🏛️ From Rome to the Renaissance, Where Engineering and Craftsmanship Unite, Evolution Begins 🌱

Hey there, digital warriors! ⚔️

Last week in Forge of Unicorns, we pulled back the curtain on CEO hiring with Ron Ondechek Jr. His story wasn’t just a behind-the-scenes reveal; it was a reality check.

😱 Only 1 in 4,000 candidates makes it through his Stanford-backed behavioral screening model.

And Ron said it best:

“You’re not hiring a person—you’re hiring a cultural signal. One that has to resonate across the entire organization.”

The rest?

❌ Misfires.

❌ Mismatches.

❌ Cultural rot hiding in plain sight.

In an AI-bubble economy where leadership missteps cost millions and morale, we can’t afford to guess anymore. Because when the top fractures, the whole system caves.

So this week, we dig deeper ⛏️.

From Ron’s elite hiring lens to the field-level design of evolutionary systems, where people, performance, and process aren’t separate… they’re connected. Bound by connascence. It means growing and existing together, where change in one part of the system is intrinsically tied to another. In high-stakes industries, it’s the source of transformation resilience. And it’s this relational depth, the intrinsic dependency, that unlocks real, lasting evolution.

Today, we step outside the org chart… and into the operating system of entire industries.

Because the greatest playbooks for transformation?

It’s built by those who blended craft with engineering and refused to stand still.

🏭 FOUR INDUSTRIES. ONE COMMON EVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLE

In this episode, Nicolas Banados brought us two stunning real-world stories of evolution:

• ⛏️ Mine working went from swinging a pickaxe in deadly tunnels in the 50s ⏩ to piloting 50-ton excavators and trucks remotely with zero casualties.
• 🍔 In high-speed Fast-Food chains, students with zero experience ⏩ are consistently upskilled into high-performance teams.

Both stories revealed the same truth:

When engineering, mentorship, fast feedback, and craftsmanship are woven into a system, transformation becomes natural and scalable 🌱.

Let’s walk through it:

• 🍔 In fast food, students with zero prior experience are transformed into high-performance operators, replicating the same customer experience globally. Not through improvisation, but via structured upskilling, behavioral choreography, and relentless, feedback-driven craft. A global operating system designed to scale excellence, not chaos.
• ⛏️ In mining, what began with pickaxes and fatality-ridden tunnels evolved into high-tech control rooms, where 50-ton excavators are driven remotely. This didn’t happen by accident. It followed the socio-technical model theorized by Eric Trist [*book], where teams evolve not as parts but as living systems with mentorship and shared purpose at the core.

Then we zoomed out to 🏎️ Formula 1 and 🏍️ MotoGP, the crucibles where our research began. We saw the same evolutionary DNA at work:

• 🏎️ In Formula 1, continuous telemetry loops, design sprints, and track feedback create 1000-hp machines that protect lives at 350+ km/h. Here, craftsmanship isn’t nostalgic; it’s speed, safety, survival, and a world championship in the highest-regulated motorsport environment.
• 🏍️ In MotoGP, the bike and rider become one: flesh, craft, data, iteration. The human body leaning 62° through apexes at 350 km/h is not magic. It’s mastery, forged in feedback and built by cohesive engineering teams of passionate crafters, not white-collar thinking checklists.

These industries didn’t stumble into evolution. They engineered it. Through deliberate socio-technical design, they created ecosystems where human learning wasn’t an afterthought, but the core. Where craftsmanship was not nostalgia, but operational advantage. Where feedback wasn’t occasional, but constant, and sacred.

Each system was a fusion of engineering precision, behavioral insight, and field-level mentorship. The result? Environments that didn’t just resist decay. They ignited progress. As Nicolás reminded us in the episode:

“You can’t expect a miner with a pickaxe to walk into a control room and perform. That evolution takes time, mentorship, and behavioral systems. Software is no different.”

🤔 So what ancient spark lit this fire of craft and engineering?

From Craft To Engineering: The Ancient Roots We Can’t Forget

These evolutionary leaps aren’t isolated miracles. They’re echoes of an ancient principle that’s shaped civilization for over two millennia:

The fusion of 👷🏻♂️ engineering and 🛠️ craftsmanship.

Let’s rewind ⏪ the tape 2,000+ years…

• The Greek and Roman Empires. When Rome fell, what preserved human advancement wasn’t just philosophy or politics. It was infrastructure powered by skilled hands. Roads, aqueducts, amphitheaters: enduring, elegant, and engineered with precision by master builders and their apprentices.
• Then came the Middle Ages. A long stretch of intellectual darkness, where innovation dimmed but did not disappear. Guilds quietly kept the flame alive. These brotherhoods of crafters passed on their secrets, curated standards, and protected human knowledge: not in libraries, but in practice.
• The Renaissance reignited it. Science, art, and mastery merged. Leonardo wasn’t just an artist or an engineer: he was both! Craftsmanship became the vehicle for human potential. No longer a job, but a calling. No longer isolated, but institutional.

And today? We float in a strange purgatory. Especially in software. Not quite collapsed. Not yet enlightened. We’re trapped between unchecked growth and unanchored purpose. Software evolved without a backbone. No standards, no socio-technical scaffolding, no ancient formula. And that’s the missed opportunity.

Reclaiming this legacy doesn’t mean going backward. It means taking the best of the past to leap forward. While the rest of the world evolved, what did we do? We tribalized. We fought over frameworks. We outsourced responsibility to tools, diagrams, and certifications.

We pretended that process was progress.

And now?

❌ Tool oppression.

❌ Talent disengagement and burnout.

❌ Transformation fatigue.

We created digital factories with no craft, no soul, no pride. Drowning in checklists.

🤔 What stopped us from building the same system?

💡 The System Software Never Built

Every one of those evolutionary industries (mining, fast food, F1, MotoGP) created something we didn’t:

a human-centered system. Not built for control. Built for growth.

They paired engineering with craftsmanship. They embedded feedback into the floor. They built talent through behavioral systems, not slide decks. They didn’t wait for motivation. They designed for it. They didn’t preach culture. They practiced it. They didn’t sell transformation. They engineered evolution.

Meanwhile, in software, we forgot that our work isn’t mechanical; it’s intellectual. Artistic. Deeply human. Instead of blending engineering with craft, we fractured 🥺.

Coders vs. engineers. Engineers vs. crafters. Everyone distracted while the market sold us frameworks and diagrams.

And what did we build? White-collar factories. Where creativity is optional, and compliance is king. Where burnout isn’t a bug; it’s baked into the org chart.

Today, companies that treat software as a commodity are replacing engineers with AI agents. But, those same companies are calling back in desperation. Because only modern crafters, guided by behavioral systems and proud of their guild lineage, and engineering knowledge, will be able to fix the brittle, bloated software built without soul.

🧵 CRAFTSMANSHIP ISN’T NOSTALGIA. IT’S SURVIVAL.

And it’s time to bring it back:

To software. To hiring. To delivery. To every room where the cost of disengagement is collapse.

This episode is a story of real evolution from the trenches. It is a blueprint for restarting communities of practice, SW Craftsmanship, Book reading clubs, and coding Dojos in every software company.

Let’s stop selling transformation. Let’s build evolution inspired by the lessons of those succeeded, and as you’ll see in this week’s episode, this isn’t theory.

It’s the evolutionary playbook the software industry forgot to build.

📺 Enjoy the podcast

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