Dystechnia is a barrier to organizational performance—a condition of flawed or failed efficacy in the use, deployment, or logistics of technology. Dystechnia occurs at every level: individual, team, firm, industry, region, nation, and
world. At the micro level, dystechnia is a diminished self-efficacy or technophobia personally experienced by an individual or team; at the meso level, dystechnia is a disconnect among the critical organizational elements of
people, culture, and technology; and at the macro level, dystechnia is a condition of suboptimal functioning in the socio-technologic-economic network, where the yield from resources and the efficacy of transactional logistics are compromised by latent demand for technological innovation.
Dystechnia is homologous to recognized disorders of capacity, such as dyslexia, an impairment of the ability to
read written
words, or dyskinesia, an impairment of the ability to control movements, and dystopia, a place of fanciful horror and despair. Dys- denotes abnormal, impaired, difficult, or bad; originally from the
Greek dus. The
Greek root tekhnē, meaning skill, craft, or
art, is at the core of the term technology, the systematic treatment of an
art or craft in the
Greek. The literal interpretation of the term dystechnia is hence ‘impaired skill, craft, or
art’.
© 2011, paraphrased here from "Technology Entrepreneurship: A Deliberation on Success and
Failure in Technology Venturing toward a Grounded Theory of Dystechnia"
Dystechnia is the ubiquitous 21st-century successor to technophobia in the impedance of technology acceptance, crosscuting all levels of organizational and institutional performance. Dystechnia is not neo-luddism, which connotes active resistance to technology adoption, with paranoiac overtones. Dystechnia is incompetence more than defiance, reticence more than recalcitrance, ignorance more than skepticism—a naïve concession or resignation to technology’s pervasive presence, without command or mastery—or a blind faith that technology will just take care of
everything and
always works! Dystechnia is rampant yet poorly recognized, representing a costly hindrance to the optimization of organizational and socio-technological network performance—a
secret disgrace or resigned
snafu of the technology marketplace.
Dystechnia is the social defect upon which the modern hero—the Technology Entrepreneur—intrepidly plies a stalwart vision to improve human lives and boost the plenitude of the socio-technologic-economic network. Economists and
business analysts make references to opportunities, ‘white
space’, technology gaps, unfulfilled needs, unsatisfied or latent demand. But from the perspective and positioning of the Technology Entrepreneur, the social
ill that needs treatment is dystechnia.
©
2011, paraphrased here from "Technology Entrepreneurship: A Deliberation on Success and
Failure in Technology Venturing toward a Grounded Theory of Dystechnia"
