Praxis: You Don't Need Permission to Innovate. You Need Standards.
- David Turner
- Aug 20
- 8 min read
Updated: Aug 22
"Praxis is the idea that you do something 'cos you want to do it. And after you've done it, you find out all the reasons why you did it."
Tony Wilson said that in 1984, sitting in a bathtub in south Manchester, explaining the core ethos of Factory Records to Gillian Gilbert of New Order. It sounds romantic. It sounds like permission to follow your gut and figure it out later. But that'd be a misreading.
Wilson was describing something far more specific. A feedback loop between action and reflection that produces coherence. You move because something feels necessary, not because a strategic plan told you to move. But the movement itself - and this is the part that separates craft from chaos - is guided by a standard that was already sitting in your head. You knew tacitly, before you started, what quality looked like.
Working in the opposite direction often creates the opposite output. Trying to force design, creativity or innovation into a process of plans, KPIs, recurring calls and PowerPoints will more often than not result in a mediocre checkbox exercise.
Where Praxis Came From
The term has been floating through Western thought for about 2,000 years, but has always meant the same basic thing: knowledge that only comes through doing. This is rooted in practicality and output, not daydreaming or philosophising.
Aristotle split human activity into three categories. Theoria was pure contemplation - mathematics, philosophy, the abstract. Poiesis was making something external - you build a table, you produce an object, the value sits in the finished thing. But Praxis was different. It was action where the transformation of the person acting was the point. Politics, ethics, craft. The end goal was a human being who had become more capable through the act.
This distinction is important because it puts action at the centre of learning. You don't understand justice by reading Plato; you understand it by doing just things and observing what happens.
Hegel and Kant later refined this for the industrial world. If abstract thought couldn't connect to material reality, then the bridge had to be labour itself - real work in the real world. Consciousness develops through struggle and contradiction, not through isolated contemplation. You learn the properties of a material by working with it.
Marx weaponised this for revolution. In 1845, he famously declared: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it". For Marx, praxis was the synthesis of theory and practice brought together to reshape material conditions. Theory without practice was hollow dogmatism. Practice without theory was blind flailing. Genuine praxis was neither - it was conscious work that actively transformed the world.
By the 20th century, educators like Paulo Freire were teaching it as a methodology: reflection and action, cycling together, turning passive subjects into active agents in their own development.
Sometimes in the translation from philosophy to everyday language, praxis gets softened into something limp. People misinterpret it as "let's just try things" or "we'll learn as we go" - which is the opposite of what the term describes. Praxis isn't trial-and-error without a compass. It's action informed by deep knowledge, executed to a standard, and then reflected upon.
How Influence Becomes Output: The Factory Blueprint
Peter Saville didn't invent his style of graphic design by sitting in a studio with a blank canvas and the instruction to "be creative." He spent his time studying Jan Tschichold's typographic rigor, Henri Fantin-Latour's floral paintings, Depero's futurism, Herbert Bayer's systematic grids. He absorbed and either consciously or subconsciously developed a stance - a set of principles about what good design looked like.
When Factory needed a sleeve for New Order's Power, Corruption & Lies. Saville took a 19th-century French floral painting he'd seen at the National Gallery, collided it against a modernist colour-code strip, and produced FAC 75 - one of the most recognisable pieces of pop art in history. The artifact was so decisive that you can't argue with it. It exists for starters.
That was the loop in practice. Heavy inputs absorbed over years lead to development of taste and principle, leading to instinct-driven action paired with uncompromising execution, resulting in an output that proves the stance.
Martin Hannett, Factory’s early in-house producer, demonstrated how the ethos of praxis led to innovation in its purest form. He didn't record Stephen Morris’ drums on Unknown Pleasures in a warm studio. He ran them through digital delays and recorded them in basement toilets, rooftops, empty stairwells at Strawberry Studios in Stockport. He disassembled the kit and recorded each drum individually, panning the snare off centre and letting snaps of delay bounce off the opposite channel. He recorded the clatter of the freight lift at the rear of the studio for ‘Insight’, used a tape-cleaning aerosol to augment the hi-hats on ‘She’s Lost Control’.
He understood that the sound of an industrial city could be recreated through specific technical choices. He created a soundscape with huge spaces for hard-split guitars, breaking glass and microsecond percussive delays to violently stab into. He ran vocals through telephone lines to create a dystopian, distant effect to Ian Curtis’ voice. He had a vision and had accrued the technical expertise to execute it. The result was a sonic architecture that still defines how people around the world imagine post-industrial Manchester (ironic for group that was half Salford, half Macclesfield, recording in Stockport).
You can’t achieve these results through planning or philosophising. None of it was created by sitting around having feelings about music. It was voracious consumption of high-quality influences, the development of a coherent stance, and then ruthless execution against a standard that was already established in their minds before they started. That's praxis, and praxis makes perfect.
When Myth Replaces Rigour: Why Factory Eventually Imploded
In the interests of balance, it should be said that there's a razor-thin line between praxis and self-destruction, and Factory Records often crossed it.
Blue Monday's die-cut floppy-disk sleeve was so expensive to produce that money was lost on every unit sold. The Haçienda’s mismanagement is legendary. Sending the Happy Mondays to Barbados where they sold studio equipment to buy drugs and eventually recorded master tapes without a vocal track has entered music lore.
The difference between praxis and recklessness isn't about how much risk you take, or about winging something for the hell of it. It's about building and testing ideas in the real world. Praxis stress-tests an engine to see where the unit implodes. Recklessness drives the car off a cliff and calls it art.
Another quote Tony Wilson famously did or didn’t say, but was fittingly attributed nevertheless, was a paraphrase of a line from the 1962 Western ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’ :
"When forced to choose between the truth and the legend, print the legend."
That's the opposite of a craftsman's code. A craftsman prioritises the truth because the truth is what keeps things standing. Wilson built an empire out of mythology and bravado, ignored the flaws and watched it burn. Factory made incredible history in spite of recklessness, not because of it.
This distinction is key, because the seductive part of praxis is the action without justification. But rigour is what separates the two. You act on instinct, but you execute against a standard. You don't overthink the start, but you obsess over the finish.
How Standardisation Stifles Innovation
There's a recurring pattern across ages and industries. A movement emerges - whether it's post-punk in 1980, Agile development in 2001, or Generative AI today. It has energy because it starts out solving a real problem with rigour. Real people are making real things for a real purpose.
Then institutional systems identify the movement, buy the intellectual property, hire the pioneers, and attempt to standardise what made it work in the first place. Standardisation means removing the idiosyncratic, risky, and subjective elements - the exact elements that gave the original movement its coherence and power.
The pattern accelerates. Once you've commodified the idea, control shifts from the people who care about what's being made to the people who are paid to care about margins and quarterly returns. Innovation must become predictable in order to be reportable and controllable. Risk becomes something to minimise rather than run with. You have to stop asking "What is authentically valuable?" and start asking "What is the fastest, safest thing we can ship to meet the quarterly target?"
You can see this play out in the BCG Growth-Share Matrix - a framework that’s part strategic blueprint, larger part taxonomy of decay.
As with all things, we shouldn’t take a zero-sum view on this - it's just reflection about what institutions do because the markets ask them to. They don't preserve ideas; they capture them, extract value, and move on. If you have a pension invested in the markets, you can't complain.
The reason this matters is that it explains why serious innovation gets stifled and people eventually have to decide whether to leave for an environment where it’s possible, or settle into the framework and forever wonder ‘what if’?
Applying praxis to your own work
In the spirit of praxis, there has to be an output here, a distillation of the influences and ideas. In fact if this piece was never written, the avenue of thought that started with a New Order documentary from 1984 and ran across tangential avenues of Aristotle, Hegel, Marx, Unknown Pleasures and Henri Fantin-Latour would remain as a daydream. It’s the act of synthesising these influences and putting them on paper to create something that makes it praxis.
No-one commissioned this, no-one asked for it, I did it because I felt I wanted to do it. And afterwards I found out all the reasons why I did it: It crystallises a method of translating thought from a concept to an output. It demonstrates why you should constantly collide with diverse influences. It delineates recklessness and rigour. It gives a blueprint for how to move an abstract thought from one discipline or domain into another and then into the form of a coherent product.
The praxis-less alternative was to consume a New Order video and forget about it, or dismiss it as something interesting that had no relevance to anything else. Consign it to a line item in my YouTube history.
The seductive promise of praxis is that you can act without justification. But the real promise is more subtle: you can act without permission.
Permission requires someone else's approval. Justification requires you to have standards. Praxis skips the permission but doubles down on the justification - you establish it through execution, not through explanation.
How to translate this into your own world is down to the individual context and politics and priorities of the situation. And of course whether you think it’s worth the effort to do so.
But if you try and do something that interests you, base it on a coherent vision synthesised from high-quality influences, and execute it with rigour, you’ll land on something valuable. The point is to do so, and to create rather than wonder 'what if'. You can figure out the reason why afterwards.
David Turner is the founder of Kói, an independent technology consultancy advising investors, founders, and boards on organisational strategy, innovation systems, and scaling coherent work in complex environments.
You can reach him at: enquiries@dkoi.design
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