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. “Oh gosh”, she said, embarrassed, "I'm at the end of my shift and I’m 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 bar codes?” the checker and bagger asked. “Nope,” I answered, “Everything was manual.” Again, in unison, “no barcodes?” as though it was unimaginable.
Around that time, NPR’s Marketplace, launched a summer segment, My Analog Life, where people shared 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, but while technology has enabled so much, in the work I’ve done it's been mostly a game of whack-a-mole.
Building a financial model in an electronic spreadsheet beats the heck out of manual calculations; it's faster, more accurate, and exponentially expands what can be analyzed. Yet time and again, sophisticated spreadsheets produce results that make no sense and no one notices. Lost, it seems to me, is the common sense, reality checks, and insights enabled by plodding through the calculations manually. Add the 24/7 prison of email and text pings that keep us from having time to think, discern and separate from work. And don’t get me started on PowerPoint.
I’m only reflecting on my own experience here — the way the kind of work I do gets done now is just different. Not necessarily better.
Back to analog
As I shared in an earlier post, I taught an entrepreneurship course at a local 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, research it, create a business plan, perform 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, have no access to the internet, and limited access to any technology.
The course was redesigned to be anchored by three physical books: How I Built This by Guy Raz based on the podcast of the same name, How to Build 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, and 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 put their whole selves 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, real-learning kind of way. Many were seriously pursuing their ideas — some within the correctional facility if they were long-timers, and others through family and friends in preparation for their release. 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 really felt like I got to know them.
I was so moved by this, I’m carrying it forward. A module of the on-campus Design Thinking course I’m teaching this Fall will be sans technology — a physical book, Designing Your Life, with a companion workbook that has to be written and drawn in. Just humans, pen and paper, white boards, and markers.
Fingers crossed the groaning students will discover a joy and connection in writing, drawing, and reflecting with each other.
Old school.
Sunday Morning: 181