The Athanor in 2026.
A Year of Intention.
I have a sense that 2025 was only the warm-up act for 2026, and that this year we step into the main act, whether we are ready or not. America will have to get to grips with its Trump hangover and the discovery that after all the rhetoric and the chest-beating, it is no longer the centre of the universe. Europe is going to have to live up to its rhetoric of being more self-reliant, whilst avoiding the toxic narratives of the far right. China continues to do what it's always done; playing the long game. Business will need to find a way of making itself socially respectable again as it seeks to dissociate itself from a very Californian Techbro view of capitalism, and we humans need to regain our confidence in who we are and not just see ourselves as passive victims of AI. Taken together, these shifts are less about policy than about meaning: who we trust, what we value, and how we choose to live alongside one another.
I start 2026 with a simple belief: that the health of our conversations shapes how we see the world, and that, from this, flows the health of our organisations and, ultimately, our society.
Structures and strategies matter, but they sit downstream of meaning, and meaning is formed in constellations of conversation between people who are invested in one another.
Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow. Don't walk behind me, I may not lead. Just walk beside me and be my friend. Albert Camus
The conversations we have this year will matter; they can open up new possibilities, hold productive tension, bring things together, or slowly harden. We must nurture them, because they will shape our future.
Identity is built through small acts that serve as evidence. James Clear
The Athanor is a space designed to tend to this developmental quality: to hold what already exists at a sufficient temperature, for long enough, that something new might emerge. I’m interested in conversations that are young enough to introduce new material, courageous enough to stay with friction, mature enough to integrate difference, and wise enough to know when to let go.
As technology, in both its physical and virtual forms, assumes more of the work of execution and expertise, our human task becomes less technical and more developmental: cultivating judgement, perspective, and the conditions for renewal. The Athanor is not about preserving what is failing, but about caring for the conversations in which the old might nurture the emergent and shape it into something new. We have let these qualities lapse as we have become obsessed with data, mistaking measurement for meaning and efficiency for progress.
Workplaces have transitioned from being communities, even dysfunctional and toxic ones, into something far more sterile: platforms where economic activity is coordinated, but social life is treated as incidental. They have become platforms where our skills are traded, and relationships are sidelined in favour of short-term wealth generation for people we can only ever see from an increasing economic distance. There may be a lot wrong with capitalism, but I suspect it remains the least worst of our options. The deeper problem lies in how we have allowed our organisational forms to strip work of reciprocity, care, and restraint; we have, carelessly, allowed it to turn our organisations into Wetiko:
In North American Indigenous wisdom, Wetiko is not simply a monster but a condition of the human spirit. It arises in stories from Algonquian-speaking peoples as a cannibal being born of extreme hunger, isolation and spiritual disconnection. Wetiko appears when a person becomes possessed by insatiable appetite, losing empathy, reciprocity and restraint, and regarding everything it sees as resources to be consumed. It is a warning tale about what happens when fear and scarcity override kinship and balance, transforming survival into a form of madness that feeds on itself.
Wetiko cannot be killed like an enemy. It can only be outgrown and outrelated. Or, put simply: Wetiko dies when it is no longer unconscious. In this sense, Wetiko is not an external enemy but a mirror, reflecting what happens when our systems grow faster than our capacity for relationship.
Bringing Work Home.
The question on my mind as we start the year is this: can we bring work home, not by reversing history, but by restoring its capacity to create community, identity, and meaning?
For much of human history, work was not simply how we earned a living; it was where we learned who we were, where we were seen and known by others, and where our contribution took on social meaning. Craft, trade, and later industrial labour all functioned as containers for repeated human contact, shared standards, and a sense of mutual obligation, but over time, that container has thinned.
As technology, capital, and management theory have made it easier to fragment, outsource, and abstract labour, work has gradually shifted from being a site of community to a platform for economic activity. It has brought efficiency and reach, but at the cost of something harder to measure: belonging, identity, and the slow formation of trust. This is not some nostalgic vision; much of the journey we've been on has involved horrific conditions and exploitation. But I think we still have to recognise that we have paid a very high social price for economic progress.
We cannot kill the Wetiko at scale, but we can do it locally, through conversations that make it conscious, and by exploring together the possibilities that exist beyond the edge of our current work architectures.
A Conversational Path.
At the end of last year, I wrote a post about conversations as an ecosystem.
In it, I explored how conversations, like people, pass through distinct developmental stages; how early conversations mirror our childhood's exploratory abundance through play, mature through an adolescent phase of identity creation, affiliation and compliance, and reach adult integration where we "take residence" as we earn our living.
Eventually, though, we age into precedent-bound respectable rigidity and defensiveness unless we do the deliberate, unsettling work of questioning and renewal. I suggested that transformation fails not from lack of intelligence but because our conversations lose curiosity and courage.
One of the joys of AI is its ability to compile and synthesise information.I asked it to look at year-end reviews across all the major media and identify common themes. Read together, these end of year reviews are striking less for what they prioritise than for what they quietly exclude. They speak fluently about execution, productivity, governance, resilience and return on investment, as if the primary task of the coming year were to make complex systems behave a little more efficiently and predictably. People appear mainly as skills to be upgraded, costs to be managed, or risks to be mitigated, rather than as participants in a shared social project. Community barely features at all, except as a proxy for brand trust or customer sentiment. They are inward-looking stories, told mainly from the organisation's vantage point, looking back on itself.
As technology accelerates and work becomes ever more mediated by platforms and automation, this leaves an open question that few of these reviews seem willing to ask: if organisations are no longer places of belonging, and if technology continues to dissolve the social glue that once came with work, where do individuals now find identity, continuity and care, and what kinds of communities are we allowing to form in the spaces left behind?
Many of these conversations display the rigidity and self-congratulation of a recently honoured retired CEO, as they look forward to writing their memoirs from a beach somewhere. These are conversations that need hospicing, not because they are evil or misguided, but because they are rooted in assumptions that no longer serve us.
The conversations we need are the conversations of childhood: imaginative, playful, and experimental. Conversations that hold wonder as a value and ambition as energy. These are the conversations I am hoping we can grow and spread through the Athanor: not as a programme or a platform, but as a place of shared attention. Conversations that can look at technology in general and AI in particular as a toy, as a vehicle for imagination, but not yet a tool. Conversations that might help us develop a language that brings work back as a social container, not just an economic interface.
From Private Disquiet to Shared Naming.
The quiet before is not silence. It is the sound of people thinking, testing language, and discovering that their unease is shared. For some time now, many of the most important conversations about work and technology have lived in this private space: thoughtful, hesitant, and unfinished.
Many of us have been on this journey together since the start of the pandemic.We have watched the ripples that that period created as it flowed through arguments from working from home vs. working from the office, conversations on how we reward some of the most important people in our society that the pandemic brought into sharp relief, and we have watched as our organisations have signally failed to capture the imagination of those who work for them. We have watched as those in leadership roles have been unable to lead, instead retreating into automation as a less problematic approach to increasing complexity. Algorithms have the benefit of being compliant and not pointing out the bullshit.
What feels different as we enter 2026 is that these conversations are beginning to find one another. Private disquiet is turning into shared naming, what was once background noise is becoming signal. The end of the quiet before does not mean we know what to do next, but it does mean we are ready to take responsibility for doing something.
Outside the Walls and New Artisans are contributory conversations to this moment. One looks outward, making sense of what is shifting around us; the other looks inward, at how people are reshaping their working lives in response.
The Athanor is different. It is a step beyond commentary and example, into participation and intent. A place where people do not need to adopt a shared worldview, but only a shared commitment to thinking well together.
Walking beside each other.
If 2026 marks the end of the quiet before, then it also marks the point at which reflection gives way to responsibility, noticing becomes a form of action. We move from observation, through orientation, to making decisions for ourselves and helping others do the same.
Below are some writers and thinkers whose work resonates with this moment, not because they have all the answers, but because they are asking versions of the questions we’re now ready to face.
Bill Johnston
Carlo Navato
Colin Newlyn
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