Postcard from the Edge
Adapting Artisans
If you rely on technology, you’ll lose the war.
Technology is wonderful for solving yesterday's problems today, but it often ties us into trying to solve tomorrow's problems using yesterday’s understanding. We invest huge amounts of capital and training and demand a return, so we expect it to be efficient and productive. We define our problems in the context of the technology we have to solve them.
The quotation at the start of this post triggered the thought. It reminded me of a conversation earlier in the week on “value stream mapping,” where we talked about the one hundred thirty elements that had been identified. Only seven of these actually added value. The rest were structure, governance, and similar elements that turned what is, at heart, a simple process into a behemoth.
As uncertainty stalks organisations' meeting rooms, it seems that the value-generating elements are becoming ever more subordinate to the ones monitoring and measuring it.
I’ve mentioned in previous posts the Physiocrats, the precursors to modern economists, who divided the economy into three elements - the producers (then, mostly farmers, who grew the food), the merchants, who created the market, and the “sterile classes” who serviced the system - the bankers, insurers, lawyers, accountants and others who fed off the system but created no original value.
It seems a reasonable summary. I wonder, as the role of the sterile classes is supported and increasingly supplanted by sterile technology, as we focus on extracting every last ounce of value from what we created yesterday, where tomorrow’s value will be created.
The answer, of course, is artisans. Those who occupy the spaces between those neat boxes on the value stream map, where the things that cannot be measured or quantified live. The curiosity, the wonder, and the impatience with the increasingly perfect boring. Technology may be changing the landscape, but it does not understand the territory the way that artisans do.
The podcast highlighted at the start of this post is worth listening to. It describes modern distributed insurgent networks as innovation hubs with independent franchisees, who leave the world's hugely technological armed forces struggling to find a response as we use million-dollar missiles to bring down five-hundred-dollar drones. Great for Raytheon shareholders, perhaps, but less so for the defence budget.
Our obsession with productivity and efficiency will remove the easily replaced elements of our business processes, leaving us with expensive, efficient, inflexible systems but open to disruption in the same way by adaptive artisans.
During April, I will combine this blog and Outside the Walls under Outside the Walls as a place to start, grow, and connect the conversations we need, and mail each of you as I go to ensure you have a voice, and are heard.
In a very genuine sense, I’m starting before I’m ready, and before I really know what I’m doing.
But if not now, when?
ns
Very well said.
Andrew McLuhan, grandson of Marshall and son of Eric, at his LinkedIn page, offered this recently.
“...as James Joyce said of these man-made environments, when invisible they are invincible.’ To free ourselves from the invincible effects of our own programs of organized activity, it is necessary that we inspect the ignorance systematically engendered by our applied knowledge.”
—Marshall McLuhan, 1960
But how?
Well, often it’s a natural consequence of the introduction of a new medium. All of a sudden we, the fish, are aware of the water we swim in. We collectively discover all sorts of new things, new ways of seeing, of apprehending, of understanding. These are the new assumptions setting in, the new biases, from the new medium.
“The advent of a new medium often reveals the lineaments and assumptions, as it were, of an old medium.”
—Marshall McLuhan, 1960”
The same is true of leadership. For generations, we operated with the belief in the heroic character of the corporate CEO, the champions of industry. New technology reveals that they are small minded persons with ambitions limited to their own welfare. The Center of society that past generations believed in no longer holds it together. The Periphery breaks off creating multiple new Centers of belief and relationship - https://edbrenegar.substack.com/p/as-the-center-does-not-hold-the-periphery. I am having similar discussions, ironically, not provoked by me.