Software development is a holistic craft, not a prescriptive process, so leaders should act as support staff enabling teams to own the end-to-end work.
Ursula Franklin separates technologies into holistic and prescriptive. Holistic technologies keep decision-making close to the work, letting the maker feel the material. Prescriptive technologies push decisions up the hierarchy and break work into fixed steps.
She uses examples like potters, cooks, and woodworkers to show how craft retains personal control, while assembly lines and Taylorism strip it away. The article applies this lens to software, calling software itself the most prescriptive technology ever built, but arguing that software development is fundamentally holistic.
When developers try to slice the work into isolated phases-requirements, design, implementation, testing, operation-the projects stumble because the knowledge needed to move between steps is too thick to compartmentalize. The author stresses that a single mind-or better, a tightly knit team-must own the whole flow to keep feedback loops tight and the product viable.
For technical leaders the takeaway is clear: treat developers as craftspeople and act as support staff rather than command-and-control overseers. By preserving holistic ownership, teams stay resilient, adapt quickly, and can deliver the prescriptive power of software without choking it with unnecessary process overhead.
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