Lands of Lorecraft

Arguably, lorecraft is the first truly internet-native school of management and organizational thinking, though I’m sure it won’t be the last.

I stumbled across a key insight that may or may not have been spotted before: lorecraft is the evil twin of marketing.

Lorecraft is how you design and manage organizations where all the dull and boring stuff is increasingly being automated away, and what’s left of management and leadership functions is increasingly just the interesting and hard to automate stuff. This is the hypothesis of lorecraft as a genuinely new managerial capability.

Lorecraft is clearly a strikingly millennial school of management thinking. All the thinkers who belong in this tradition are, as far as I can tell, between about 28-35 or so. They are firmly middle-of-the-pack millennials. Founders of startups who seem to practice a sort of management by lorecraft, such as Conor White-Sullivan of Roam Research, ar... See more

Lorecraft is perhaps a kind of self-soothing behavior in individuals caught up in a highly automated, non-nurturing, and inhuman work environment.

Unlike older millennials and GenXers like me, they joined the workforce late enough that their thinking was not too influenced (contaminated?) by the baggage of traditional industrial organizations. Unlike Zoomers, they already have experience of workplaces — but crucially workplaces that have already been transformed by the internet in a way that ... See more

If your party or event boasts good vibes, that’s great. But if you expect a vibe to do the work of full-spectrum managerial lorecraft of the sort suggested by Rafa’s table or Kei’s eight qualities, your effort is doomed. 

What is notable about this construct is that while it inherits many elements from older traditions that will be familiar to older managers and leaders (even Boomers should be able to parse the Mission and Ethics columns), the core of it is the Lexicon and Lore columns, which have no real counterparts in older traditions. As far as I know, no MBA co... See more

When “HR” to you mainly means a bunch of cloud apps rather than Toby from The Office, when even your boss is potentially an app streaming tasks and bounties at you rather than a person, when your world of work does not exist in the reality distortion field of a Steve Jobs, but in the inanimate reality distortion field of a stack of cobbled together... See more