One of the many lovely things about blogging is the way that people redirect your attention to things you’ve looked at before; calling attention to important insights that you missed the first time around or have simply forgotten. Back in May, the folks at SIGNAL VS. NOISE pointed to a passage in Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language. Alexander is an architect whose work has strongly influenced the world of software design. Here’s the passage:
To begin with, such a structure allows the actual building process to be a creative act. It allows the building to be built up gradually. Members can be moved around before they are firmly in place. All those detailed design decisions which can never be worked out in advance on paper, can be made during the building process. And it allows you to see the space in three dimensions as a whole, each step of the way, as more material is added…
The essence of this process is very fundamental indeed. We may understand it best by comparing the work of a fifty-year-old carpenter with the work of a novice. The experienced carpenter keeps going. He doesn’t have to keep stopping, because every action he performs, is calculated in such a way that some later action can put it right to the extent that it is imperfect now. What is critical here, is the sequence of events. The carpenter never takes a step which he cannot correct later; so he can keep working, confidently, steadily.
The novice by comparison, spends a great deal of his time trying to figure out what to do. He does this essentially because he knows that an action he takes now may cause unretractable problems a little further down the line; and if he is not careful, he will find himself with a joint that requires the shortening of some crucial member – at a stage when it is too late to shorten that member. The fear of these kinds of mistakes forces him to spend hours trying to figure ahead: and it forces him to work as far as possible to exact drawings because they will guarantee that he avoids these kinds of mistakes.
The difference between the novice and the master is simply that the novice has not learnt, yet, how to do things in such a way that he can afford to make small mistakes. The master knows that the sequence of his actions will always allow him to cover his mistakes a little further down the line. It is this simple but essential knowledge which gives the work of a master carpenter its wonderful, smooth, relaxed, and almost unconcerned simplicity.
There’s a lot to reflect on in this passage that bears on the world of knowledge work. First off, it’s a good reminder to keep the craft nature of the knowledge work we do in mind.
Second, the notion that expertise lies partly in the ability to recover from inevitable mistakes and missteps; not in avoiding mistakes altogether. Novices freeze in fear of making a mistake. Experts take mistakes as a given and learn how to recover gracefully.
Finally, it offers an intriguing perspective on design. Too often, design attempts to reduce the human element to the same rigidities and tolerances of machines. This seems particularly likely in enterprise settings where design responsibility falls on IT and systems professionals who don’t generally have the depth of knowledge (and expertise) about the human dimensions of organization.
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