The Technology of Business.

Casting a Pot. Weaving a blanket. Painting a still life. Building a business.

One of these does not seem like the others.

We think of pottery and weaving as crafts, as an artistic and creative process. Whereas building a business is a very structured and rational endeavor. It's all about accounting, profit & loss, and all these logical processes.

But why doesn't it feel that straightforward?

I've been pondering on this since last year. I remember distinctly one moment while I was driving and thinking about my business plans. Trying to wrap my mind around the ideas I had, and how to make those ideas into something real and concrete. I felt so much uncertainty. I had no idea how the work would unfold. It felt like I wrangling something from the void and manifesting it here in this physical world. In that moment, it struck me that this felt exactly like the creative process.

And yet there's been this tension because no one talks about entrepreneurship like creativity. In my mind, these were supposed to be very different modes of being. But as I've been building my business over the past year, why does it feel like I'm creating something just like you would create a novel or a painting?

Then, during a recent Human-Centered Technology gathering, we were reading an excerpt from Ursula Franklin's book, "The Real World of Technology" and she provided a framework that helped me understand what's going on with this tension.

She describes technology as a craft or a way of doing something. It's not just computers, software, and AI. Technology is just a formalized practice. There is technology around religious rituals designed for a specific purpose. She references Kenneth Boulding who "pointed out that there is a technology of prayer as well as of ploughing; there are technologies to control fear as well as to control flood."

Franklin goes on to distinguish between holistic technologies and prescriptive technologies.

"Holistic technologies are normally associated with the notion of craft. Artisans, be they potters, weavers, metalsmiths, or cooks, control the process of their own work from beginning to finish. Their hands and minds make situational decisions as the work proceeds, be it on the thickness of the pot, or the shape of the knife edge, or the doneness of the roast. These are decisions that only they can make while they are working. And they draw on their own experience, each time applying it to a unique situation."

She notes that this leaves the crafter in control of the entire process to make decisions as they see fit.

"The opposite is specialization by process; this I call prescriptive technology. It is based on a quite different division of labour. Here, the making or doing of something is broken down into clearly identifiable steps. Each step is carried out by a separate worker, or group of workers, who need to be familiar only with the skills of performing that one step. This is what is normally meant by 'division of labour'."

So in this model, each person working within the system is constrained to follow specific rules for their step of the process. She uses the example of metalworking in the 12th century Shang Dynasty, where the level of complexity in casting their ritual vessels required strict compliance to process and a division of labor. Or, you could think of the difference in a woodworker crafting furniture versus an assembly line in a car factory.

These technology models provide very different possibilities for outcome. Prescriptive technology has allowed civilizations to advance and reach levels of complexity impossible if we were only using holistic technology. However, it does shift the power balance significantly, as opposed to someone using holistic technology who has complete control and agency in their process.

And I realized the tension I've been feeling about building a business comes down to this: is it a holistic or prescriptive technology?

What I'd like to suggest is that it's possible to have a business built on holistic technology. The default model in our society right now is prescriptive. We optimize, measure, control, and scale. We're running on a capitalist structure which is inherently prescriptive (I think. But this feels like something worth exploring further).

Someone was telling me the other day how they met an entrepreneur who had mapped out this 5 year business plan for how to make millions. Which is impressive and great for that person. But I am not that person. I don't want a 5 year business plan. That's not interesting to me, and it's not the way I live my life.

There have been times when I wonder if I'm doing this "business" thing wrong because I make a lot of my decisions from intuition. My business evolves as I change and as the world around me changes. I follow the sparks, the ideas that catch my attention and feel alive in some way. I hold my plans loosely and spend a lot of time in uncertainty: letting things unfold over time.

But it has worked—far more than I could have imagined. A year ago I could not have predicted that Pathwright Partners would look the way it does today. And this feels very much like holistic technology. Maybe it's possible to approach business like craft or creative practice.

As I worked through the reading and writing this post, I noticed a shift in how I feel about my business. It's expanding my possibilities. Maybe it's okay to continue creating my business exactly the way I am doing it. Maybe there's nothing wrong or insufficient with it. Maybe I'm just choosing a different model. And if that makes me feel empowered and excited, maybe there are other business owners who would feel a similar sense of relief and alignment with this framework.

This brief foray into Ursula Franklin's book has left me curious and with even more questions:

- What would it look like if we, as small business owners, adopted more holistic technology in how we work? What might this look like? What kind of problems could it solve?

- Is prescriptive technology inherent to a capitalist economic model? Or, if we shift to holistic technology, is this also breaking out of a capitalist system?

- How do we hold the tension between holistic and prescriptive? How can we evaluate which technology is best for any given context?

- Does this framework provide a useful lens for navigating the world of AI and other forms of computer technology?

I expect there will be some future blog posts as I explore this path, so check back or follow along if this has sparks some curiosity for you as well.