Every economy is defined, in the end, by what it treats as scarce and what it treats as cheap. The economy we are walking into has quietly reversed the assignments most of us spent our careers learning, and the organizations that recognize the reversal early are going to look, within a few short years, very different from the ones that don't.
For most of the modern era, the raw materials of competitive advantage were information and the ability to act on it. Knowing something the other party didn't know, or being able to build something the other party couldn't build, was the entire game. Whole industries were organized around the friction of acquiring information, and whole careers were organized around the friction of turning that information into working systems. The professional class, broadly speaking, was paid for the labor of moving the world from not knowing to knowing, and from not built to built.
That world is ending, and it is ending faster than most of the institutions inside it have fully registered. Information is no longer the scarce material; it is the air. The ability to build, which used to require years of specialized training and a team to match, is becoming something a single curious person with the right tools can do over a long weekend. Anyone with a laptop and an honest question can now interrogate the sum of recorded human knowledge in conversational English, generate working software without having written a line of code in their life, draft contracts, design brand systems, model financial scenarios, and produce passable video. None of that was true at this price, at this speed, or at this quality five years ago. All of it is true now.
The new scarcity
When the raw materials of an economy become abundant, the value moves. It always has. When iron became cheap, the premium shifted to architects. When information became cheap on the open web, the premium shifted to editors and curators. The same logic applies now, only more sharply, because the materials becoming abundant this time are not a single substance but the underlying capacity to know and to make. When everyone can know almost anything, knowing stops being the differentiator. When everyone can build almost anything, building stops being the differentiator. The premium has to move somewhere, and the place it is moving to can be described, with some precision, by two words.
Synthesis and synergy are the two words I would write on the wall of any organization trying to find its footing in this next decade.
Synthesis is the discipline of pulling many things into one coherent thing. It is the work of taking a tangle of inputs, some of them contradictory, some of them half-formed, and arriving at a clear and defensible view of what they actually mean for the specific organization standing in front of you. Synergy is the discipline of arranging the resulting pieces, the strategies and systems and people and tools, so that each part makes the other parts stronger rather than merely sitting next to them on the same org chart. The first is a thinking discipline. The second is a building discipline. Neither has any meaningful relationship to how many tools you own or how fast you can produce output.
Why building, by itself, will not be enough
The most common confusion of the next few years, in my view, will be the one already taking shape in boardrooms and back rooms across the country: the assumption that the right response to abundant building capacity is to build more. It is an understandable mistake, because building is visible, and visibility is comforting in seasons of uncertainty. The team that ships ten things this quarter feels, at the level of the gut, more serious than the team that ships two. The leader who can point to a wall of dashboards, a stack of new tools, and a flurry of automations feels, to the people watching, like a leader who is doing the work.
The trouble is that when the cost of building approaches zero, the volume of building stops being evidence of anything. Every competitor can produce the same output, in the same window, at roughly the same cost. The flood of new sites, new apps, new campaigns, new automated touchpoints, new AI-assisted everything is not a competitive moat; it is the new sea level. An organization whose strategy is to outproduce the field is competing in the one category that has been most thoroughly commoditized by the very technology it is leaning on. The volume game is, structurally, the losing game in an economy where volume is free.
Worse, the obsession with output tends to produce a particular kind of organizational decay. Teams begin to mistake activity for progress, motion for direction, and stack complexity for capability. Three years in, the wall of dashboards is still there, but no one can articulate the through line. The brand has accumulated assets that do not reinforce each other. The website talks past the sales process. The sales process talks past the operations team. The operations team is working out of a tool the marketing team has never opened. Each individual piece was reasonable at the moment it was built. The collective result is incoherence, executed faster than ever, and incoherence executed fast is still incoherence.
What synthesis actually requires
Synthesis is unglamorous work, which is part of why it tends to be undersupplied. It rarely produces anything you can point to on a Tuesday afternoon, and it almost never feels, while you are doing it, like progress. It is the patient labor of sitting with a problem long enough to see the shape of it, asking better questions than the obvious ones, and resisting the very strong cultural pressure to convert understanding into output before the understanding has actually settled. The organizations I most admire, across categories that look nothing like each other on the surface, are united by an almost stubborn willingness to think before they ship.
In practice, synthesis at an organizational level means a few specific things. It means a leadership posture that treats the strategy document as a living instrument rather than a quarterly performance. It means cultivating people on the team whose primary contribution is judgment rather than output, and trusting their pace even when it lags the build cycle around them. It means refusing to adopt a tool, run a campaign, or launch a product until someone can answer, in plain language, what the move is in service of and how the organization will be measurably more coherent on the other side of it. None of that is technically difficult. All of it requires a kind of patience that the current pace of technology is actively working against.
What synergy actually requires
Synergy, in the sense I mean it here, is not the boardroom word of the 2000s, with its faintly embarrassing connotations of merged spreadsheets and forced cross-selling. It is the older and more useful idea: that a well-arranged set of parts produces an effect none of the parts could produce alone. A brand whose visual identity, written voice, sales conversations, onboarding sequence, and customer service all feel as if they were authored by the same intelligence is not merely tidy. It is fundamentally more persuasive than any one of those layers could be in isolation, because every interaction quietly confirms what every other interaction has already established. The person on the other side stops having to do the integration work in their own head, and trust accumulates much faster than it otherwise would.
The reason this matters more, not less, in an economy of abundant tools is that the natural drift of cheap building is fragmentation. Every team can now stand up its own stack, its own automations, its own micro-strategy, and each of those decisions is locally rational. The aggregate cost only shows up later, in the form of a customer who experiences the organization as four organizations wearing the same logo, or a staff that cannot give a consistent answer to a simple question because the underlying systems do not agree on what the answer is. Synergy is the active, ongoing refusal of that drift. It is the work of insisting that the pieces fit, and rebuilding the ones that don't, even when the broken-but-functional version would be cheaper to leave in place.
Cheap building, left unsupervised, produces fragmentation. The work of holding the pieces together is now the work that compounds.
Where this leaves the people doing good work
There is a version of this argument that lands, for a certain kind of reader, as bad news. If the tools are commoditizing, if anyone can build anything, if the volume game is over, then the field is going to be flooded with capable mediocrity, and the temptation to despair, or to retreat, or to compete on price, will be real. I want to argue the opposite, and not as a rhetorical move. I think this is, for the people I would call the doers of good work, the most genuinely promising moment of our careers.
For most of the recent past, the people who cared most about doing thoughtful, careful, human-scaled work were structurally penalized by the economics of the field. The thoughtful brand studio was outbid by the agency willing to ship faster. The careful nonprofit was out-scaled by the one willing to dilute its program in exchange for growth. The independent practitioner with strong taste was simply unable to match the throughput of a larger shop with weaker taste. The market rewarded volume because volume was hard, and the people who could produce it commanded a premium more or less regardless of whether what they produced was any good.
That equation is inverting in real time. When the volume floor rises to meet everyone, the ceiling stops being defined by production capacity and starts being defined by judgment, coherence, and care. The studio that can hold a brand together across twelve touchpoints will out-earn the studio that can produce twenty disconnected ones. The nonprofit whose programs, communications, and donor experience tell a single, integrated story will outpace the one whose growth chart is impressive but whose narrative is incoherent. The practitioner whose work is recognizable as theirs, in any room, will be more valuable, not less, in an economy where most output is increasingly indistinguishable from most other output. The people who have been quietly insisting on doing the work well were, it turns out, building the exact muscle the next decade is going to pay for.
How we are trying to practice this
I do not want to pretend we have any of this fully figured out at Hilltree. We don't. We are, like every shop our size, working in real time to adjust the way we engage with partners, the way we scope projects, and the way we use the same tools that are commoditizing the rest of the field. What I can say is that the orientation has clarified considerably for us over the last year, and the clarification has shown up in the kind of work we are willing to take and the kind of work we are willing to turn down.
We are spending more time, not less, on the unbillable hours at the front of a project, the ones where we are trying to understand an organization well enough to say something true about it. We are spending more time on the connective tissue at the back end of a project, the places where the brand has to make peace with the website, and the website has to make peace with the sales process, and the sales process has to make peace with the way a small team actually answers the phone. We are using the new tools, often aggressively, but we are using them in service of the synthesis rather than as a substitute for it. The point of the leverage, for us, is to free more of our attention for the parts of the work no tool can do for our partners. That is the practical shape, on a given Wednesday, of what we mean when we say we are trying to do good work.
The argument, plainly
If the raw materials of this next economy really are this widely distributed, and I believe they are, then the organizations that thrive in it will not be the ones with the most tools or the most output. They will be the ones who can synthesize a coherent view of what they are actually trying to do in the world, and arrange the systems and the people around that view so that each part strengthens the others. Everything else will be table stakes, available at commodity prices, to anyone willing to spend a weekend with a chatbot and a credit card.
Synthesis and synergy are not new ideas. They are older than most of the technology this essay is responding to. What is new is that the rest of the work has gotten cheap enough that these two disciplines, which used to be invisible inside the larger labor of building, are now the entire game. The teams that recognize that early, and reorganize themselves around it without apology, are going to do disproportionately good work in the years ahead. The teams that don't will be very busy, and largely indistinguishable from one another, which is its own kind of answer.
We would rather, given the choice, spend our careers on the first list. If that sounds like the kind of work you are trying to do too, we would genuinely love to talk about it.