Craft - What the word reveals about where your real power at work lives (Word at Work Series)

Good morning and welcome to here's an idea worth playing with and this week's word of the week is the word craft. It's a word that we all think we know. We've got craft beer, we've got craft fairs, we've got hand crafted, small batch, artisanal, that kind of word that's been stuck on almost everything that it's I guess it's gone a bit soft around the edges, it's lost some of its meaning. Which is a bit of a shame because underneath all of that, CRAFT is actually what I think carrying one of the best stories from the English language, and it's a story about power. So let's start where I always start which is the dictionary.

Now, the dictionary definition, and I think this one comes from the Oxford Dictionary, is craft is a noun. It's a skill in making things especially by hand. Also, it's an activity or trade that needs that kind of skill. So carpentry, weaving, writing, the CRAFTs as we call them. My grandad was a cabinet maker, that is a CRAFT.

And then another definition which is a little bit stranger, a little bit darker, this is the skill of deceiving people. So they have cunning, they have guile, That is the craft in crafty. That person is very crafty, is often sort of negative to some extent. And then apparently from nowhere we get a boat, So a ship, an aircraft, a watercraft, a spacecraft. So we have four meanings that don't obviously seem to sort of belong together.

We've got a skill, we've got a trade, we've got trickery and we've got boats. So how did they end up sharing a word? Well, I think this is where it gets really interesting. So if we go back about a thousand years or so to old English and the word CRAFT, and I'm probably not saying that right, but it's c r a e f T, where the A and the A are joined together in that sort of old English way. It didn't mean skill at all, it meant power.

It meant strength. It meant might. It meant physical force. If you had CRAFT, you were strong. And you can still see that original meaning today actually sitting there in plain sight in German because the German word CRAFT still just means power.

CRAFT WORK, the band? It means power station. That's the old meaning still preserved in modern German. But here's the thing, the English is the only Germanic language because that's where it came from where the word made that journey as far as my research tells me anyway. So somewhere over the centuries, CRAFT drifted from meaning power to meaning skill.

Every other branch of the family kept the muscle, the power. English kept the hands part of it. And I don't think that's actually a downgrade. I actually think that's an insight. At some point, English speakers sort of looked at that raw strength and looked at the skill and and I guess subtly and quietly decided that they were actually the same thing.

That skill is power. That the person who knows how to do the thing really knows in their hands, in their eyes, in their minds, well, they hold the kind of strength that brute force alone can't touch. So the other meanings fall into place once you sort of see that in the word. Crafty originally meant strong or skillful, a compliment. It then changed and morphed later into cunning when people noticed that the skill could be turned on other people instead of on materials.

Same power, different target. And the boat is most likely short for vessels of small craft, boats that took real skill to handle. The vessel ended up named after the skill it demanded. And I I love that branch of that word. So what does any of this mean for the world of work?

Well, here's the idea worth playing with this week. Your craft is where your power at work actually lives, not in your job title, not in your position on the org chart, not your grade, not your band, not your level. All of those are borrowed from the structure of the organization. They are issued to you and they can be reissued, restructured, renamed on a random Tuesday afternoon in the executive's announcement. I've sat in enough of those kinds of announcements on both sides of the table to know how quickly that kind of power evaporates.

But your craft, the thing you've learnt to do well, through the years of actually doing it, that's owned, it travels with you, it compounds. Every hour you spend in that kind of honest contact with that real work building your craft, the judgement gets a little finer, the eyes get a little sharper, your taste and your skill and your craft increase. Nobody can restructure that away from you. And those old English speakers had it right the first time. CRAFT is might.

It is power. And that's the other thing about the word CRAFT, the part that I actually find the most interesting. We talk about CRAFT as if it lives in the hands. It doesn't. It lives in the eyes, in the mind.

What separates a CRAFT's person from someone who merely produces things is often what they can see. I'll never forget those times when I went to see my granddad who was, as previously mentioned, a cabinet maker. He had a little workshop down at the bottom of the garden. A very small workshop really, but it was just perfectly laid out. And I remember as a young lad I was probably only maybe seven, eight, coming up to nine, 10, around that kind of era watching him in his workshop, the way that he looked at a piece of wood and discarded it.

He sees the grain, the tension, he sees where it's gonna split, what it wants to become. And he could see that, and I couldn't. And a good editor, if you've ever worked with a good editor, they hear a sentence that's carrying too much, that's not quite landing. A good engineer feels where the system is straining before anything breaks. The hands just carry out what the eye has already noticed, which means CRAFT at work isn't reserved for people who make physical things.

If your work involves ideas and let's be honest, whose doesn't? Then your CRAFT is the trained seeing, the noticing, the observing that you bring to it. The things you notice that others do not. That's the skill. That's the power.

And between every idea and the value it could become, there is a distance to travel. CRAFT is what you carry it with. It's how the distance shrinks. It's how the idea becomes something valuable. This is precisely why in the flywheel level of the idea to value system we have three distinct areas of focus for learning, and one of those is CRAFT.

I've chosen that word specifically. And then one more thought before I let you get on with your wonderful day that you have ahead of you. There is a magical Japanese word called Motanae. We've done a word at work about that particular word. Motenie is a kind of regret at seeing something's potential go unused, squandered, wasted.

And I think about that word a lot. It actually is one of the kind of guiding principles, I guess, that sits underneath a lot of my work with clients and the work that I produce. You see, CRAFT to me is the opposite of maternier. It's attention that honors the material. Nothing about the word or the sentence or the idea or the person gets squandered.

CRAFT is care personified. So here's the question that I think is worth carrying into the week, into the day, into busy schedule. It's not what's my role, that's a borrowed power, it's a borrowed position. I think the better question is what's my CRAFT? What have I learnt to see that others can't yet?

Am I spending enough time in contact with the real work for that seeing to keep sharpening? Because a thousand years ago, craft meant power. It still does. We just wrote it down differently. And at the end of the day, craft is just the hands carrying out what the eye and the mind has already noticed.

That's this week's Word at Work, the word CRAFT, and I hope that's been an idea that has been worth playing with. Now it's still scorchio here in The UK. We've had, a couple of weeks of nearly like 29, 30 degrees Celsius, which for us is is unheard of to have this period of time. And I think we've got another week ahead of us, so I've been loving it, but I think my family are starting to suffer now with the heat. And I think many of us in Europe are suffering this same heat wave.

So kudos to you. Stay safe. Make sure you hydrate. Try and keep yourself cool if you can. And I look forward to speaking to you in the next episode.

You take care of yourselves. Bye bye.