THE PERSON BEHIND THE PRACTICE
Every technology
is a pedagogy.
I'm Yasin Hayow. There is probably nobody else in this country holding both halves of this job at once: a senior digital workplace consultant who has designed and delivered programmes in around twenty countries — for the European Central Bank, NatWest and BT, and on behalf of Microsoft across Europe and North America — and a qualified teacher.
Those look like two careers. They are one question, asked twice. How does a person become more capable than they were yesterday?
There is an old word for what interests me here: anthropotechnics — the practices by which human beings shape themselves. We have never simply used tools. We have always practised ourselves into something through them. The book, the timetable, the workshop, the drill, the instrument. Technology has never been neutral equipment standing beside us. It is the thing we become fluent in, and fluency changes who is holding it.
So every system teaches, whether or not anyone intended a lesson. It teaches a posture. An attention span. A tolerance for interruption. A quiet belief about what work is for and how much of yourself it is reasonable to spend. Most enterprise technology teaches appallingly and nobody notices, because nobody in the procurement meeting was watching for the lesson.
Nobody was ever transformed by a licence agreement. Transformation is a practice — rehearsed, coached, repeated badly, and eventually invisible.
Teaching gave me the word the technology industry is missing: practice. Not practice as in a firm. Practice as in the thing you return to tomorrow, still clumsy, until one day it belongs to you. The older name for it is ascesis — training, exercise, deliberate and unglamorous repetition in the direction of something you have chosen to become. I stood in front of thirty adolescents on wet Thursday afternoons, which is the most honest feedback loop that exists: you find out inside ninety seconds whether your explanation worked. No rollout plan I have ever seen accounts for rehearsal. Rehearsal is the entire job.
And then the part consultants get most wrong. They arrive braced for resistance. I have almost never found it. What I find is desire — people who want badly to be excellent at their work and are prevented by their tooling, their calendar, their inbox, a process nobody has revisited since 2014. The wanting is already there, at full pressure, pointed at nothing.
People want to do well. Organisations want to do well. My job isn't to persuade anyone of anything — it's to find where the wanting is already straining against the wall, and open a route.
Potara is named after an idea I've carried since I was a kid: two beings fuse and become something neither could be alone. That is a better model for expertise than the one we actually use, which is to keep specialists in separate buildings and hope somebody eventually introduces them. Here the engineer and the teacher, the human and the machine, are one practice — each making the other more capable than it could manage on its own.
What I believe: the future of work is not a forecast to be waited for. It is a design decision, available now, to whoever is willing to take it seriously enough to make it.
What I do: design the conditions under which people and machines make each other better — and stay long enough to teach the practice.
