Lands of Lorecraft

This suggests a skeptical null hypothesis — lorecraft is perhaps a kind of self-soothing behavior in individuals caught up in a highly automated, non-nurturing, and inhuman work environment. Being raised by TV is a walk in the park compared to being raised by apps.

If this hypothesis of lorecraft as an emerging managerial capability is correct, any organization — be it a traditional corporation, a DAO, or just a complex money-making coordination pattern passing through Twitter or TikTok like a wave — will thrive and do interesting things to the extent it has both interesting ideas and content — and skilled lo... See more

t is also tempting to dismiss this kind of thing as non-rigorous solipsism, but that would be a bad mistake. Lorecraft does rely on rigorous argumentation and empirical-phenomenological grounding. In fact it is much more grounded and empiricist than traditional management thinking, with its arsenal of unacknowledged myth-and-ceremony cognitive tool... See more

Lorecraft is a natural and adaptive intellectual response to the automation of vast swathes of managerial/leadership functions, and organizational processes.

The common feature in the work of these emerging thinkers is the centrality of lore, as in folklore, the lore of a fictional extended universe, or more pertinently, the water-cooler lore of an organization, in the framing of the traditional concerns of management and organizational theory. Lore, you might say is the feedstock of both stories and wo... See more

Being raised by TV is a walk in the park compared to being raised by apps.

Then it hit me: lorecraft is a natural and adaptive intellectual response to the automation of vast swathes of managerial/leadership functions, and organizational processes. You end up doing more of what the machines don’t.

And the way you get good at it is by getting increasingly attuned to the softer, subtler side of organizations. To the extent these subtle and nebulous forces can be understood and manipulated with precision and deftness (soon with deep learning for leverage), you get vastly more sophisticated organizations. 

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.

But there’s a really compelling alternate hypothesis — 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.