I was at the check out at Zupan’s — Portland’s treasured locally-owned grocery store — when the young bagger asked if I wanted bags. I pointed to the bags I had brought in front of her. She rolled her eyes.
She said she was the end of her shift and just fried. I told her I used to work in a grocery store and understood. I added that at the time, we punched the prices into the cash register, shoppers paid in cash, and we calculated the change ourselves.
No barcodes? Nope. Everything was manual.
The checker and bagger in unison this time: no barcodes? As though it was unimaginable.
Around that time, NPR’s Marketplace launched a summer segment called My Analog Life. It featured people sharing how work got done “BT” — before technology.
It got done. And pretty darned well. This got me thinking.
My schooling and early work life were mostly technology free, save for an HP 12C calculator (a major status symbol for a young financial analyst) and clunky punch cards fed into a mainframe computer.
This could just be my revisionist nostalgia speaking. But it seems to me that technology advances have been mostly a game of whack-a-mole. At least in the work I’ve done throughout my career.
Building a financial model in an electronic spreadsheet beats the heck out of manual calculations. Yet time and again sophisticated spreadsheets produce results that make no sense and the analyst doesn’t notice.
The reality checks and insights that come with plodding through the calculations manually are lost. Add to that the 24/7 prison of email and text pings that keep us from having time to concentrate and think. And don’t get me started on PowerPoint.
Much has been gained. Much has been lost.
Back to analog
As I shared in an earlier post I taught an entrepreneurship course at a local women’s correctional facility earlier this year through Portland State University’s Higher Education in Prison program.
The course design at PSU has students work in groups to select an idea for a product or service.They conduct research. Create a business plan and complete a feasibility analysis all culminating in a Shark Tank like pitch competition.
The students inside the correctional facility are restricted from working in groups outside of class. They have no access to the internet and limited access to any technology to do analysis or written assignments.
We redesigned the course to be anchored by three physical books: How I Built This by Guy Raz based on the podcast of the same name, Building a Great Business by Ari Weinzweig of Zingerman’s fame, and the Business Model Canvas by Osterwalder et al. The students worked on their own ideas without the help of a team. Assignments were paper-based including writing a vision of greatness for their idea in place of a pitch deck.
You know where this is going
The students devoured the books vs. skimming them just enough to get through the assignments. They read them so thoroughly I had to scramble to re-read them myself to keep up with their questions.
They paid attention in class. No devices to distract. They immersed themselves into their assignments.
Their work was the best I’ve seen in my time as an adjunct instructor. Not in a slick or academically rigorous way. But in a real-world and real-learning kind of way.
Many were seriously pursuing their ideas. Some within the correctional facility if they were long-timers. Others through family and friends in preparation for their release. And the majority of their ideas had a social-good bent.
Most poignant for me was the intimacy of the handwritten assignments. Handwriting reveals a personality no typed assignment could. I felt like I really got to know them.
I was so moved by this, I’m carrying it forward to a module of the on-campus Design Thinking course I’m teaching this Fall. It will be sans technology. Just a physical book, Designing Your Life, with a companion workbook that has to be written and drawn in.
Just humans + books + pen and paper + white boards and markers.
Fingers crossed the groaning students will discover a joy and depth in writing and drawing and reflecting with each other.
Old school.
Sunday Morning: 181