An Unseen Factor in Innovation

What are people really asking about when they say:

How do we integrate this technology?... We need a tech roadmap... Help us innovate.... Help me understand why our ideas aren’t gaining traction...

There’s an unproductive misconception I see over and over in the “tech” space, including tech commentary, that can get in the way of meaningful innovation.

It’s a misconception that I believe inhibits the types of positive transformation people explicitly and implicitly clamor for.

The misconception is that there is a thing called “tech”.

Take for example Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist’s Manifesto, and Jacobin’s critique of it. Tech can be understood as a thing, a sector, an ideology, a driving force, a vehicle for hubris, the engine of progress, the Trojan Horse of the apocalypse...

And you hear it among clients looking to innovate, to leapfrog, or become a leader. (Domino’s Pizza claims they are a “tech company that sells pizza”.)

Tech has cache, but seems to mean just about anything.

Tech is treated as a thing that is good, or bad, or neutral. It’s worthy of caution, or worthy of investment. It creates progress and/or exacerbates inequality. It’s how to win, the reason we’re losing, the reason we’re distracted and the secret to greater productivity.

So what is it and what is it not?

At this point, it’s easy to shrug, admit it’s a big category, that it’s all and none of those and that in the end it just depends.

But that’s where it gets interesting.

It Depends. Depends on what?

All of the above questions have one thing in common, and it's that tech itself is not actually self-justifying.

The question to ask first is, What is tech for and to whom? And that will tell you a bit about what tech is.

And you’ll need to know, because the answer to this is the answer to each of the questions at the start of this post.

Pointedly, articulating the meaning of technology tells you what to do with it. And it’s not actually hard to do, you just need to do it.

Said another way, technology (and innovation for that matter), is only meaningful to the extent that you understand what story it needs to tell (call it a mythos, a cosmology, or a social imaginary, or a cultural model, what have you). Importantly, the cultural story needs to come first, it isn’t a veneer or script you attach to "sell" or “help resonate” with customers after the fact, that’s where everyone goes wrong.

The story tells you what tech is and how to develop it. Everything after that is just telling the truth.

And if no one understands the story, no one needs, or even understands, your technology. Even where your innovation is intended to fade into the invisible background of “good user experience”, it supports some story your customers tell themselves about what user experience is for.

You might be tempted to ask,

Can any given innovation be so transformative that it crafts its own story and changes the trajectory of human social interaction?

You mean like fire, the Sam Colt revolver, or birth control? Sure, but people with those technologies don’t ask the questions above, at the start of this article. For everything else there’s mastercard. If your innovation could tell its own self-evident story, we wouldn’t be here. But so much of tech innovation lives or dies on proper integration, on timing, and on relevance. The right investment at the right time. And all of that is downstream of what you are doing and why. The time to think about who you are, what you're doing, why, and what it all means (cultural questions) is at every stage of development.

Background

Philosopher Yuk Hui has convincingly written on what he calls Cosmotechnics, which is the notion that technology is not a transcendental category that presides over diverse culture expressions of it, but is instead downstream of, and configured by, culture (and in particular, culturally construed cosmologies). To support his claim, he draws upon a solid body of literature that, even so, only scratches the surface of the many ways technology has been conceived across the entire anthropological record. The meaning of technology, and what gets developed, is culturally informed.

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Prometheus, he mentions for example, is a cautionary tale unique to Western contexts, as are many cautionary tales related to the idea that technology is fraught with the capacity for hubris, harm, and (left untended) disaster. And we can see Frankenstein’s Monster, Terminator, Icarus, HAL, these are familiar tropes.

He also discusses the three sages in China representing an informative counterpoint, their bestowing technology upon humans was unequivocally divine and good. Tech in China means something different than in the US.

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But wait, before we go full old school National Character sociology, cross-cultural comparisons are never so simple, historically technology in China has had the potential to occlude the dao and muddle simplicity. And when cultural contexts interact, things get more complicated, as with the introduction of Mao’s Natural Dialectics, derivative from Engel’s Dialectics of Nature, wherein forms of technicity play a crucial role in an emancipatory project. The concept of Utopia is a recent import to China, but its integration is unique. The role of technology in Utopian projects is hardly uniform globally. Culture makes the difference.

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We could go on, but in short, technology doesn’t mean one thing. It doesn’t even mean one thing per nation or market region (sorry). And generally, it simply can’t be reduced to a fundamental definition of mechanical, electrical, or computational advantage, nor is it a substrate of otherwise cultural behavior. Instead, technology is interdependent with culture.

So if you want to answer any of the above questions, you need to understand culture first.

Fortunately it isn’t especially difficult or complicated, but it does take a bit of skill.

Start with a Map and a Shadow.

There are three things to know about understanding the stories that structure our lives.

The first is that there are a lot of them, and they don’t always mesh. Some contradict each other, some are mutually supportive, some are interdependent, and some push the boundaries of social norms. It’s what anthropologists refer to as heteroglossia. Ask a hundred people what health is and you’ll get nonsense, but analyze what health means in a cultural context triangulating a diverse set of data and you’ll likely get a plural but limited set of really pointed answers.

The second thing to know is that these stories are not evenly distributed. Some people are true believers in a limited few, some people are aware of many but have a center of gravity, some people live at the emergent edge of new stories, and some people prefer to reside in the comfort of dominant, mainstream, narratives.

You can map all of this.

Finally, the third thing to know is that for every story, there’s a dark side, or a shadow story.

Think of it like this:

The shadow side is what to watch out for, the dark side of the happy path, or the inflection point when someone goes from Anakin to Darth Vader. If you’re remotely close to the domain of human activity called tech development, please make yourself aware of the shadow side of those stories that populate the cultural imagination so you can steer clear. Think of the shadow side as the really ungenerous description of everything you’re trying to do written by someone with an ax to grind. It’s more scientific than that, but you should get the idea.

• Learn and Map cultural stories about your domain, they’re not infinite.
• Map how you, your audience, new audiences, your partners, and your competition overlay with these cultural stories
• See where you align or contradict, where there are tensions or ambiguity, and what opportunities exist
• Map the shadow to reduce risk, and give yourself a heads up on any blind spots.
• Generate, Alternate, or Evaluate what you do (and what you build) along these lines.

So if we return to the questions above, we have some real answers. The tech you develop, prioritize, integrate, roadmap, and innovate will be defined by the shared stories - from conception to execution- that provide you with a north star, your customers with genuine affinity, and your investors with a way to interpret current, and anticipate future, decisions.

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There is no such thing as “tech”, or there might be, but a definition that general does you no good.

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So find ways to make it smaller, more actionable, and more tangible with culture.

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