Friday Fun : The Alchemists of Modern IT

When organisations stop searching for magic and start practising chemistry, performance becomes reproducible.

The Age of Organisational Alchemy

For centuries, alchemists occupied a curious position in the courts of Europe. They spoke in obscure language, surrounded themselves with strange instruments, and promised results that would transform entire kingdoms. Their most famous ambition was seductively simple: turn lead into gold.

Kings financed them. Nobles admired them. Laboratories filled with smoke, symbols, and elaborate apparatus. Yet after years of experimentation, the raw material remained stubbornly unchanged.

Modern IT, despite its cloud platforms and AI copilots, often operates according to the same logic.

Today's alchemists no longer wear robes. They arrive with polished slide decks, strategic frameworks, and an impressive vocabulary of transformation. They promise that more ceremonies will create alignment, more roles will create accountability, and more tools will generate productivity. If the latest fashion is artificial intelligence, then AI becomes the philosopher's stone that will finally convert ordinary teams into world-class engineering organisations.

The promise remains as compelling as it was in the Middle Ages.

Take a struggling technology organisation. Add a layer of agile coaches, product operations specialists, delivery managers, transformation leads, and external consultants. Introduce a new planning framework, a maturity model, and several workshops. Sprinkle generously with dashboards and generative AI. Present the result to the executive committee under the reassuring title of "strategic acceleration".

The expectation is that this elaborate ritual will somehow transmute mediocre engineering into exceptional performance.

The Raw Material Matters

But the underlying material matters.

Weak leadership does not become strong because titles become more sophisticated. Poor engineering habits do not turn into craftsmanship because an AI assistant writes part of the code. Fragmented teams do not become aligned because they attend additional ceremonies. And organisations burdened by politics, fear, and unclear ownership do not become high-performing because a consultant produces a colourful roadmap.

In metallurgy, impurities determine the quality of the final alloy. In organisations, the same principle applies.

Fear contaminates decision-making. Politics distort incentives. Lack of accountability introduces structural weakness. Title inflation creates the illusion of authority without the substance of responsibility. Comfort replaces truth, and appearance replaces outcomes.

No amount of ritual removes these impurities.

The organisations that consistently outperform their competitors understand a much simpler principle. They do not search for magic. They refine the raw material.

They hire carefully. They train relentlessly. They reduce unnecessary complexity. They reward candour over theatre. They design systems where responsibility remains clear and outcomes remain visible. They treat engineering as a discipline rather than a performance.

The result may look less glamorous than transformation theatre, but it works.

What Real Engineering Looks Like

Toyota did not become a global benchmark through incantations. Amazon did not scale through mystical ceremonies. Aerospace, medicine, and watchmaking did not achieve extraordinary reliability through vocabulary. They advanced through disciplined practice, rigorous feedback, and an uncompromising commitment to craftsmanship.

Engineering has always resembled metallurgy far more than magic.

You begin with imperfect material. You identify impurities. You apply heat, pressure, and repeated refinement. Over time, the structure strengthens. Performance improves. Reliability increases. What emerges appears valuable not because someone declared it so, but because the underlying substance has genuinely changed.

This explains why independent consultants and interim leaders are often called when organisations reach a point of frustration. After months of workshops, strategic narratives, and expensive interventions, the kingdom still cannot deploy reliably, onboard customers smoothly, or explain where the delays originate.

At that point, someone arrives with fewer slogans and more practical questions.

• Where does work accumulate?
• Which dependencies block flow?
• Who owns the outcome?
• What happens in production?
• What evidence shows that customers benefit?

The answers usually reveal that the problems were neither mystical nor particularly novel. They were engineering and leadership problems disguised as transformation challenges.

And once the system begins working again, a familiar pattern often follows.

The alchemists return.

New presentations appear. Success is attributed to the strategy. Additional funding is requested for the next phase of transformation.

The engineer quietly moves on to the next troubled kingdom.

From Gold to Porcelain

History offers two remarkable examples of this transition.

In France, Bernard Palissy, a 16th-century potter, naturalist, and relentless experimenter, became obsessed with reproducing the enamelled ceramics he had seen. Lacking the right materials and techniques, he spent years conducting trial after trial. According to his own account, he became so consumed by the pursuit that he burned floorboards and furniture to keep his furnaces hot enough.

His neighbours thought he had lost his mind.

He never discovered gold. Instead, he created extraordinary ceramics that secured his reputation as one of the great craftsmen of the French Renaissance.

Two centuries later, Johann Friedrich Böttger followed a similar path. He originally claimed he could manufacture gold and spent years under the patronage of Augustus II the Strong attempting to fulfil that promise. He failed repeatedly.

He never produced gold. Instead, after painful experimentation and countless setbacks, he helped create the first European hard-paste porcelain and laid the foundation for Meissen Porcelain.

Both men began with an impossible ambition. Neither achieved the miracle they promised. Yet through persistence, sacrifice, and disciplined experimentation, they created something tangible, durable, and economically transformative.

Real progress rarely fulfils the fantasy we begin with. More often, it produces something far more valuable because it is real.

From Alchemy to Chemistry

The real breakthrough in human progress did not occur when alchemists perfected their rituals.

It occurred when chemistry replaced mysticism with evidence. Observation replaced belief. Experiments replaced incantations. Reproducible methods replaced secret formulas. Results became measurable.

Organisational progress follows the same path. The most effective companies do not behave like alchemists. They behave like chemists.

They understand the properties of the material they work with. They formulate hypotheses. They run controlled experiments. They measure outcomes. They refine the system until performance becomes predictable.

This is exactly what engineering should do.

The engineer quietly moves from one troubled kingdom to the next, helping organisations replace magic with method.

The Final Lesson

The lesson remains unchanged after centuries of technological progress.

Gold does not emerge from incantations. It emerges from discipline.

And in the end, engineering is not magic. It is chemistry.

In modern IT, as in medieval courts, the surest sign that an organisation has confused theatre with engineering is when it continues searching for magic instead of improving the material itself.