On Precursors

A precursor sits in the quiet before the event; a signal, not yet a story. It carries the essence of what’s to come but hasn’t yet unfolded. In nature, precursors are the faint ripples before a storm, the trace minerals before crystal formation, the tension before release.

We are up to our ears in precursors at the moment, if we take the time to stop and notice. The narrative about an AI bubble has moved from speculation to acceptance and has spread from AI to the wider market. We know a correction is coming, just not how big or quite when, although I suspect it will not be long.

The challenge is that those who need to see precursors rarely do. The obsession with productivity, efficiency, and speed makes them blind. I notice it in several places. In the games sector, where over 26% of European game professionals were laid off in the past year, with more than 10% still searching for jobs, those in creative professions within the industry feel the least secure in their roles. This seems perverse. Games are the world’s largest creative industry, and right now their future growth hinges on the most insecure roles, as post-pandemic overreach and extraction-first strategies stifle new voices whilst player demand remains strong.

The same pattern runs through other creative and knowledge sectors, echoing what Cory Doctorow calls enshittification, which describes how digital platforms decay as they shift from serving users to exploiting business partners to finally extracting maximum value for themselves until the system collapses under its own greed.

Film, music, publishing, and even academia have followed a similar arc: early abundance and open opportunity give way to consolidation, platform capture, and the steady extraction of value from those who create it. Post-pandemic overreach and investor impatience accelerated this. Rapid expansion, then contraction. A turn from exploration to efficiency. Platforms and financiers now dominate the flows of attention and capital, while those who actually create things—the writers, designers, teachers, and developers who generate renewal—bear the volatility. What looks like optimisation from above is often decay from within, as creativity becomes both the fuel and the casualty of systems built to extract rather than sustain.

What tends to blind those at the top is not a lack of intelligence, but the narrowing that comes with success. Once a system is optimised, attention contracts to what is measurable: quarterly growth, engagement metrics, and operational efficiency. Weak signals are filtered out because they do not fit the dashboard. Margaret Heffernan called this willful blindness, the quiet bargain we strike to stay comfortable inside the story that has worked so far. In complex systems, it is a costly trade. The precursors of failure appear first as small contradictions; rising tension, fatigue, odd data points, creative voices going quiet; yet power rarely listens to whispers. The danger is that we end up economically exhausted, having extracted every ounce of energy from old business models with nothing well enough developed to replace them.

Those who spot precursors share certain traits. They linger at the edges, hold multiple hypotheses lightly, and create enough safety for inconvenient truths to surface. They read patterns through friction rather than flow. In alchemical terms, it is the slow dissolution before transformation, and they sense tension building early.

I suspect that if you're reading this, you're good at spotting precursors. Perhaps, like me, you can sense them and spot them, but it can be a challenge to describe them in a way that is compelling enough to engage those in the organisations that are going to feel the impact enough to do something about it. It's frustrating, but in many ways inevitable.

This same pattern shows up in craft traditions. Reputation and success can trap the maker in place. Often it is the journeyman, those who travel from place to place working for different masters, experiencing different cultures, who come up with the inventions and innovations that really change things.

Mastery, paradoxically, can become a prison. The virtuoso pianist develops such fluent technique that their fingers follow grooves worn deep by practice. The successful painter finds a style that sells, and the market becomes a gravity well. What began as creative exploration calcifies into "brand maintenance". Bach, embedded in Leipzig for decades, and O'Keeffe returning obsessively to New Mexico's landscapes, represent the counterargument that depth itself can be generative. Yet even these examples suggest something more subtle. Bach was simultaneously the culmination of a tradition and its quiet revolutionary, but he was reading everything he could find, copying scores, absorbing Italian and French styles. O'Keeffe's eye was sharpened by years in New York's avant-garde before she moved to the desert. Their embeddedness came after exposure, not instead of it.

The journeyman, by contrast, lives in productive discomfort. Moving between workshops, cities, and traditions, they lack the luxury of automaticity. Each new context demands adaptation. The jazz musicians who created bebop weren't the most decorated virtuosos of the swing era; they were the side players touring between Chicago, Kansas City, and Harlem, hearing how the same standard was played differently in each city, synthesising fragments into something unprecedented.

This suggests that innovation emerges not from mastery or movement alone, but from a particular rhythm between them.

The most transformative figures seem to follow a cycle: deep apprenticeship to build vocabulary, travel or displacement to encounter difference, then a return to focused practice where synthesis can happen.

What blocks this cycle is not embeddedness itself but embeddedness without input, the closed system that mistakes optimisation for health. The master trapped by success faces the same functional fixedness as the expert who cannot see novel uses for familiar tools. Their dashboard shows green, so the weak signals stay weak.

But the journeyman can fall into a mirror trap: movement without depth, collecting influences like souvenirs without the mastery to synthesise them meaningfully. Innovation requires both the discomfort of difference and the capacity to metabolise it.

So, perhaps the real distinction is not between masters and journeymen, but between those who remain reflective and those who don't. The danger is not expertise, but unreflective expertise; not staying put, but staying put without curiosity; not moving, but moving without integration. The artists who keep innovating, whether they travel widely or paint the same mountain for forty years, share a quality of attention that refuses to settle. They treat their own mastery as provisional. They stay permeable to friction.

This is why precursor-sensing matters, and why it frustrates us if we are operating as a journeyman inside the master's house, carrying signals from the periphery to the centre. But the centre, optimised and comfortable, has trained itself not to hear. The most effective pattern-breakers seem to be those who have earned enough credibility within a system to be heard, but have kept enough connection to the edges to still sense what the dashboards miss. They are embedded outsiders, trusted enough to speak but strange enough to see.

We don't know what's going to happen next, but it seems unlikely that our current organisations are going to see the light and transform. Some will adapt and survive, but growth and the transformation we're looking at in the way we live will not come from them.

We need people who sense precursors, who can act like the strange attractors of chaos theory, and connect to create the opportunities we're looking for.

The Athanor exists to create that space. Not a training programme with predetermined outcomes, but a community of practice where reflective practitioners can work together in small groups over twelve to eighteen months. A place where depth and displacement can coexist, where you can test ideas, metabolise friction, and stay permeable to what the dashboards miss. A community for embedded outsiders to find each other and build what comes next.

If the idea excites you, and if you're prepared to help others, join us.