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.
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