The Peak Before the Plateau

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The Peak Before the Plateau

There is a difference between demonstrating a capability and possessing it.

A demonstrated capability says: this can be done, once, under exceptional conditions, with enough money, urgency, ingenuity and institutional force.

The military call it a raid.

An embedded capability says something quite different: this can now be done repeatedly, economically and without drama.

In military terms it's the follow-up invasion.

The first is a peak; the second is a plateau.

Apollo was the peak before the plateau. The United States placed men on the Moon not because lunar travel had become a natural extension of its economic and technological life, but because the state concentrated intense resources on a politically defined objective.

The result was magnificent, but brittle. Once the political pressure had subsided, the capability largely disappeared. America had proved that it could go to the Moon. It had not created a civilisation for which going to the Moon was normal or had a point.

The medieval cathedral has the same structure. A society of limited transport, low productivity and fragile institutions could still raise Chartres or Salisbury. Those stones really stood but the building was a vertical extrusion from a very narrow base: craft, faith, patronage and multi-century patience had been lifted far above the everyday productive forces of the society around it.

The same thing can happen to a person.

When I first started fingerstyle lessons with Stewart, I had prior teenage familiarity with chords and playing lead breaks across the fretboard. But I had never attempted the intricate motions of thumb and fingers for fingerpicking.

As an experiment, Stewart gave me a Grade 3 fingerstyle piece.

It was impossible: my right hand was uncoordinated, the left hand - fretting the chord shapes - was always in the wrong posture. Eventually by obsessional perseverance I managed to get a passable performance. But it was not generalisable, it was a performance assembled by rote. 

Looking back now, after seven months of daily practice, I can deconstruct that hard piece into constituent skills, each of which I have internalised to some degree and which therefore transfers.

I now have a general capability: what was once a peak has become part of the plateau.

Spectacular achievements are often misleading, flattering our sense of possibility while concealing the conditions of their reproduction.

Some current projects have this character.

Artificial intelligence is perhaps the most obvious. Large language models already produce Q&A performances which look uncannily like high-intelligence. But many organisations trying to use them seriously discover that their data, processes, governance, incentives, systems integration and human judgement are just not ready.

Artemis, NASA's return to the Moon, is another. Its real problem is not whether astronauts can be landed there again - Apollo answered that. The question is whether lunar access can become sustained, repeatable and industrially normalised. That requires not another heroic spike, but a plateau of launch systems, landers, suits, habitats, logistics, finance and political patience.

(But China is driving the programme, not a sound business case).

Achievement peaks are seductive, fooling us that the future has already arrived. A peak can only be reached by intense and narrow focus; a plateau gets built by holistic organic development. Only the latter anchors real progress.

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