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 that were laying 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. The checker and bagger at the same time said, “no bar codes?” “Nope,” I answered, “Everything was manual.” Again they said in unison, “no barcodes?” as though it was unimaginable.

Around that time, NPR’s daily business recap show, Marketplace, launched a summer segment, My Analog Life, where people shared how work got done before technology was ubiquitous. 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 might be my revisionist nostalgia, but while technology has enabled so many important advances in our lives, in the work I’ve done it's been mostly a game of whack-a-mole.

Building a financial model in an electronic spreadsheet, for example, beats the heck out of manual calculations; it's faster, more accurate, and exponentially expands what can be analyzed. Yet time and again, I’ve seen sophisticated spreadsheets produce results that make no sense and no one caught it. 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 and 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 have limited access to any technology to complete basic assignments.

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 would work 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 (which is what students usually do). In fact, 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 cell phones, iPads, or laptops 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 even 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 were social-good products and services to address societal and environmental problems. 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 the students.

I was so blown away by this experience, 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, along with mind mapping and brainstorming with just humans, white boards, and markers.

I’m hoping the groaning students will discover a joy and connection in writing, drawing, and reflecting with each other. Old school.

Analog me

I’ve been leaning more analog myself lately. More time gardening, cooking, reading, listening, noticing, walking, talking instead of texting, writing, and purchasing stuff at local stores instead of online. Feels good. Feels better.

Thoughts are welcome