The Factory Mindset

In my 20s, I spent several years working in a factory.
W. R. Grace in Acton, Massachusetts. We made battery separators for the automotive industry.

I started at the bottom, as a packer on the Chop Line. I boxed finished sheets coming off the cutters and stacked them for shipping. After a while I bid on the Line Operator job, then moved again to Mixer Operator. By the time I was elected Chief Steward and later Trustee of ICWU Local 324, I had seen nearly every part of the process from raw resin to finished roll.

The plant used hexane as a solvent to extract oil from the extruded plastic. Everyone knew the smell, sharp and sweet and metallic. You could taste it before you could name it.

The big spill had already happened by the time I got there, but its shadow hung over everything. The plant ran twenty-four hours a day on a four-shift schedule. The machines never stopped; they only changed hands.

The Quality Control guys in white lab coats came through a couple of times every shift, collecting samples, jotting notes, and heading back to the lab. They tested the runoff, the air, and the residue on the floors. You would see them near the drains or the mixers, talking quietly and marking clipboards. Nobody said much about what they were measuring. We just knew not to drink the tap water. They were testing for damage that had already happened, the way schools test kids after systems have already failed them.

Years later I learned what they were looking for. Several thousand gallons of hexane had escaped containment years earlier and seeped into the ground. The spill reached the aquifer. The site was designated an EPA Superfund cleanup for groundwater contamination. The battery-separator hexane releases were handled under a separate state process on the same property. The town wells were closed. Pumps and filters became the new soundtrack of the plant.

I did not need a government report to tell me what that meant. The factory that once built things was now testing itself for damage.

Factories make sense for machines. They make less sense when the product is a person.

I thought I left the factory when I started coaching. Turns out the factory followed me.

The Logic of the Line

The Chop Line taught me rhythm. Everything had a beat: the press stroke, the knife, the conveyor.
Each worker handled one fragment of a process too large to see.

That logic escaped the walls of Acton. It became the operating system of modern life.

Schools copied it first. Bells replaced whistles. Classrooms replaced workstations. Students moved from subject to subject like unfinished parts down a line. Grades became inspection tags. In the 1840s, Horace Mann did not invent public education; he industrialized it.

Corporations, governments, and even youth sports followed. Efficiency became virtue. Consistency became proof of competence. We built systems that rewarded predictability over imagination.

The line kept expanding until every institution that touched human potential began to act like a factory.

The Human Cost of Efficiency

In the factory, efficiency protected profit. In people, efficiency erodes potential.

As a coach, I saw it again. Group drills, standardized lesson plans, one-size-fits-all instruction. It looked organized. It produced predictable results. It also left most players untouched.

Factories are built to eliminate variation. Development depends on it.

The language gave it away. In factories, you have production targets. In schools, performance targets. In sports, ranking targets. Different words for the same compulsion: measure everything, control everyone.

Control makes sense when you are producing batteries. It makes less sense when you are cultivating minds.

What the Factory Got Right

The factory did teach one lasting truth: systems matter.
A good process can protect people from chaos. A bad process can turn them into parts.

As Chief Steward, I spent long nights writing grievances and sitting in negotiation rooms trying to keep the line from crossing over: the line where workers become interchangeable parts. The union existed because the system worked exactly as it was designed, to maximize production. We existed to remind it that production required people.

That lesson stayed with me long after I left Acton. Systems are never neutral. They always favor someone. The only question is whether they favor the work or the worker.

The Factory Still Lives

We no longer clock in beside conveyor belts, but the mindset is everywhere.

Teachers are evaluated by test scores. Coaches by win–loss records. Executives by quarterly returns.
Different machines, same logic.

Every modern institution is haunted by that old industrial ghost, the belief that people are most valuable when they are predictable.

We have built digital versions of the same system. Dashboards. Metrics. KPIs. Analytics.
The instruments look new. The story is old.

The data promises clarity. What it delivers is compliance.

I see it every time a young athlete waits for instruction instead of trusting their instincts.
I see it in classrooms where curiosity is treated as an interruption instead of a contribution.

The world keeps demanding human creativity. Our systems keep producing conformity.

Leaving the Line

Factories solved a nineteenth-century problem, how to make things the same every time.
The twenty-first century has a different problem, how to help people become different in the right ways.

Creativity, empathy, and adaptive thinking are not byproducts of standardization. They are its casualties.

The new economy does not reward people who follow instructions. It rewards people who can write new ones. Yet most of our institutions still train for obedience.

That is the trap of the factory mindset. It keeps us preparing for an economy that no longer exists.

What Comes Next

For 180 years we have built our human systems with the logic of machines.
We can finally build them with the logic of conversation instead.

Communication technology can now handle the parts of teaching and coaching that once depended entirely on human bandwidth: observation, feedback, adaptation. The same things Alcott proved worked but could never scale.

We can design systems that notice, listen, and adjust in real time. Systems that give teachers and coaches more reach without turning them into assembly-line supervisors.

The lessons from the factory shaped how I think about this work. You cannot design a better future without first understanding how the old one was built. I am not trying to rebuild the factory. I am trying to design its opposite.

The Rhythm of Work

When I walk into a training center today, I still hear echoes of the factory floor. The steady thump of effort. The repetition. The pride.

The factory taught me discipline and solidarity. It also taught me what happens when a system values efficiency more than humanity or the earth beneath it.

In Acton, the machines set the rhythm.
Today I am trying to design systems that listen for a human rhythm instead.

Duey Evans worked at W. R. Grace in Acton, Massachusetts, where he served as Chief Steward and Trustee of ICWU Local 324. The site was designated an EPA Superfund cleanup for groundwater contamination. He has spent 35 years coaching elite junior tennis players and consulting on systems of human performance.