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Future Tense

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June 27, 2005

Making it up as we go

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Posted by Jim McGee

We are now living in the midst of a new world of work that has been predicted and promised from Daniel Bell’s The Coming of Post-Industrial Society and Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock onward. Some of it is as the experts predicted, but most remains a surprise.

With the scope and range of what is surprising about this world of work around us, we have all become equally expert or, to be more honest, all equally ignorant. We are all making it up as we go. No matter how desirable it might be to be able to “just do my job” it isn’t likely to happen. As fear-inducing as that can be, I prefer to treat it as an opportunity for learning and discovery.

Instead of learning to perform a script, we need to hone our skills at improvisation. If you watch those who are good at it, most improvisation is pretty ordinary; sometimes it bombs. But every once in a while, something brilliant and magical occurs that no script could ever produce.

The aspect of future work that most intrigues me is the emerging dominance of knowledge work. Elsewhere I have characterized it as a new kind of craft work. It is also craft work that is supported with industrial strength power tools. Finding that synthesis between the lessons of craft work and the applications of power tools is one of my starting points in trying to make sense of this new world.

The second aspect of my efforts to make sense of this world is a choice to focus on the level of the individual knowledge worker. As much as I have enjoyed and benefited from reading writers such as Bell and Toffler, I frequently end up disappointed. The movers and shakers who are in a position to act on the global advice of these pundits are a small, albeit powerful, group. But what of life in the trenches? Or wherever it is that we might expect to find our fellow knowledge workers. What can we be doing at the grassroots level to operate more effectively in this developing world? Do we have to wait for new organizations and institutions to emerge before we can act on new opportunities? What kind of power or degrees of freedom can I create for myself regardless of where I happen to work?

A final aspect that flows from combining the view of knowledge work as craft with a focus on the individual knowledge worker is the changes that brings to how we think about learning. There is no curriculum yet that prepares us to operate in this new world. And there aren’t any masters of the new craft we can sign on with as apprentices. How can we go about writing our curriculum on the fly and adapting the notion of apprenticeship to a world where what experts might exist may be no farther along in their curriculum than we are in ours?

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