dystechnia

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"