Lands of Lorecraft

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

Would you rather run blindly off a cliff, armed with a spreadsheet full of hard-earned but deeply flawed data, unaware that the cliff is even there, or thoughtfully navigate it with appropriately uncertainty-modulated mental models, with the unknown front-and-center in the form of a tarot card, and dashboards of live, accurate, but known-to-be-limi... See more

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

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

This is the hypothesis of lorecraft as a cope. 

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.

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

In a world where most aphorisms are born in on the Hobbesian meme-battlefield of Twitter rather than in books or speeches by already-revered figures, aphorisms with halos are cringe anyway, but aphorisms without halos do actual work. They are tools of thought, not ornamentation.

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