Prologue

Every assumption is a dependency. Every dependency is a risk.

From forest to sawmill, wheat field to granary, from warehouse to factory, factory to home, the question is always the same:

“When will it be delivered?”

This question has pursued humankind since the first plant was gathered and the first hunt yielded prey.

Everything we build, we first build in reverse. Applying human intention to the world of cause and effect, we put one and one together. Our human minds, evolved to imagine the future, deconstruct those fantasies into pieces – a set of parts, assembled in a sequence of steps back to the present.

Then, with tools in hand, we turn everything forward again and make it real, one step at a time.

We acknowledge and celebrate the bounty of human variation. Some love to run and hunt. Others are deft with needle and thread. Still others explore the mysteries of taste and texture, sustenance and healing.

We share our labors. The hunter hands the pelt to the tailor, and the meat moves to the butcher and then the cook.

Our imaginations parallelize and allocate. Our practices repeat, evolve, and optimize. In a circle of virtue, social bonds grow, protect, and are protected. Ritual emerges, feeding those bonds, keeping the engines of invention warm through the darkest nights.

Diversity of skill and division of labor support a growing population, in turn feeding the reservoir of productive and inventive possibility. Constructs become more capable. Complexity and interdependence grow.

Sophisticated supply chains form to serve the interdependent makers. The question “When will it be delivered?” becomes a chorus of a thousand voices, each directed to the one before, lighting up the supply lines like neurons in the brain.

While the master teaches the apprentice by doing, the master also hones the telling. When the scribe shares the telling, the recipe becomes the norm. The norms follow the supply lines and become both truth and expectation:

“This is what you are going to get.”

As supply lines pump the lifeblood of production, their preservation, efficiency, and flexibility grow. Trade routes form. New forms of transport and packaging make it safer and easier to preserve and move more.

All the while, the circle of invention turns relentlessly inward, building tools to expand the efficiency and ease and possibilities of what can be made. The supply line is a tool. The recipe is a tool. Tools build tools.

With the printing press, information takes a physical, replicable form. Now the recipe is everywhere.

The recipe codifies the expectation:

“This is what you are going to get. Every time.”

Make a thing once and you are left with idle tools. Make it twice and your tools are paid for. Make it a thousand times and you are the Industrial Revolution.

The Industrial Age encapsulates the supply line within the factory walls, geared to assembly. With each stage of product conveying past a purpose-built tool, physical workflow is actualized at scale.

“When will it be delivered?” is answered with the clockwork tick of the assembly line.

Assembly lines repurpose, spitting paper. A white-collar workflow is born. Paper shuffles from one specialist to the next, putting the transformation to page and moving to the next specialist in line.

On the factory floor and in the cubicle farm, any surprise – anything that does not fit the pattern – is expensive. When the line stops, it bleeds. Discussions are held. Decisions are escalated. Problems are solved. The solution is systematized and the heart restarts, another step evolved.

An educational system rises to serve these ends. We memorize facts, blank slates run through a rigid school factory, installed to our places as cogs in the Great Machine. Blue collar, white collar, sentenced to life for a pension and the chance to touch the spoils of the Great Expansion.

Industrial engineers and MBAs take root in the factory and office soil – Designers of Assembly and Smokejumpers, imagining backward, tooling forward, on call to capture the spot fires and dig the perimeters, optimizing every flow for speed.

Another revolution. Paper tears into bits and bytes, infinitely replicable, each copy free. The White-Collar River splits into a thousand digitized tributaries and creates the Lake and then Ocean.

Cast free of the chains of physical production, information factories arise. No longer actualizing sameness at scale, production is now the domain of the information artists and architects. Static assembly flows give way to dynamic reconstruction, each widget an answer to the question:

“Is this really what we want?”