This is a piece I ran on my own blog before Future Tense launched. It struck me that it was worth sharing here to see how this group might react. Enjoy!
I’ve been thinking about the knowledge work as craft idea for a while now. Maybe it was the prospect of Revenge of the Sith opening, or just the slow percolating of ideas, but apprenticeship has been on my mind the last couple of weeks. I'm still working through this, but wanted to see what others might think.
In a craft economy, your craft was your birthright and you learned it through long apprenticeship. One strength of the industrial revolution was to define jobs and skills that could be taught more rapidly and systematically than craft apprenticing practices. This led to a host of cultural consequences that culminated in the social mobility that characterized the U.S. economy for so many years.
Whether it is the fundamental nature of knowledge work or the state of our understanding of that work, learning to do knowledge work is more apprenticeship than job training. In the quintessential knowledge work roles, learning still takes place in apprenticeship forms and settings. Think of research scientists, architects, lawyers, management consultants, senior management. Progress and success in these arenas is based on apprenticeship. This can be obscured by the emphasis on credentialling that tends to pick up on easily visible elements, but appenticeship models rule (with both their strengths and weaknesses).
Two things worry me about this. One, I fear that apprenticeship models of learning are too slow for the pace of change that characterizes today’s knowledge economy. The clock speed of today’s world was set by the industrial economy and continues to accelerate. Most of the knowledge work fields that are aware and mindful of their apprentice-based learning strategies also take misplaced pride in the pace of those processes. We can’t afford that attitude.
As Peter Drucker and others have argued, economic progress in the coming decades will be driven to a large extent by our ability to improve the practice of knowledge work. That means improving the quality and speed of apprenticeship based learning, which brings to mind Drucker’s observation about productivity improvement in the early days of Frederick Taylor. Whenever Taylor examined a craft job, he discovered that the traditional tools and methods carried with them unseen and unexamined inefficiencies. Cruft accumulates along with tradition and distinguishing cruft from essential practice can be difficult. We need to become more aggressive and systematic about discerning true quality in knowledge work output and connecting that quality to the differences in practice that correlate with quality in output.
That leads me to my more fundamental concern about apprenticing our way to improved knowledge work; where are the Jedi masters? Where is that senior research scientist who already understands how to connect robotic gene sequencers and bioinformatics? Where is that senior investment manager who understands how to connect new derivative-based financial instruments with electronic markets? If those people even exist, do they have any real skill at helping those who work for them learn better and faster? How should their managers help them strike the right balance between advancing current knowledge work practice and educating those apprentices in the appropriate mysteries of the craft?
My hunch is that the answer here lies in developing a deep understanding of what self-directed learning and communities of practice really entail. We need to learn how to better become a part of a community of fellow seekers after knowledge, which includes appreciating the limits of what we know and what other experts know.
In the days of industrial productivity improvement and, later, in the days of expert systems development, the implicit and unexamined premise was that there was a right way to do a job and an expert who knew how. That made the improvement task one of capturing and disseminating that knowledge. In the knowledge work world we inhabit today, that is certainly less true, if it even applies at all.
We are all improvising at some fundamental level; making it up as we go along. Instead of looking for someone with an answer to copy, we now have to participate in the invention process ourselves. Even in the most enlightened settings, this is an uncomfortable place to be in. In far too many organizations, it is a nearly impossible place to be in for anyone other than the juniormost members of the organization. Most of our training and development models get in the way. They are all still based on an expert model. Even the community of practice models still have an expert bias. The new world is a more fundamental emotional shift than that. We are all novices and we are all apprentices. Moreover, we are likely to remain so for much, if not all, of our working lives.
Giovanni Rodriguez
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Jim McGee
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1. kris olsen on October 18, 2005 2:52 PM writes...
Apprenticing in a 'craft' seems to focused on only developing more and more tech tools and less and less on developing any expertise in applying those tools. 'Craftspeople' are concentrated in the technology arena and the masses of non-technical people are drowning in information without any appreciation of the 'tools' they could use to derive knowledge.
What's really missing is non-technical people who have apprenticed and mastered skills in assimilating the mountains of information by applying all the cool tools so the rest of the population can use it.
JMO, but that's the reason tech blogs attract lots of techy-only audience, non-tech blogs attract very little audience, wikis are still the domain of developers, and all the other social collaboration gizmos are the domain of, well, young people - they haven't distinguished between 'information' and 'knowledge' yet.
Permalink to Comment2. Jim McGee on October 18, 2005 3:13 PM writes...
I've certainly seen the same kinds of behavior myself. And I continue to search for the "magic" way to explain things so that those "non-technical" types will recognize the payoff that is there for the taking.
I think part of the problem lies in the marketing of technology tools, which emphasizes the magical qualities of the tools. That preserves the illusion that technical tools require some mysterious talent to use at the expense of revealing that the magic isn't all that clever and the work to become skilled is tiny in comparison to the payoffs to be gained.
I also think that complaints about the poor design of most tools is more hindrance than help. Think of all the productive and creative work that might be getting done in place of all the folks who are doing the equivalent of using the expensive power tools as no more than larger, unwieldy rocks.
Permalink to Comment3. kris olsen on October 19, 2005 9:57 AM writes...
Bingo - "...part of the problem lies in the marketing of technology tools..."
And a big part of marketing is market perception. Look at the names of these products. None of these tools evokes a perception that aligns with needs in the non-techy marketplace.
I actually have a 'blog' about 'wikis' and I hate both of those names because neither one speaks to the large audience that could be getting the benefits of both. The whole purpose of that blog is to hammer a message to the audience of people who don't realize how valuable a wiki can be to them because they have tuned it out - the name is goofy, techy, and they choose not to think about it.
There is a growing occurrence of mass media articles explaining the term 'wiki' right now and still nobody in the target audience gets it. The tech crowd comes up with these cool tools, gives them a goofy name that nobody in the real world understands. It's the first and most long-lasting obstacle to adoption.
'E'-mail is the best example of technology that everyone got and adopted because the name evoked a specific thing.
Permalink to Comment4. Jim McGee on October 19, 2005 11:58 PM writes...
The average software developer certainly doesn't tend to have an ear for naming and terms like 'blog', 'wiki', 'RSS', etc don't make it any easier for the nervous non-techie to try out new tools that could have a huge impact on their effectiveness.
On the other hand, letting marketing types name products or product categories doesn't seem any better. To me the more relevant issue is how to help potential users think about their problems at the most useful level of abstraction (somewhere closer to process than technology, I suspect).
Analogies such as for 'email' ease the initial impediments to trying something new. At the same time, they constrain people's thinking in ways that fail to tap the full power of the new tools to change the underlying patterns of knowledge work. Any thoughts on how we might do a better job positioning the new technologies we do have available or packaging collections of technology in ways that better convey where the opportunities lie?
Permalink to Comment5. Ivan Webb on October 20, 2005 8:31 PM writes...
Interesting post. Part of moving to a communities of practice approach is to utilise the available expertise (as resource) but also move away from expert-novice formulation that is at the heart of the apprenticeship model as the only way to go.
Permalink to CommentThe alternative is to have a genuine community to which members contribute and from which members ar able to find and arrange assistance in order to meet their own needs. In such a community there is a richer and wider range of roles and the roles are likely to be dynamic and situational.
In some research into the professional learning of teachers several important roles were identified:
co-learner: who validates the learner's experience
tutor: who can help someone learn how to...
mentor: who can help someone learn what to do and why
faciltiator: makes it easier for the community to (re)configure to meet the needs of of its memebers
endorser: who can acknowledge and validate the learning thus 'releasing it for action' (ignorance isn't the only impediment to the utilization of knowledge). For more information on this research see http://www.educ.utas.edu.au/users/ilwebb/Research/professional_learning.htm
6. Jim McGee on October 21, 2005 9:36 AM writes...
Ivan,
You're absolutely right. A COP approach is a much better way to characterize this, although I think there is still value in the apprentice side of the apprenticeship model. What I mean by that is that it is important to maintain an attitude of being open to learning and be on the lookout for those from whom you might learn.
The COP notion helps focus on the key idea that, in this realm, there are no experts. We are ALL apprentices or co-learners in some way.
And thanks for the pointer to the research. Much appreciated.
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