Where do skills come from?

In this episode, we explore the difference between training and education - and why that difference matters…

“Are you the guy who writes books?”, asks the young woman behind me in the cafe.

Well, yes, I am – but much as for her, it’s taken me a moment or two to recognise her, and then remember the context in which we last spoke, a couple of weeks back. A nice memory.

I’ve no idea how that initial conversation had started – they just seem to happen, somehow – but it had soon shifted to writing. It had become clear, quite quickly, that she herself wanted to write, but had no idea where to get started, or how.

What kind of writing did she like, I’d asked. Which authors? Stephen King, she’d said. So look at the way Stephen King structures his stories; how his characters develop, what challenges they face. Look inside, too, to explore how it feels to be each of the characters – their drivers, the fears they each face within themselves. For every aspect of the story, observe, orient, decide, act. All of it iteratively, recursively – each person’s story weaving through each of the others’, creating a shared tapestry of meaning and desire and denouement. Simple as that, really.

And where to start? One example: just look around the town – again, simple as that. This an old town here, with more than two thousand years of history in every small locale, layer upon layer, literally under our feet, everywhere around us. So just pick somewhere to start: anywhere would do – anywhere at all, any place that seems to announce itself, say ‘Hello’ in its own strange way. Or, as Robert Pirsig once advised one of his students, choose a building, start with the top-left brick, and build outward from there.

We’d talked for a while, and then she’d had to go out on an errand for the cafe. I’d had to leave too, soon after, so I’d left a £5 note with her friend, to pay towards getting her a good notebook from the Paperchase store around the corner: make it special, get her started, provide that bit of extra motivation.

It worked.

When we met at the cafe again, as above, she was almost wildly excited. She’d gotten started, all right. Written her first short-story; then another, and another. Her friends liked what she’d written, the right Stephen King-like frisson of fear. No doubt, there’d be some years of hard work ahead of her, to make it work as well as she really wanted – but she now had the momentum to do it, and the motivation too. A real sense of aliveness in her, that hadn’t been there before. Literally changing her life, for the better – and all of it started up through just one brief conversation.

I live for moments like that…

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And creating conditions under which those moments can happen – not just for individuals, but for organisations too – well, that’s what I do, and why I do it.

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But wait a moment: let’s take a look at what’s happened here. She’d started from, well, nothing more than a vague notion that she’d perhaps maybe sort-of quite like to try doing her own writing, though not really having done anything about it. And yet just two weeks later, all on her own, she’s ‘created something from nothing’, creating whole stories that her friends like a lot, and than she enjoys writing. Yet how does all of this work?

The real core of it, perhaps, is about skills – about what skills are, why we need them, where they come from, what happens in skills-development, and how development of skill is inherently different from training. And yeah, I’ve been exploring the theory and practice of all that stuff for maybe half a century now - I did my Masters thesis on it way back in 1976, and I’ve continued to nibble away at it ever since. Interesting stuff, though. And useful, too.

The crucial distinction seems to be about the difference between training and education, and about method, with maybe a little bit of Einstein thrown into the picture just for the fun of it. Yeah, it’s theory-ish, but it’s still useful in real-world practice - as we can see from that young woman’s story above.

The Einstein bit is that old apocryphal tale about “the definition of insanity is to do the same thing and expect different results”. Which is true, sort-of. And it’s why we have training, with predefined methods to put people ‘on the right track’ to arrive at the same predefined answers, so that everyone stays nicely sane and all that.

Yet it doesn’t quite work that way, does it? There’s something else going on here…

The trap is that Einstein’s dictum only works when everything stays the same. When they’re not the same - different context, different place, different person, different material or whatever, with maybe a bit of of extra uncertainty or suchlike thrown into the mix - well, that’s when it gets a bit more tricky. Our training doesn’t give us the same results that we expect: we keep on having to tweak things a bit to make them work - so much so that we sometimes end up with a kind of ‘Inverse Einstein’, where the definition of insanity is to try to do the same thing each time and expect the same results. And that’s where skill comes into the picture - because knowing how to tweak things a bit so as to get the results that we need is what skill is.

Which brings us back to that bit about training, and method. In training, we’re taught the respective ‘The Method’, which is supposed to work the same way for everyone, everywhere, but often doesn’t. When things get different, we need skills, where we have to create our own methods - but it’s rarely clear how we create those methods, or exactly how to choose the right method each time that will give us the outcomes that we need. So how does that work? Where does that skill come from?

The short-answer is education - literally ‘out-leading’ our answers from within ourselves (rather than having it stuffed into us from someone else, which is what happens in training). There are still bits of training-like structured step-by-step in that process of (self)-education - it’s just that it works in a somewhat different way.

To find the right method, we look at the context. There are some bits of the context that are always going to be the same for everyone, everywhere, everywhen - the physics, for example, or what we might describe more generically as the ‘mechanics’ of the context. Then there are other bits that are specific to that context - the time, the place, the person, or what might call the ‘approaches’. The ‘mechanics’ bits do stay the same, so we can learn those via training; the ‘approaches’ bits tend to be different, so have to identify what they are each time, learning how to ‘read the room’ and all that, by observation, self-observation and all that. The method that we need for each context then comes from how we bring together the mechanics and the respective approaches. Or, in visual form:

(If you’re interested in more detail on this, there’s a summary in my weblog-post ‘Methods, mechanics, approaches‘.)

Yet as my old friend Geraldine Beskin, at Atlantis Bookshop in London, pointed out to me the other day, there’s another entire dimension to this, about purpose, about desire – about what we want to do, rather than merely what we can do. In other words, drivers that seem, or are, somehow ‘greater than self’:

Linked to that are a whole bunch of other concerns such as competence – that the methods we use will change according to our experience and maturity within that skill. And, moving more to the ‘mechanics’ side of the equation, there are other ‘external’ elements such as inherent-uncertainty and ‘variety-weather‘ – the ways in which the set of factors that define the variety of a context are themselves subject to variety. So the methods we need in each context will depend not just on ‘objective’-mechanics and ‘subjective’-approaches, but on these broader ‘external’ drivers too.

In training, though, we basically skip over all of that, just dump it into the ‘too-hard’ basket. Instead, someone makes some random assumptions about the mechanics, the approaches, the drivers, and assembles a ‘The Method’ from those often-untested assumptions. (So-called ‘best-practices’ also work - and often fail - in much the same way.) It does work, if the context matches the assumptions. If not, well, there’ll be some tweaking that’s needed - though there‘ll be no way to know how to tweak the method that make it work.

When the world goes uncertain, unstable - when the prepackaged methods won’t work any more - what we’ll need most is skill. And to make our skills work, we need to know the underlying mechanics, approaches, drivers and so on, and how to put them together into methods that can change themselves along with the changes in context. And to do that, we’ll need sensemaking, scrutiny, self-critique and all that stuff. And experience. Lots and lots of experience. (And there’s no short-cut to experience, either.)

So where do skills come from? They come from observing, exploring, commitment and more. That’s where skills come from - and why we need them, too.

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(This episode was adapted in part from my February 2016 post on the Tetradian weblog, ‘What I do, and why’.)