something beyond the initial defeat. Hard power sets the conditions. Soft power determines what those conditions become. As in armed conflict, so in technology and economics.

The alchemical sequence has something else to say here, something less comfortable. If soft power is the albedo force, the whitening that follows the blackening, then it cannot be performed. It cannot be deployed strategically as an adjunct to the primary instrument of force, because albedo does not work that way. The material either undergoes the operation genuinely or it does not. You cannot calcinate and clarify simultaneously. The phases have their own integrity.

What this means practically is that soft power cannot be a tool in the conventional sense. It cannot be manufactured, scaled, or applied from outside. It emerges from the quality of character developed over time, through the kind of sustained attention and genuine risk-bearing that David Pye named the workmanship of risk.

It shows in the quality of work done with care, in the problems held rather than solved prematurely, and in the long accumulated evidence of contributions that serve something larger than self-advancement. This is what Nye was really describing, though he framed it in the language of international relations rather than alchemy: influence that operates through what you genuinely are rather than through what you claim or threaten.

In an age when AI can generate a competent first draft of almost anything, when credentials have become table stakes rather than differentiators, this distinction matters more than it has for a long time. The episteme is everywhere. The mētis is not. The ability to process and produce is ubiquitous. The ability to read the room, to sense when a negotiation is about to shift, to hold a question long enough that it changes the person holding it, these remain irreducibly human, irreducibly slow, irreducibly personal.

Hard power breaks things. That is not nothing. Sometimes things need breaking. The question the current moment is failing to ask is what should be built from the rubble, and who has the capacity to build it.

There is a scene implicit in every alchemical text, one that the grand language of transformation can cause you to overlook. The athanor is a furnace, and the furnace requires tending. Someone has to keep the temperature steady. Someone has to know when to increase the heat and when to let the material breathe. Someone has to resist the temptation to open the vessel before the operation is complete, to check on progress at the cost of the process itself.

The tending is not glamorous work. It is not the work that gets written about. It is the work of sustained attention, of care more than analysis, of trusting a rhythm developed over time rather than reaching for an instrument every time the anxiety becomes uncomfortable. It is craft in Pye's sense, workmanship of risk, where the outcome depends on the judgement of the person doing the work rather than the specification built into the system.

This is the work that is most needed in a nigredo world, and least likely to be valued by it. The nigredo logic rewards force, speed, scale, and decisive action. The albedo logic requires patience, discrimination, and the willingness to sit with dissolved material rather than resolidifying it prematurely into something familiar.

The Lunar Society did not try to stop the Industrial Revolution. It did not oppose the force that was transforming England. What it did was assemble at the edge of institutional life, at the boundary between what had been and what was becoming, and develop the quality of thinking that the next phase of the work would require. Watt, Priestley, Boulton, Wedgwood, Darwin, Edgeworth: people who understood craft and mētis and the long, slow process of genuine transformation, building the capacity for what came after the breaking.

That seems to me the right model for what the current moment asks of those of us who are not in the business of hard power but are going to have to live with its consequences, and eventually, when the furnace cools slightly, contribute to whatever comes next. Not resistance in the reactive sense, or withdrawal. It asks for the deliberate cultivation of the albedo capacities, the soft power qualities that no amount of compute or military projection can manufacture, and that the next phase of the work will not be able to do without.

Hard power has its limits.

I am convinced there is a craft to this.

I am inspired by C. Thi Nguyen's work on the nature of games, Joseph Nye's work on soft power, and Rory Sutherland's work on the creative nature of alchemy. I am increasingly impressed by the potential of AI when considerately harnessed. I used the prompting format I described in my "Experiment" posts here to research this article, using work I was familiar with to surface work I wasn't, in this case David Pye's work on the workmanship of risk.

I will write a piece on New Artisans on how this might emerge as a practical craft in changing times, and aim to have it posted by the end of the week.

Visit New Artisans

In my last workshop post, I shared an experiment working with Claude to map the spectrum of communication, from the purely informational at one end to the expressive and artistic at the other.

The key finding was simple: AI is not merely adequate but often superior at the information end; at the presence end, where the value lies in the relationship behind the words, “artificial” makes it a contradiction in terms.

The critical boundary lies between analytical and persuasive communication, the point at which an audience’s need shifts from content to conviction, from what is said to who is saying it.

Some thoughts, ideas and tools on this for paid subscribers;

Artisans are deeply invested in their craft, and have an understanding of and with their raw materials that makes recipes superfluous.

The realisation occurred to me when reading C. Thi Nguyen's excellent “The Score”, his latest book on the philosophy of games and scoring systems. It reminded me of a time in my life, decades ago now, when I was tasked with launching the first chilled pasta range in the UK.

Chilled Pasta is ubiquitous now, but then it was an innovation. It involved long hours, and long lunches, with a wonderful, eccentric Italian chef, Andreano Rossi, for whom pasta was something of a religion. I learned that making fresh pasta was an art that involved the feel of the flour, the ambient temperature and humidity, and the nature of the equipment. Sauces were also an art, and tomatoes, herbs and garlic come in all sorts of varieties, even when they look the same. Choosing ingredients felt more like an extended interview for Goldman Sachs than a shopping trip. The results were uniformly wonderful, hence those long lunches.

The challenge was developing recipes that could be scaled to industrial production, because Andreano refused to do them, on the basis that making great pasta and sauces needed more than a set of instructions; it involved empathy. His line was that recipes produced mediocrity, and he wouldn't do mediocre. If I wanted a recipe, I would have to write it myself. And that is what happened: lots of observation, increasing understanding, but not the empathy of mastery, which takes years of daily practice, and I suspect, a drop of Italian DNA. 

The range was a great commercial success, but I always felt a bit of a fraud.

Nguyen helps me understand why. One of the central ideas in The Score is the distinction between scoring systems that liberate and those that constrain. In games, we adopt rules freely, and the constraints become scaffolding for creativity. A chess player hemmed in on the board discovers moves they would never otherwise have imagined. But when institutions impose scoring systems on work, something different happens. Rich, complex activity gets flattened into measurable outputs. Nguyen calls this value capture: the process by which thin, quantifiable proxies replace the thick values they were meant to represent. Scores replace the experience of playing, metrics replace the experience of managing, and recipes replace the experience of cooking.

A recipe is a scoring system imposed on craft. It captures the achievement, the measurable output, but it cannot capture the striving, the quality of engagement between maker and material. Andreano's cooking was striving play: the point was the conversation between him and his ingredients, the feel of the flour between his fingers that told him something no thermometer could. The recipe I wrote reduced all of that to steps and quantities. It worked, and produced consistent, defensible results, but it was somebody else's game, and Andreano knew it.

Anything that can be reduced to a recipe follows the same pattern. MBAs are a case in point. They are recipes for management: frameworks, case studies, decision trees, all designed to produce competent operators at scale. They work, in the same way that my industrial pasta recipe worked. But the best leaders I have encountered did not get there through a curriculum; they got there through years of paying attention to the texture of situations in ways that no case study can teach. The MBA gave them a start point, a vocabulary, and a set of tools. Mastery, for those who made the effort, took years of commitment, of learning to “feel the flour”.

The same is true across most of the professional landscape. Coaching methodologies, agile frameworks, accounting standards, consulting playbooks: all recipes. All designed to produce acceptable outcomes at scale, and all available now, courtesy of technology, for a fraction of what they used to cost. The franchise model is built entirely on recipes, which is both its strength and its ceiling. If your business or your role is built on following recipes, the next few years will be instructive, because the recipes are about to become very accessible, and very cheap indeed.

This is where AI enters the picture, not as a threat but as a revealing agent. AI is extraordinarily good at recipes. It can process, recombine and optimise codified knowledge faster and more cheaply than we can. If your work consists of following recipes, AI will do it better, and this is not a prediction; it is already happening. But AI cannot strive. It cannot feel the flour, has no empathy with its materials, and no embodied relationship with the situation it is working in. It operates entirely in achievement mode, which makes it powerful and, for anything that matters, fundamentally limited.

I have now spent enough time working with AI, with Claude in particular and Gemini Deep Research alongside it, to understand something important about this relationship. Using AI well is itself a craft, more than a recipe. There are plenty of recipe-level guides to prompting and workflow, and they will get you started in the same way that my pasta recipe got the factory started. But the real work, the critical thinking work that produces something genuinely powerful, involves developing a feel for what each tool does well, how they interact, where to push and where to listen. It involves learning to read the texture of a response in the same way Andreano read the texture of his dough. It is mētis: the embodied, practical knowledge that develops through sustained attention to a particular practice.

This matters because it changes the landscape of value. When recipe-led solutions are ubiquitous and cheap, the focus moves to craft, to mētis, to the quality of relationships and the depth of understanding. The recipe gets you to the starting line. It is necessary, and it is no longer sufficient. Turning up to crank the organisational handle, following the process, delivering the acceptable output, that is no longer a place of invisible safety. It never really was, but the fiction was sustainable when recipes were expensive and hard to come by. Now they are everywhere, and the question shifts from "can you follow the recipe?" to "what can you do that the recipe cannot?"

The answer, for Andreano, was empathy andlove of cooking. The answer for the overlookers at Cromford Mill, who understood both the craft of weaving as well as the the machinery, was a hybrid sensibility that no instruction manual could produce. The answer for us is something similar: the willingness to develop a relationship with our tools, our materials and our situations that goes beyond competence into genuine understanding.

None of this is comfortable. Mastery takes years. It requires commitment to a practice when the recipe offers a shortcut, and means sitting with the discomfort of not yet being good enough, of feeling like a fraud, which is perhaps how most of us feel when we are genuinely learning rather than merely performing. The range of subjects to be mastered is exploding, and the pressure to reach for the recipe has never been greater. But the recipe, however good, will only ever produce Andreano's mediocrity at scale. The craft is where the difference lives.

Nguyen's subtitle asks the right question: how do we stop playing somebody else's game? For Andreano, the answer was simple. He refused. He wouldn't write the recipe because writing it meant accepting that pasta could be reduced to a score. The rest of us may not have his clarity or his stubbornness. But the question is worth sitting with, because the game is changing whether we like it or not, and the recipes will not save us.

I am bringing together the observations I make here and at Outside the Walls into a series of explorations and experiments at The Athanor.

If you're interested in looking at the art of how we use AI, join us there.

Visit The Athanor

Visit Outside the Walls

In my last post, I argued that AI might serve as our "Gutenberg moment", not by replacing what we do, but by fracturing the monopoly on who gets to create. It leaves a question hanging, one that goes to the heart of what alchemy actually demands of us.

If alchemy requires the idiosyncratic, the half-formed, the things we notice that others don't, then it has a problem with distance, because I do not think that those qualities travel well. They belong to particular people in particular places, dealing with particular circumstances. They are, by their nature, local. They are part of the inconvenient elements that commensuration, the averaging that metrics require to work at scale, must eliminate.

This matters because almost everything we've been taught about value creation runs in the opposite direction. Scale wants universals. It wants what works everywhere to work the same way everywhere. The entire logic of the platform economy, and of the AI goldrush now accelerating it, is to abstract away the local in favour of the general. But alchemy can't work like that.

Scale craves certainty, and wants simplicity to moderate the complexity it encounters. Scale doesn't like handmade. It prefers Lego brick substitutability.

Alchemy requires trust, whether that's in materials, people, or the equipment we use, because alchemy is not science. Going through the same procedures will not necessarily end up with the same result. Alchemy is affected by context and all the small details that exist in materials, place, time, and mood that commensuration must ignore. Alchemy has much in common with Boyd's OODA loop. Boyd understood that the competitive advantage isn't in deciding faster, but in re-orienting more honestly, destroying your current mental model when reality has moved on and rebuilding it from what you actually notice rather than what you expected to see. Alchemy asks the same of us. It requires the constant destruction and re-creation of mental models, not the production of a one-size-fits-all works-every-time process.

Trust is an interesting animal. It takes a long time to grow but is fragile and can be destroyed in an instant. It needs constant nurturing and tending; it erodes over time unless it is frequently refreshed. We can tend it over distance, from writing through to technologies like Zoom, but for trust to do its real work it needs personal encounter. There are so many small signals picked up in the chemistry that exists between us when we're together that technology cannot replicate.

Robin Dunbar reminds us that social connection degrades quickly the more people we connect to, and that our most productive relationships are likely to be with those five to fifteen people we most connect with. Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety tells us that only variety can absorb variety; we need more available to us than is being presented to us. And Sue Heatherington, in her post on Monday, reminds us beautifully that progress comes from paying attention to the small things.

Because the small things are where the value lies. When we sacrifice them in order to measure and compare at scale, we lose texture. We sacrifice mētis, craft, and the power of presence to think in the moment, and end up being captured by the measures we use — until we can only see what we're looking for, not what is there. Serendipity is strangled, as the mediocrity required by speed, efficiency, and productivity blinds us to the genuinely novel.

We lose omoiyari, the quiet, anticipatory empathy that is the interpersonal expression of everything this argument describes. It operates only within Dunbar's inner circles. It depends on sustained attention to the particular person and cannot be scaled, metricated, or algorithmised, because it reads context, mood, history, and relationship in real time. It is perception, not recognition. It is mētis made real.

Consider the difference. Recognition says: "I know your name, your role, your stated preferences." Perception says: "I notice you're holding something back today. I notice the energy has shifted. I'm adjusting before you need to ask." Recognition can be automated. Perception cannot, because it requires being changed by what you notice. It asks something of you. It is, if you like, the OODA loop made intimate — the constant re-orientation that Boyd described, but applied to a person rather than a battlefield.

It is, I think, a small thing that changes everything for those of us looking to find a place outside the brutal economics of scale. It is about turning up as who we are, not who we think others want us to be.

And that raises a major question for us about how we turn up. It's easy to turn up the way others think they want, waiting to be chosen; it's something else altogether to turn up as who they need.

I think it's important, so I'm going to start exploring that in the workshop later this week for paid subscribers. Usual rules - making a path by walking and telling you where I've been….

AI and Communication

When it comes to using AI in our communications, what I see tends to be a bit polarised. At one end of the spectrum, there are people who say, "Yep, use it for everything," and at the other, people who wouldn't touch it with a bargepole. Then, of course, we have the usual collection of people who express with confidence exactly what we should do about a new technology which we don't really understand yet.

So as an experiment, I thought I would work with Claude to see what came up. The results are interesting and valuable, and I'm going to use them as a base for doing some more work, which I will also post here.

Alchemy and the Heretics

Every time we scale something, we lose something. Scale demands commonality. It requires that all those little parts of us that aren't easily accommodated into a common whole be either eliminated or ignored. Alchemy requires the opposite. Alchemy requires all of us, all that we think and all that we are; the half-formed thoughts, the ideas we are afraid that other people might think are daft and the things that we notice that other people don't: the idiosyncrasies.

Alchemy requires diversity of every sort, from the individual to the collective.

Historically, while alchemy was not a heresy in itself, it often drew the ire of the Church because the pursuit of 'perfecting nature' seemed to trespass on divine territory. The secretive, coded language used by practitioners only fuelled suspicions of forbidden magic and spiritual rebellion. A classic example is the 13th-century friar Roger Bacon; though a dedicated man of faith, his pioneering work in alchemy and 'novel' scientific experiments led to his imprisonment by the Franciscan Order. His career illustrates the era's narrow divide between being a visionary seeker of God's natural laws and being branded a dangerous disruptor of religious orthodoxy. Today, we have a different religion whose version of divine territory is profit maximisation in pursuit of shareholder value, where espousing other values puts us in the same territory as Roger Bacon.

Where we are today demands heretics and alchemists. Capitalism, as we're currently practising it, has allowed us to perfect the wrong thing. That said, we're not exactly sure what the right thing is, so our challenge is to distil what we have learned, test it against what we want, and find new ways of working and living.

Paradoxically, the thing that many of us fear may well be the crucible we need to achieve what we want. We have given it a name in "artificial intelligence" that seems calculated to frighten us, when what we are dealing with is neither artificial nor intelligent, as I wrote in my last Reflections post.

A "Gutenberg Moment"

Before Gutenberg, the Church held something close to a monopoly on the written word. Manuscripts were copied in monasteries, literacy was concentrated among the clergy, and the laity's relationship with scripture was essentially oral, mediated by priests who controlled not only access but also interpretation. The printing press fractured that arrangement; Bibles appeared in vernacular languages, pamphlets circulated beyond ecclesiastical control, and literate laypeople began drawing their own conclusions from texts they could now read for themselves. The Church fought back through licensing and censorship, but these were rearguard actions. By the time Luther's theses were reprinted across Germany within weeks of their posting, the information monopoly had been broken.

It is worth noting that the conflict was not simply "Church versus laity" as neat opposing blocs; many clergy enthusiastically embraced printing. The deeper tension was structural, between centralised interpretive authority and distributed access to knowledge. It is a pattern we might recognise in our own time, where the concentration of AI capability in very few hands mirrors the old monopoly on the written word.

I had a small taste of what it feels like when that monopoly fractures. As I described in my Reflections post, I had a breakthrough moment when I stopped reading about what AI could do and started doing it: using Claude to build an application that leveraged my own thinking, simply by writing clearly about what I wanted. The bigger challenge was overcoming my self-doubt about "coding." It turns out that AI has not made coding skills redundant, just much more selective and specialised. What has changed, profoundly, is who gets to create.

What I built will not scale, nor do I want it to. What it does is amplify potential by harnessing all those things, in my clients and me, that scale cannot cope with. Things that will not be reduced to the doctrine of metrics. That is the Gutenberg parallel. Not a new technology replacing an old one, but a structural shift in who gets to make things, who gets to interpret, and who gets to participate.

Alchemy and Autonomy

The fragile nature of a workplace increasingly focused on efficiency and productivity is what it doesn't use. The employees who turn up deploy only a fraction of their capabilities, imagination, and enthusiasm in delivering increasingly rote work, designed algorithmically. It feels a little like putting Leonardo da Vinci on a production line. If we were to measure the waste of human potential in the way that we measure material waste, we would be deeply embarrassed.

But what if we can use the technology capabilities we're being offered to change that? Not to become more efficient at the things that waste us, but to exercise the parts of ourselves the workplace doesn't use. To build our own resilience and find some inspiration along the way. What if our "Sod-it Fund" isn't just financial, but potential? All those capabilities, experiences, and instincts that are inconvenient for scalable corporations could become a unique point of differentiation. Not a deficit to be managed, but an asset waiting for the right conditions.

So, in my own small way, I'm going to put myself in the service of that. Having started experimenting, I will continue. The risks for me are tiny. I have no business to protect, no monthly income to risk, and no obligations that require them. I have the opportunity, and perhaps the duty, to play and share.

The Alchemists Workshop

Here on The Athanor, you'll find a workshop tab, and I'm going to put in there the experiments that I'm running: the ones that work, the ones that don't, and what I'm learning along the way. I will look to cover my costs by putting it behind a modest paywall for paid subscribers. I will also look to put together small groups that can gather around what I'm finding to share what they are learning. My mental model for this is the Lunar Society, those 18th-century industrialists, scientists and thinkers who met monthly to share discoveries and push each other's thinking. No intellectual property. No hierarchy. Just people committed to learning together in a time of extraordinary change. As with the Lunar Society, anything we learn, we learn together.

I'm going to use Claude, and probably Notebook LM, as I do. Between now and the end of March, I will work with Claude to build an independent site where I can write about Outside the Walls and New Artisans, rather than relying on Substack. I really like Substack, but I share others' concern that when we write on other people's platforms, we are tenants, not owners. And, to an extent that could make me weep, the USA is rapidly becoming a place where digital landlords find themselves being shaped in pursuit of a minority agenda, rather than shaping through their extraordinary creativity.

Gutenberg created havoc for the established church, not least when he enabled Martin Luther to post his 95 theses on the church door in Wittenberg. I rather like the idea of AI doing the same for us as individuals.

Not havoc for its own sake, but the quiet, determined fracturing of monopolies that have held for too long.

Because Monopolies are never on our side...

I ran a small project over the weekend, considering our relationship with AI when it comes to communication - when we use it, and when we don't. I will post the results here for paid subscribers on Tuesday......

A Reflection on "Thin Space"

The idea of Alchemy is fractal; it happens at every level of being, from our individual psyches to the groups we form and on to the environments we occupy. Alchemy can be individual, at other times collective, and on occasion something larger altogether, like the "Thin Spaces" of Celtic myth and folklore, spaces where the boundaries of existence and meaning are more accessible than usual. As a Celtic saying has it, "Heaven and Earth are only three feet apart, but in thin places that distance is even shorter"

I think that the same is true of the space between who we are and what we do. Sometimes, we are fully engaged as who we really are, in "flow", where time is secondary, and the task is autotelic, a reward in itself. Goals, incentives and the tedium of measurement have no place. At other times, doing work required of us by others in exchange for reward, where there is no joy or discovery, just KPIs and OKR's, time takes on an elastic, endless quality. The clock, however carefully watched, moves slowly.

The more performative our workplaces, the slower the clock moves, and the more fleeting those opportunities for flow become. We are taken hostage by goals defined by others, waiting to be released by unloading the obligations that have led us to do the work we do, through good luck, retirement, or increasingly frequently, an email or short meeting with HR in the room. When that happens, in whatever form it takes, we would do well to be ready.

As a friend of mine said once about the idea that "The universe will provide", "It helps to give it a clue as to what you are looking for."

Thin Spaces and Athanors share qualities. While one is a spiritual geography, and the other a physical furnace, both are "liminal engines"; places where the veil between states is a semipermeable membrane, a space between the unsatisfactory known, and the possibilities of the unknown. Thin Spaces and Athanors have in common that they are points of transition, outside the noise of the thick spaces of daily survival, where the normal rules are suspended for a while. They also share a relationship with those who occupy them. They respond to intent, attunement, and acceptance that both the space and the occupant are part of the same exploration of possibility.

I think possibility has its own thin spaces. Just as we become the average of the five people we spend the most time with, so I think our goals exhibit something similar. If we spend our days pursuing goals defined by others, in pursuit of the measurable, then our own goals are likely to reflect that. Goals are like groups, they have insiders and outsiders, and the nature of the goals we derive in their company will reflect them. As an American friend told me ‘it’s hard to soar like an eagle if you’re surrounded by turkeys.“

We need our Athanors to find the space where can have new ideas that are not constrained by where we spend our days.

The Lunar Society was an Athanor, so was The Cafė Guerbois, as was the The Bayt al-Hikmak, the 9th Century Baghdad House of Wisdom, where the "fire" was the massive state-funded effort to translate all world knowledge into Arabic as it fused Greek philosophy, Indian mathematics, and Persian literature, leading to the birth of Algebra (Al-Jabr). Then there was The Bauhaus, where a weaver might spend all day with a carpenter, with the collateral result a unified aesthetic that defined the modern world (IKEA, Apple, and skyscrapers all trace back to the Bauhaus aesthetic). I could go on; Building 20 at MIT, cheap and "hacked together," where researchers could literally tear down walls or drill holes in the floor to run cables to other lab, and where linguist Noam Chomsky sat next to nuclear scientists and acoustics experts. At smaller scale, the "Inklings" at The Eagle and Child,
a small "Thin Space" in an Oxford pub where J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis met and their shared love of Old Norse created the conditions that allowed The Lord of the Rings to become a cohesive reality rather than just a collection of fairy tales.

What they had in common was that they were about possibility, not money. They were places where questions were derived, not addressed. Once we have a specific question we have set conditions, and moved from possibility to definition. It reminds me of one of my favourite lines from Elspeth Huxley:

“The best way to find out things, if you come to think of it, is not to ask questions at all. If you fire off a question, it is like firing off a gun; bang it goes, and everything takes flight and runs for shelter. But if you sit quite still and pretend not to be looking, all the little facts will come and peck round your feet, situations will venture forth from thickets and intentions will creep out and sun themselves on a stone; and if you are very patient, you will see and understand a great deal more than a man with a gun.”

― Elspeth Huxley, The Flame Trees of Thika: Memories of an African Childhood

And another from Jidda Krishnamurti

“But we do not ask. We want to be told. One of the most curious things in the structure of our psyche is that we all want to be told because we are the result of the propaganda of ten thousand years. We want to have our thinking confirmed and corroborated by another, whereas to ask a question is to ask it of yourself.”

I think it offers in part an answer to a question I have been wrestling with;

‘what is the purpose of the Athanor?”

The answer is, I think that like alchemy and thin space, it exists outside any notion of purpose. It exists as a space to host possibility, and the moment we define what that possibility might be we move into a different space of the creative process, from alchemy to science, and from thin spaces to projects.

Inspired by Sue Heatherington yesterday, I think Athanors and Thin Spaces are in many ways poetic places:

BECOME AN EVERYDAY POET

listen
notice 

stay curious
trust uncertainty
celebrate emergence 

be graceful
choose hope

+ Sue Heatherington

So, the Athanor will be shaped by what we bring to it, not what we expect of it.

I think that’s enough.

For those who can, our regular Zoom room will open at 5;00 pm UK on Wednesday 11th Feb

Zoom Link

Hennig Brand, shown here in Joseph Wright’s painting was trying to produce gold. He got phosphorous. Not what he expected, but unexpectedly valuable.

We could do worse.

A number of us in the Athanor have been part of another group that has been meeting on Thursdays for over 5 years now. We started at the beginning of Covid, online out of necessity, making sense of what was happening around us, testing ideas, building understanding week by week. Then, when conditions allowed, we met face to face.

For many of us, it was our first physical encounter, and yet the transition to deep conversation happened quickly, effortlessly and engendered genuine joy. It was, on reflection, genuinely alchemical, and the effect on subsequent online conversations was profound. Something had shifted. We established a rhythm: online meetings that explore and test, physical gatherings that complete and transform. The experience taught us something about conversational alchemy; about the conditions it requires and the craft it demands.

For an Athanor to function, its fire must be maintained for an extended period and materials must be kept in close proximity and tended carefully for alchemy to take place. For us, the alchemy we seek lies beyond opinions or the surface chatter of stable communities; it seeks to change the participants and the work they are able to do. Our Athanor functions as a catalyst, not merely a container, and whilst it hosts the change, like a catalyst, it remains unchanged. We can use it time and time again.

As individuals, we are the materials, developing in each other's company, but not always in the same location. We refine our individual understandings remotely, but genuine joint discovery requires something more. Physical gathering establishes its own rules: micro-obligations, attention, turn-taking, face-work, what we allow ourselves to reveal, and what can be safely named. That matters because alchemical talk usually starts with awkward truths and half-formed thoughts, whilst physical presence amplifies emotion and intention in ways that are difficult to reproduce remotely.

Remote work is important, but it tends to privilege exchanges of propositions. Co-presence better enables perception, tone and what we might call social weather; subtler frequencies which carry meaning that shape what becomes possible.

I suspect this is an aspect of intangible quality, in the Robert Pirsig sense of quality as a form of beauty. Remote work creates ideas and collisions, but turning them into something tangible requires the slower processes of time together; that precious stage when we share a similar sense of something but cannot yet name it. It requires space to percolate.

Online is easy and convenient. Creativity often requires friction, and friction requires a special type of space. Ray Oldenburg wrote of third-place environments that make conversation easy before it becomes important. They lower the activation energy, which matters for initiating alchemical talk because we often need a gentle on-ramp before asking people to risk honesty.

What emerges is a very particular craft. Something more than convening, less than facilitation. Something that understands preparation and completion as distinct phases requiring different conditions. Proximity alone does not cause alchemy, as anybody subjected to return to office mandates will testify. Those interventions mistake theatrical presence for genuine co-creation. They confuse being seen to be together with the conditions that make togetherness productive.

But preparation promotes alchemy. Exploring and testing ideas online is powerful, but completion requires presence. There is a special craft in turning enthusiastic and passionate energy into a single, more coherent form that can penetrate the challenges we are trying to address. Alchemy remains a good metaphor.

Our Thursday group experience suggests the essential conditions. Voluntary participation, a rhythm of meetings, online and off, and a sufficient degree of ritual and ceremony that create a safe space where we can do our best work. Small group scale, in our case, around eight, plus or minus two. Lastly, a different relationship with time: a kairos rather than chronos approach that celebrates timing more than time and respects the need for what is being created to emerge when it is ready, not before.

This year I intend to test this more deliberately. Following a conversation with a client earlier this year, I am convening a small group experiment: two or three practitioners, each with a client or two, meeting online and physically over a six month period. A mix of those who can put ideas into action and those who help catalyse those ideas. We will explore the spaces beyond immediate operational challenges and see what we might see together.

I think The Athanor is where we can turn conversational energy into something more tangible, something that has impact and generates movement, no matter how small. Perhaps this is where we go now: beyond exploratory conversation to the expression of ideas as action.

What are your thoughts?

Zoom will be open on Wednesday, 5:00 pm UK. Be good to see you there.

Zoom Link. Wednesday 4th February 5:00 pm UK

Note: There are others doing this work.

Doing it is more important than who does it. Have a look at what Colin is up to.....

Grinding onwards

Seeing the World Differently.....

There is a discipline to dealing with uncertainty. It starts with not reacting in the moment and taking the time to calmly consider what is really going on. Standing back enough to sideline, for a time at least, our visceral reaction to what we're dealing with when it conflicts so strongly with our values and what we believe to be important. As I write this, we have no shortage of visceral material. It can feel like we're in a live version of Gladiators meets Traitors. I wonder what Dickens would have made of it.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only" . The opening of The Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens.

I am left with a clear impression that, at the heart of the conflict, are different relationships to the idea of value. On the one hand, a mindset that seems to suggest that value lies in what already exists, like rare earth minerals, gold, oil, and anything else the acquisitive might define as a resource in finite supply, where the challenge is to acquire it by whatever means necessary, then trade it for an advantage. After all, when around 40% of the United States of America was acquired through purchases, treaties, and annexations rather than settlement, it makes sense. Why bother creating art, music, or anything else when you can buy what others have already made, or nature itself has given us and get a calculable ROI? Why would we not focus the astonishing energy and creativity of our countries on building weapons and technology that enable extraction and extortion rather than creation? Why would we choose to retain and nurture relationships that offer the basis of long-term prosperity when they do not offer the short-term return that shareholders demand?

Looked at through that lens, our current cast of antagonists is not the problem; they are a symptom of the problem. Whilst they may have unappealing characteristics and qualities, they are not the root causes of the challenge we face.

The root cause, I suggest, is different understandings of value. On the one hand, something that can be identified, measured, analysed, and traded as tangible wealth, which, when combined with a culture of urgency, efficiency, and productivity, makes acquisition rather than creation an attractive option.

On the other hand, value as the sum of qualities grounded in concepts far beyond the reach of measurement, such as beauty, fairness, and justice, which determine values and cultures over generations, not quarters.

If the fault line we are tracing runs between value as something to be seized and value as something to be shaped, then part of our difficulty lies in how we have trained ourselves to see, and perhaps more tellingly, in what we have trained ourselves not to see.

Two ideas offer a useful corrective here, precisely because they sit awkwardly with the extractive, transactional view of value that has become so dominant. The first comes from Kurt Lewin, one of the founders of modern social psychology, who distinguished between what he called Region Alpha and Region Beta. Alpha refers to the world as it can be described in objective, physical, and measurable terms. Beta refers to the world as we experience it at a human, embodied level. The second comes from James C. Scott, the political scientist and anthropologist, who writes about Mētis as practical, local, embodied knowledge, which I have touched on in earlier posts.

These ideas redirect our attention away from what is easily captured and towards what is quietly formative. Region Beta asks us to take the world seriously as it is experienced, not just as it is measured; it insists that we do not inhabit a neutral landscape of facts and resources, but a world thick with meaning, memory, fear, hope, and identity. Value, in this sense, is not simply what can be priced or traded, but what shapes how people feel about their place in the world and their relationship to others.

Consider what this looks like in practice. When an organisation measures engagement through survey scores while people experience their workplace as increasingly disconnected from meaningful work, that gap between Alpha and Beta becomes a space where value quietly drains away. The metrics may improve whilst the experience deteriorates. Region Beta asks us to notice that contradiction and take it seriously.

It reframes the distinction between value as extraction and value as creation in an important way. The problem is not only that we are stripping landscapes, markets, or institutions of what can be sold, but also that we are shaping experiences in which people come to feel that worth lies primarily in what can be owned, accumulated, or leveraged.

Over time, that becomes a culture, not just an economy.

Beauty, fairness, and justice, which sit beyond the reach of measurement, inhabit Region Beta. We know them, not because they can be calculated, but because their absence is felt. A society that erodes them may still grow richer in the narrow sense, while becoming poorer in the only sense that endures across generations.

Mētis brings us from perception into practice; it describes the kind of knowing that arises from being embedded in particular places, practices, and relationships; it is the capacity to act well in situations that refuse to be reduced to general rules or clean metrics. It is the nature of a craft relationship with what we do and an intimate understanding of the nature, people, environments, materials, and context in which we work. It matters because the creation of value, in this richer sense, is rarely the result of applying universal, abstract formulas at scale. It emerges from judgement exercised under constraint, from attention to context, from the slow accumulation of practical wisdom. Art, craft, institutions, even just forms of decency, are not extracted from the world like minerals. They are grown, shaped, and sustained through practice.

Where an extractive mindset seeks to bypass this slow work by substituting acquisition for creation, mētis insists that certain forms of value cannot be shortcut without being destroyed in the process. We can buy a building, but not a culture, and acquire a company, but not its trust. We can copy a technology, but not the judgement that allows it to be used well.

Together, Region Beta and mētis suggest that the contest is not merely between different economic strategies, but between different relationships to the world itself. One treats the world primarily as a stock of assets. The other treats it as a field of relationships, meanings, and practices in which value is continuously made and unmade.

This brings us back to the importance of not reacting and of standing back from the visceral because what is at stake here is not only how we respond to today's headlines, but how we choose to orient ourselves in a world that increasingly rewards speed, scale, and seizure over patience, depth, and care.

Region Beta asks us to notice how our systems feel to live in. Mētis asks us to notice how they are actually navigated in practice. Between them, they offer us a way of re-entering the question of value that neither retreats into abstraction nor collapses into outrage, but stays with the slow, demanding work of understanding how values are really formed, sustained, and sometimes quietly lost.

This capacity to hold different views of value without collapsing into one or the other, to recognise both the measured and the experienced, the universal and the particular, is at the heart of the work in The Athanor.

Not to take sides, but to hold the space in between the different views in order to enable those we work with to synthesise approaches that work for them and the work they are choosing to do.

The Beta / Mētis framework offers a way of doing this that acknowledges the legitimacy of different value systems whilst remaining alert to what gets lost when one completely dominates the other.

I look forward to exploring this with those of you who can join our conversation on Wednesday evening, 5 o'clock UK time, on Zoom.

Zoom Link for Wednesday 28th January, 5:00 pm UK timer