The prepared mind: How to Approach Craft

The Prepared Mind: How to approach craft

READING TIME: 8 MINUTES

Photo by Franck V.

This past weekend, I attended a conference focused on one of the latest buzz terms “transformative tech.” I’ve been tracking them since they started and it appears to be nice marketing to VCs for—you guessed it—tech, but specifically tech “for mental health, emotional well being, and human flourishing.” For this group, there needs to be electricity, or a battery involved so the work of teachers, coaches, seekers, etc. are not emphasized.

One of the speakers was extrapolating on how one day, we will have tech that “gets us to flow” or “helps us jump quickly to a meditative state.” This is not the first time I’ve heard this idea being discussed and I listened intently, thinking through the potential consequences of what amounts to “skipping the [learning] journey” of learning and moving right into integration.

Learning, the kind that moves us forward in our lives and work, is fraught with struggle. There is struggle to accept a new idea, reason with it, and integrate into a new, broader understanding. Reasoning is a skill that is in precarious decline as reliance on data increases. What depth of experience (and insight) might be lost if technology could help us avoid the ungainliness, awkwardness, anxiety-prone beginner’s mind of a new idea or activity? What would be lost if we were able to skip important phases of developing mastery?

In an age obsessed with tech, repackaged ideas, and Instagram soundbites, some of the great tech thinkers get lost to history. I’d like to share some learning from the great Richard Hamming. Hamming was an American mathematician whose work had many implications for computer engineering and telecommunications. He programmed IBM’s calculating machines. He was involved in nearly all of Bell Laboratories' most prominent achievements. After retiring, Hamming took a position at the Naval Postgraduate School and devoted himself to teaching and writing books. He delivered his last lecture in December 1997, just a few weeks before he died from a heart attack on January 7, 1998.

You can see it here. I call out some of his major ideas as they relate to my research on Master Craftsmen, how they get better at what they do, and what we (in tech and in business) can learn from them.

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How to Work With Craft In Whatever You Do

Insight, skill, or the state of consciousness gained by daily, deliberate practice, are rarely handed to you on a silver platter. Einstein argued that genius was 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. Picasso referred to “inspiration [existing] but needs to find you at work.” While we can acknowledge that luck plays a role, we often use that as a crutch to avoid doing what we can do to intelligently prepare for opportunities. Perspiration and work are, in my opinion, integral to effective integration.

We only get one life, “and it seems to be it is better to do significant things than to just get along through life to its end,” writes Richard Hamming in his 1997 book The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn. The book and his 1986 lecture, 'Luck favors the prepared mind', You and Your Research, explore how we do great work. Specifically, he refers to “Nobel-Prize type work.” Nobel level work raises the standards of what we thought possible and teaches us to think in new ways. In many ways, Nobel prize winners are the craftsmen in their respective fields.

From cooking to coding, there are methods to engage in order to do something with Craft. That’s how LEAN, DMAIC. 6Sigma and my other methodologies came to be. There are also mental disciplines we can learn for more effective thinking. But, where to start?

Hamming suggests that preparation is what separates the good from the great. This means the way you live your life—the extent to which you intelligently prepare—makes a huge difference in what you can accomplish.

As human beings, we tend fixate on what we can see with our eyes. We think focusing on the concrete is being objective. It’s how we rationalize. When we look at transformations in other people’s lives, we see good luck, natural talent, unfair advantage, or the right connections. We concentrate on the visible signs of opportunity and success. We do this with organizations too — and it’s an illusion. 

The key to any change is insanely simple. Stop fixating on the external and focus on smaller, internal changes. It is the difference between grasping at an illusion and immersing yourself in reality. Reality is what transforms you. 

The major objection cited by people against striving to do great things is the belief it is all a matter of luck. I have repeatedly cited Pasteur’s remark, “Luck favors the prepared mind”. It both admits there is an element of luck, and yet claims to a great extent it is up to you. You prepare yourself to succeed, or not, as you choose, from moment to moment, by the way you live your life.

Hamming, Richard R. Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (Page 209)

Luck is always part of the equation. Philosophers, political theorists, and strategists have long acknowledged the large role that luck plays in every aspect of our lives. Even Nicolo Machiavelli, the cataloger of each and every lever that a prince can pull in the pursuit of power, acknowledged that “I believe that it is probably true that fortune is the arbiter of half the things we do, leaving the other half to be controlled by ourselves.” What was true in Italian politics centuries ago is just as true in management today.

Yet if life were all about luck, the same people wouldn’t repeatedly do great things. Galileo Galilei did many great things. So did Newton and Einstein. Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos have been successful in multiple sectors. The list goes on.

When someone repeatedly achieves greatness, it is because they prepared in advance to recognize, work on, and fill in the blanks when necessary. This is the essence of intelligent preparation and the foundation of deliberate practice—greatness is a byproduct. So often, in the attempt to optimize and recreate, we forget that.

Intelligence comes in many forms. A lot of the time it’s not easily recognized — a lot of people who repeatedly do great things were poor students. IQ does not ensure academic success. Being smart is nice but it’s better if you know how to apply your knowledge.

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Believe that you are capable of doing work that matters.

How you regard yourself and your ability to contribute determines how you experience the people in your life, the work you choose, and the tactics and strategies you choose to solve problems.  

With the belief that you can do work that matters, why is that most of us spend time on work that doesn’t matter?

…direct observation, and direct questioning of people, shows most scientists spend most of their time working on things they believe are not important nor are they likely to lead to important things.

Hamming, Richard R.. Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (Page 210).

If what you are working on is not important and aligned with your values—and a lot of what you are working on, what you are saying and what you are doing isn’t either. Think about that.

Is health important to you? When was the last time you invested in it?

Are relationships important to you? What do you do to invest in them?

Do you value the process, really? When was the last time you valued, really valued the many, many small decisions that enable you to achieve the results you are after?

The question you need to ask yourself if why are you not working on and thinking about the important problems in your area? How can we expect to achieve great things if we are not working on the right problems?

Be willing to be an outlier. 

Think of this as confidence meets courage. You might look like an idiot because you are doing something new. You might not be immediately understood by those around you because you are challenging the status quo.

[Claude] Shannon had courage. Who else but a man with almost infinite courage would ever think of averaging over all random codes and expect the average code would be good? He knew what he was doing was important and pursued it intensely. Courage, or confidence, is a property to develop in yourself. Look at your successes, and pay less attention to failures than you are usually advised to do in the expression, “Learn from your mistakes”. While playing chess Shannon would often advance his queen boldly into the fray and say, “I ain’t scaird of nothing”. I learned to repeat it to myself when stuck, and at times it has enabled me to go on to a success. I deliberately copied a part of the style of a great scientist. The courage to continue is essential since great research often has long periods with no success and many discouragements.

Hamming, Richard R.. Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (Page 211)

Embrace horizonal goals. 

You have to see excellence as a pursuit not an outcome. This isn’t as easy as it sounds but it as an essential feature of engaging in Craft.

Without such a goal you will tend to remain three degrees off course. You will be headed in the right direction, almost. Three degrees seems small, but that is when you stay the course and say to yourself, “I’m ok, I can still see the hill I’m headed toward.” It isn’t until twenty years later that you realize something isn’t right. You can no longer see that hill. The cumulative effect of being three degrees off course for a long period of time means that it’s either time to backtrack, make a pivot toward that hill, or try some other approach to get you back on course.

…with the goal of doing significant work, there is tendency for the steps to go in the same direction and thus go a distance proportional to the number of steps taken, which in a lifetime is a large number indeed.

Hamming, Richard R.. Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (Page 211)

What most people think are the best working conditions, are not—learn to dance between failure and fame.

Constraints can lead to innovation. But constraints is just another word for reality, or the lack of the ideal (budget, resources, environment, or other qualities you are seeking). The feedback of reality in order to keep your feet planted on the ground.

Age seems to have the effect it does. In the first place if you do some good work you will find yourself on all kinds of committees and unable to do any more work. You may find yourself as I saw Brattain when he got a Nobel Prize. The day the prize was announced we all assembled in Arnold Auditorium; all three winners got up and made speeches. The third one, Brattain, practically with tears in his eyes, said, “I know about this Nobel-Prize effect and I am not going to let it affect me; I am going to remain good old Walter Brattain.” Well I said to myself, “That is nice.” But in a few weeks I saw it was affecting him. Now he could only work on great problems.

When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you. In fact I will give you my favorite quotation of many years. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in my opinion, has ruined more good scientists than any institution has created, judged by what they did before they came and judged by what they did after. Not that they weren't good afterwards, but they were superb before they got there and were only good afterwards.

Work with your door open.

I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, “The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.” I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing – not much, but enough that they miss fame.   

People who do great things typically have a great drive to do things.

…most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, “How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?” He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, “You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years.” I simply slunk out of the office!

Focused investment of only one hour a day can double your lifetime output. 

Intelligent preparation is like compound interest, the more you invest, the more situations you can handle, the more you learn how to do, so the more you can do, etc. The advantage of investing in just one hour a day to learning new things is an overlooked gem hiding in plain sight.

This isn’t about who works the hardest but rather who focuses their limited energy on the right things. Learning things that (1) change slowly and (2) apply to a wide variety of situations could be a better use of time than learning something incredibly time-consuming, rapidly changing, and of limited application.

Hamming dedicated his Friday afternoons to “great thoughts.” Setting aside time to think is a common characteristic of people that do great things. Not only does this help you live consciously it helps get your head out of the weeds. The rest of us are too busy with the details to ask if we’re going in the right direction.

Consider that advice against a well-intended behavior not truly lived. Google’s 20% time was eventually abandoned. Only about 10% of Googlers were using it. But that didn’t matter much as long as the idea of it exists, according to Google HR boss Laszlo Bock in his new book, "Work Rules!"

Tolerate ambiguity.

Believe and not believe at the same time. You have to believe that where you work is the best place in the industry, and capable of improving.

It took me a while to discover the importance of ambiguity. Most people like to believe something is or is not true. Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well. They believe the theory enough to go ahead; they doubt it enough to notice the errors and faults so they can step forward and create the new replacement theory. If you believe too much you'll never notice the flaws; if you doubt too much you won't get started. It requires a lovely balance. But most great scientists are well aware of why their theories are true and they are also well aware of some slight misfits which don't quite fit and they don't forget it. Darwin writes in his autobiography that he found it necessary to write down every piece of evidence which appeared to contradict his beliefs because otherwise they would disappear from his mind. When you find apparent flaws you've got to be sensitive and keep track of those things, and keep an eye out for how they can be explained or how the theory can be changed to fit them. Those are often the great contributions. Great contributions are rarely done by adding another decimal place. It comes down to an emotional commitment. Most great scientists are completely committed to their problem. Those who don't become committed seldom produce outstanding, first-class work.

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Still Interested? Check our my Hamming compendium.

The Multiple Intelligences of Craftsmen

Before assuming craftsmen have something to teach us, let’s look at how a restoration stonemason approaches her work. We will look in-depth as she attempts to solve problems while creating something in particular. Comments to the right will highlight how she works with qualities to create her piece.The stone carver is experienced in a medium that brings physical limits and opportunities. In this case, this includes a dolly to move her stone, the actual stone, her bankers (workspace), ruler, measuring tape, pencil or chalk to draw design, mallet, chisel, claws for roughing out, pitch for removing large piece of stone, an array of chisels, face mask, and a bag of dollar store reading glasses.

She trained as a stone mason, which is all straight lines and geometric. There is a particular order to how things are done. Heather finds this approach boring so she will change her approach from project to project.

“I’ve always been unmotivated by money, which is a problem for me. Some of my best work is done when I’m avoiding something I don’t want to do. If I was more motivated by money, I might have better attention skills to a particular method, but I understand the consequences of my choices.”

She makes her own rules, informed by methods she has learned, understanding the consequences of her choices in terms of time, materials, and money.

She stands before her stone, preparing it by positioning the side she wishes to cut at an angle that is comfortable for her. She sketches a design on the top side. She neatly arranges her selection of tools in preparation for cutting. She has approximately twenty-five chisels, with many more in her spare drawer. She arranges them by size, from her two-inch chisel to her 1/8-inch chisel. Her pitch, bolster and claws of varying sizes are in the next row.

She physically orients herself toward her work.

Standing before a relatively blank piece of stone, she confronts a problem that is both simple and complex. The stone is a large block. It contains multiple cuts on all sides that generate unexpected angles when chiseled or carved. Her solutions are all unique to her. Another cutter or carver would undoubtedly approach the stone differently. As the problem is being resolved, its form shifts.

She arranges her tools in order of size, or quantitatively.

She stands in between smooth and rough, rules and ambiguity—by choice. “I enjoy a challenge when I take it on. My interest is the defining thing in the carving. I shape it first and then do what detail I need to do. But before I finish I will often do detailing earlier. I need to see if I’m going to like it. That is backward, and not how you are supposed to do it because it is very difficult to go back and do the other work if you don’t like it. This is where my stone masonry skills help me. I understand how to get there, so I understand how to go back. I don’t break the important rules, but I break all the rest.”

Heather’s stance toward her work is driven by the challenge of a project.

Heather must decide what she will carve. It is up to her what issues are important and how to resolve them. All of these decisions are personal to her. The first choice is selecting a stone. Something has to catch her attention. When choosing her stone in a field, she sets it upright, “I’m liking this one. I’m thinking I might be able to get a face there.”

She does not start with pre-defined, measurable goals. Instead, she makes her own qualitative, personally meaningful goals. Some of these goals are clear to her, some are vague, and some emerge as she progresses.She has a loose vision that responds to her improvisation in the medium and is kept on course by her skills. She can rely on method when it reinforces her values: use of good stone, sense of proportion, etc. With the rest, she establishes her own standards.A few of the subjective measures are that is grab attention as a raw material, and also what defines the carving.

“If I did actually have a detailed plan, it would change by the time I touched the stone.” Taking her measuring tape out and dividing the stone in quadrants with her ruler, she makes decisions on proportion for a face, how much of the stone’s length and width to utilize. She puts on her glasses and dust mask and begins cutting. After setting her initial goal with her chalk she uses the nomadic chisel. She carves with the nomadic chisel on top of her lines. She expands to include other elements such as swirling designs and various depths of indentation using multiple chisel sizes.

As she switches from automatic tools to manual carving tools she smooths surfaces, keeps others rough. There are technical visual qualities she is trying to achieve in addition to her more personal goals.In addition to being attention-grabbing, the piece also communicates a sense of permanence with the landscape. It returns to the earth, where it came from, altered by her hand. It has been changed by experiencing her.

“With the hammer and chisel there is a repetitive aspect to it. It’s almost like daydreaming. My hands know what to do, like when you’re driving. I’m not able to think when I’m carving. It’s almost like a meditation.”  The vision she has is coming through her hands. “When I get into a rhythm, I’m not there.”

Here, Heather shares the translation of vision to execution. Most craftsmen refer to this as a meditation. There is an increased awareness and presence as they go about their work. References to deep concentration are often followed by contradictory references of being absent in thought or actually not mentally present.

A successful carving includes certain qualities. She brushes off the dust from her chiseling before starting on some of the manual carving. Heather reflects as she chooses her carving tools. “No one teaches you to carve, you teach yourself to carve.” She continues, “And it’s just so permanent. I’ll make this piece today. It may end up in someone’s garden. That person may move on and it may get covered up by bushes. The face carving might get knocked off or broken into smaller pieces--but it never goes away. It’s always in the form of stone.”

Smooth surfaces, stone that appears “soft”, she’s creating concave surfaces that catch water which reflects light. Other pieces might be put in a garden to train the growth of vines.

She has direction and momentum as she progresses from taking the stone from the field, to organizing her materials, to cutting and lastly to carving. Her experience is rooted in her medium—stone—which comes with its own constraints and possibilities.

Heather understands the idiosyncrasies of her medium and uses that knowledge to create the qualities she wants.Knowing how her chisels will work or not with a particular size indentation, she can predict what will happen on the stone and respond automatically to adjust created qualities as they occur.Heather understands that action, control, and lack of control exist simultaneously.

“With stone,” says Heather, “you cannot force a carving. The stone either wants to be altered or “it will fight you.” There is no opportunity to place a chiseled piece of stone back to the main piece, she has to work with areas where she over chiseled, or where the stone is remaining unforgiving. Because of all the sizes she has to choose from each chisel has a unique impact on the stone. Without control over her own body (the pressure she administers on the nomadic tools) and hand tools (the power with which she strikes her pitches and chisels of varying sizes) she won’t get the design she is hoping for. On the other hand, a lot of what she can do is determined by the stone itself. It does, as she mentions, have a will of its own. Therefore, it takes a lot of control to transform an inert, rough, sometimes unforgiving surface into a smooth one.Her attention remains on her chisel as it follows her sketched pattern.She knows she is done with a project when she’s tired of it. “When I’ve gotten out of it what I needed to get out of it—I’m done. I can stop. I can accept that this is the best I can do at this time.”

“About one out of every 20 pieces I make, I have a hard time letting go. A lot of times I make things and I’m not sure why I’m making it. I’m working something out and not sure what it is. When I first took ill, I was making the pea pods, but I didn’t know it. There’s just a huge amount of self-searching in that stone. It has nothing to do with the piece, but everything to do with where I was mentally at the time. To let that piece go, I’m just not ready. But I will have realizations about why I’m making certain kinds of pieces, like I understand why what I’ve been working on is all ‘closed in.’ It’s a way to figure things out for me. They’re like markers of time period.”

Here, Heather shares how she bonds with her work, how she uses it as a form of mental markers and emotional expression. The fact that her emotional work is done is the prize in completion. When she reflects on her work, or sees pieces she did in her past, she will see the errors and opportunities improvement. And, she understands when she has completed a piece and can accept that as her best work for that project, on that day, with the skills she had at that time.

“In general, I don’t like living with my work around the house. I only have one piece of mine at home. That face I carved, I don’t want her in the house. She lives in the gallery. Then I see the flaws in her—what I consider flaws. But that’s just skill development. You always have to see where you can improve.”

Heather self-edits her work critically. She is in constant evaluation of her skills.

Rather than use her action to follow pre-established goals, Heather’s actions allow her to generate her outcomes. She reasons with her sensory experience rather than abstract theories. She acts without hesitating with what she knows while inviting possibilities and being open to possibilities from the stone she is working with. She utilizes a combination of her immediate experience while summoning her past experience to predict and then revise her immediate action in the moment. To perform with mastery, committed practitioners must rely on both measurement (objectivity) and evaluation (subjectivity) in their work.

This post is part of a series #LookToCraftsmen set for publication in 2019.

Subjective & Objective Thinking

Stone is a reductive practice. The mason removes material from a larger mass using hand and power tools — gouges, chisels, rasps, files, saws, grinders, sandpaper, polishing compound — until the desired form emerges. It takes much patience and persistence. The larger and heavier the material, the more equipment, and the greater the cost. If a mistake is made and a piece is removed by accident, then the entire work may need to be modified or discarded. The stakes are high. Mistakes are costly.

The stonemason sees a relationship between the way shadows play on one side of a rock and structures the rest of her vision around this emerging relationship; a CEO weighs market reactivity and customer pressure, then makes a far-reaching decision on shifting culture more aggressively toward more sustainable practices. As they work, neither the mason nor the CEO limits their judgment strictly to data or deductive reasoning.

The ongoing conflict between the structure objective thinking provides and openness subjective thinking enables has many facets. Organizations are pulled between strategies that focus on the exploitation of current skills and those that court the exploration of innovation.[i] In self-improvement circles, right-brain and left-brain fans offer conflicting advice on how to achieve well-being and life purpose. While business cares about what will make it most successful, it is often biased toward objective measures as the path to getting there. At the root of this debate lies the dispute of the very definition of intelligence. The mental processes business (and society) choose to value, educate, and reward tend to be objective in nature. We want to be first and be right. We want the job, the house, the title. Subjectivity tends to get sidelined. Embracing horizonal goals makes success hard to gauge.

After over twenty years in technology working to bridge the divide between these two modes of thinking, I have come to the conclusion that to perform with craft, committed practitioners in any realm must rely on both the ability to think both subjectively and objectively. Of the two modes, objective thinking is easier to define, as we all know how to apply data to enhance understanding. We observe speed limits, set meeting times, and pay our bills on a particular cadence. We measure businesses by accounting conventions that determine gross profit and net earnings. Understandably, risk-averse environments add constraints against subjectivity.

We are taught in the sciences (and sometimes even the Liberal Arts) that formulas, diagrams, and experiments are perfect expressions of objective, evidence-based thinking. We pursue problems driven by a measurable, single-answer approach to problem-solving. Formulas enable us to more predictably and reliably repeat our work. They communicate stability, allowing us to speak in precise terms and to share understanding. Methods, measures, and processes help define fairness, rationality and effectiveness. Measurement has such utility and power that it leads us to conflate measurable thinking with intelligence.

Subjective thinking embraces qualities like mood. We observe and sense it but it cannot be perfectly measured. All materials have a certain tone, texture, or flavor. When they come into contact with their environment, they change. We might see a group of people at an event, but the number doesn’t tell us much about their mood or richness of their connections. Additionally, different members of this group might pick up on different aspects, or they may experience the same aspects differently.

Subjective and objective thinking does not have to be at odds. So often these two ways of evaluating our world happily coexist. They are integrated whenever you deal with the problem at hand and a representative model; when you react to a situation with what you know while inviting the unknown; or when you draw upon experience to predict and then modify an action. These are examples when you are flexing your ability to think both objectively and subjectively at the moment.

Although few of us may serve in these specific roles, we take subjective qualities into account every day. Without the ability to subjectively assess, we could read street signs, but would not be able to operate a bike in frequent ebb and flow of traffic. We could celebrate an anniversary with a partner by noting the passage of time, but we would be insensitive to the unfolding stages of a relationship.

The connection between the need to utilize multiple intelligences has a long history, from John Dewey[ii] in the 1930s to and the latest work on emotional intelligence by Donald Schön, Dan Siegel, Daniel Goleman, Dan Kegan, and Lisa Lahey, and Paul Klein. Daniel Pink contributes to this debate in his recent book, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, where he states:

..in a world where entire industries can disappear overnight, highly trained workers are made redundant by new technology and outsourcing, arts education isn’t merely a marginally helpful addition to the well-rounded curriculum. It’s an essential rung on the ladder that will lead American workers to full and meaningful employment in fields of the future— a level of preparation that American education does not currently provide.[iii]

Despite the many publications on this topic, the explicit development of abilities emphasizing subjective thinking rarely occurs outside the of certain functions or disciplines. Instead, objective thinking based on measurement and data is still the primary focus of most educational programs through programs like STEM and mandatory testing where public funding is tied to results. More subjective approaches tend to be overlooked, sometimes even avoided. The impact is that these methods are either dreaded or left to those who are willing to embrace more playful approaches or risky experimentation.

For the most part, this makes sense. Assessing is vague, hard to pin down, too subjective and not able to be easily generalized. It can be costlier. A manager’s increase in effectiveness in managing others cannot be directly attributed to training initiatives, for example. Subjective measures are unreliable and inconsistent. There are many variables to consider and it can be difficult to gain agreement on what to measure.  Ask potters how they take clay and develop a feel for the material, or how they decide between a pit fire or the kiln to create a certain mood for their piece­­–you’ll get very different answers. See what a senior executive leading a major change effort has to say about employee engagement, or how an organizational coach gauges engagement or designs learning that motivates. They’ll say that it depends on the person, the group, the topic, and the context. What works for one does not always work for another when qualities are used to guide action. People will not necessarily get the exact same results in another context.

Less tangible qualities, such as personal connection and responsibility, are starting to have real value among people doing practical work where bottom line results were previously favored. My own research of craftsmen and leaders across disciplines indicates that when you dig a little deeper, the interplay of objective and subjective thinking transforms into a dynamic rhythm. The good news is that if you know how to manage this back and forth, you can turn it into a force that fuels action and progress for yourself and your organization.

This post is part of a series #LookToCraftsmen set for publication in 2019.

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Problem Seeking & Problem Finding

Working with craft requires distinct attitudes and capabilities of solving the problem at hand, but also the intellectual vision and insight to find new problems. Seeing what is missing involves the application of ingenuity.

Stability has provided the conditions for us to think of organizations of all types as machines. We update, copy, scale, and own them. We think of organizations as having parts, and concentrate efforts on making them operate ever more cheaply. We think we can fix them. We want them to be reliable producers for us. Nonprofits want more programs. Governments want more services. Businesses want to produce more widgets. We think we can control its growth trajectory and invest in ways to make the same product or service newer, whiter, and brighter.

They make more, we consume more. That’s the deal.

This model works until it doesn’t. Natural resources are finite. People burn out. Markets get oversaturated. Given the amount of change with which we are forced to reckon, the flaw in this approach is that our perception of problems remains predefined. But there is growing momentum in the belief that business is not an independent machine. It does not ‘get fixed’ using interchangeable parts. It is a living, breathing network of people, interacting with supporting networks, and dealing with ongoing, adaptive crises.

The stability we think we have in the mechanisms of business are starting to unravel. Business as usual, with its dependency on scarce resources, is a dead end. This means that business as unusual will not feel natural at first. We might even need new words to describe it. We will need to reinvent what it means to lead or to work in an organization. We have to create for ourselves the firm foundation that enables us to question constraints we see today, engage with risk toward opportunities, and take the leap. Like a craftsman, we will need to create new tools to contend with problems as they present themselves. We must learn to improvise.

Evolution, adopting modifications over time, is the most powerful tool we have for dealing with change—and it happens with or without our consent. Evolution is caused by a change in the environment. It could be a competitor. Or, we can be the virus that causes the business to evolve. The opportunity for us is to be that agent of evolution. Waiting for the DNA to evolve will take too long. A random feature that is created when a strand of DNA, or an idea, is altered and then transferred creates a mutation. Seeking or creating positive mutations can increase an organization’s resilience to change.

Evolution requires grit. Change is not the problem. Our fear of change is the problem. Fear of deviating from a leading strategy and our dependence on top-down tactics make us miserable— not change. So we adopt small changes, hoping that as the company gathers steam, it will distance itself from its competitors and dominate markets by embracing the changes that will inevitably come.

Values require homework. Truly being open to change means we need to engage in the deliberate practice of modifying our behaviors. If we aren’t prepared to engage in the emotional labor it will take in the early stages of shifting our patterns, we won’t see the changes we aspire to through.

Beliefs need to be disrupted. Business models are less durable today. Once fixed in place for years, even decades, the basic rules of the game for creating and capturing economic value have changed. What works for the competition will not work for you. But now, business models are subject to rapid displacement, disruption, and, in extreme cases, outright destruction.

Consider a few examples:

• Bitcoin bypasses traditional banks and clearinghouses with blockchain technology.[i]

• Coursera and edX, among others, threaten business schools with massive open online courses (MOOCs).[ii]

• Uber avoids the license system that protects taxicab franchises in cities around the world.[iii]

The distinction between simple and complex problems is one theorists have debated for decades. I am not the first to bring this issue up. Nor am I the first to suggest that subjectivity adds texture to decision making. Sorensen’s emphasis on judgment points directly to this idea. Yet, while the qualities that characterize craftsmanship (wrestling with uncertainty, dealing with ambiguity, complexity, change, surprise, choice, and uniqueness) are present in any challenging activity, little has been done to make use of this consideration. Few heads of state, presidents of major philanthropic organizations, or CEOs of major organizations would look to a craftsman when it comes to being effective in solving problems in the real world.

Executives looking to craftsmen for help? At first it seems a ridiculous proposition. If we’re to adopt the stereotypes for a second, craftsmen don’t have a tremendous amount of credibility in rational circles as refined problem solvers. When we think of successful, effective people craftsmen aren’t the first to come to mind.

But maybe we’ve been missing something. The important point to take is how they approach their medium. True master craftsmen see that cluster of subjective problems not as obstacles but as exciting opportunities to learn and flex their skills. In fact, they crave it. They view obstacles as exciting puzzles to work through.

And here’s something to wonder about: due to the daily discipline of immersing themselves in the potential of their medium and being in constant engagement with its constraints, when they are in the face of complexity, true craftsmen might display greater intelligence in their medium than many of us do in our own professions. This is what is meant by holding the tension of problem seeking and problem finding. Finding problems means you have the capability to predict qualities of your medium (be it clay, people, or a market) and how it will react in unique circumstances. For this group, it is often both mental and physical—and sometimes emotional.

Professionals can take valuable lessons from how craftsmen approach their work. Craftsmen seek ambiguity, disruption and surprise in the same way professions seek stability, efficiency, and permanence. They invite surprise by working at the edge of their knowledge and rubbing up against the constraints of their medium—on purpose or by accident. Taking risks is what keeps them vibrant and feeling alive. Craftsmen seek the kind of solutions that stimulate surprises, benefiting from the growth stimulated by the wonder of the unknown. As a result, they enjoy intensity, determination, experimenting, autonomy, motivation, satisfaction, purpose, creativity, learning, and transformation as they work.

Can craftsmen teach us how engaging problems differently can help us come closer to these sorts of experiences? Can we apply craftsmanship principles to shaping our businesses? Can the day to day tasks of our jobs be turned into the challenges of craftsmen? Can we learn to see the daily grind the way a craftsman views opportunity? How do I build a team of a company of craftsman?

Achieving craft in our decision making means learning to use judgment, imagination and improvisational discernment in our own work. Turning simple problems into craftsman’s problems means relaxing our grip on what we perceive to be objective data (there is none). We need to value subjective knowledge and better integrate our multiple intelligences toward creative solutions.

This post is part of a series #LookToCraftsmen set for publication in 2019.

NEXT

Life Is Not a Single Answer Problem

Not shocking, but we still need to be reminded every now and then. As someone who built first-generation online consumer experiences, managed global business intelligence initiatives, and researches leadership, I spend a considerable amount of time thinking about nagging questions:

• What makes a healthy relationship?

• What makes a great company tick?

• What is great leadership?

• Which is the coolest car design?

• What makes us more productive?

• How do you educate a child?

• Are you a good parent?

• How do we feed the world?

Our lives are filled with questions like this. Not so many are single answer questions. It’s hard not to want to provide a confident answer, as if there were only one. The dominant paradigm in which we’ve been raised conditions us to strive for a single answer, to preferably be first, and hopefully right.

We don’t really like the complexity of questions like these, not really. We tend to avoid them. We don’t like these kinds of problems because they have a certain set of features that most of us are not too excited about. We don’t elbow our way through a crowd to deal with uncertainty and ambiguity. We don’t want our lives to change just when we’ve gotten them sorted out. We don’t raise our hands to deal with situations where there are multiple solutions and we don’t know which is right. Complications are upsetting to us. We don’t seek to be overwhelmed by complexity. We like our problems simple. We like to be able to get our heads around them.

This insight fundamentally changed how I approached my doctorate. I wasn’t going back to school to debate this text or that. While the path I took to understanding learning was intellectual, I was compelled to develop an approach to practicing how to learn.

So I went interviewed as many leaders as I could about how and why they made decisions as they grew their organizations. Soon after, I came upon some documentaries about master craftsmen. Many of them used virtually the same language to describe their work as the values-based leaders did. I wondered if there was anything there about how this group went about their work.

Craftsmen, it turns out, are very effective at solving open-ended problems in their mediums. They do it all day long. That is what they are educated to do. They have explicit training and language to approach this issue.

In this book, I refer to this kind of thinking as subjective intelligence or thinking like a craftsman. Subjectivity is about being empowered to develop our personal perspective, beliefs, desires or path forward, versus those made from a data-driven, objective point of view. Within this idea are three basic capabilities that are usually kept separate:

• Subjective reasoning: the ability to arrive at a conclusion based on intuition and/or experience. Craftsmen are analytical, and they also reason.

• Flexible purposefulness: The ability to have an over-arching view and remain flexible enough to allow for adaptations as the experience unfolds.

• Cognitive emotions: The ability to be involved emotionally to one’s work, and also very thoughtful and perceptive.

They do all of these things to solve problems and create work in their medium.

Why is this of interest to business? Because the world of business has taken objectivity its highest levels with artificial intelligence and predictive data. I argue that with so many decisions directed by data, our societal bias toward the quantitative comes at the detriment of developing our own subjective interpretation and judgment capabilities.

For people looking to increase their subjective skills to match their objective ones, a starting point would be to develop a systematic process for subjective, independent learning. Objective, data-driven learning has a long history in our education system. All of us have benefitted, more or less, from over 15 years of this kind of training throughout our lives. Objectivity and a focus on efficiency have lifted entire populations into the middle class. The Lean Entrepreneur is an example of a very popular methodology that has been highly influential in the technology and business community. To get a product off the ground, it has popularized a plan-measure-build approach too fast, iterative learning.[i] And, it’s highly effective. However, it is so popular that it is (over)used—for everything from personal goals, to corporate strategies.

We don’t get much exposure to formal subjective learning unless we study art, design, or industrial arts. When you are learning on the job, most people won’t even talk about subjectivity. Success is predefined. Advice toward this goal is generally trite and unhelpful: always be the person with the right answer, first; help your boss advance; or, take on big problems and solve them (but make sure it’s at the right point in the review cycle). If you go to a leader at any Fortune 500, in fact, most leaders, and ask, “What are the qualities I should develop and how do I do that?”—you will likely not get an answer where you can take productive action.

Some mentors might favor experience and say it all comes down to 10,000 hours of practice, grit, or an attitude of “Just Do It.” Others might recommend a tool like Tim Ferris’s The Four Hour Work Weekwhich gives a step-by-step guide to simplifying an approach to life and work in unpredictable economic times. Still, others might cite those less tangible qualities and say outstanding performance is due to being an outlier, motivation, or spiritual connection to work. And all of these people would be right. Those things certainly play a part in developing expertise, but not by themselves. We do not approach gaining expertise directly. There is no straight path, no “one thing” that will get us there—it’s all of those things together. The key to expertise is understanding how they integrate.

Prescribed solutions do not work for the perplexing, complex problems we face today. In order to adapt, we need to build up our subjective intelligence systematically.

Those of us who don’t have language for subjective qualities have to learn it. This often impacts us where it counts: following dreams or advancing professionally. If you are a person who consciously works at these capabilities, this book provides some insight on how to do it with deeper focus.

Craftsmen rely on the interplay between three kinds of intelligence: experiential, abstract, and orientation.

• Experiential learning is a great teacher for building capabilities and sensitivities. Through practice, you develop a feel for an activity.

• Abstraction taps our imagination. It simplifies ideas so we can better understand them. Good models and tools help us think through problems.

• Orientation, or an overarching way of thinking that is not bound and limited by particular goals, help direct us toward our work. As we navigate the complexity of work and life, we will inevitably try things that won’t work. If we are not oriented toward an idea bigger than our own success, the journey can get frustrating and progress hard to gauge.

So while the well-meaning advice above is helpful, it is the interplay of all three categories that create movement forward. How do you balance this approach in a climate where objectivity rules? You have to create for yourself the steady ground that allows you to question and risk and leap. And, you can’t care too much. What keeps craftsmen motivated through tough times is that that the experience is worth having—regardless of the results. If you want the experience you have to go develop it yourself. There won’t be a lot of external help. You might not even be able to pay someone to care about your progress. Even if it’s hopeless, you go forward anyway because you want to gain that experience or move in a particular direction. It becomes imperative.

Your commitment to your current way of thinking is what allows you to question its value. Much has been written about the turbulence between creativity and efficiency. However, it is the individual person that has to learn to deal with that turbulence—within themselves and as they seek to change a system around them. It comes down to you and your tolerance for uncertainty. How long you are willing to dance with uncertainty? What kind of change you are looking to make? How will you develop and get better at what you do?

Artist Ann Hamilton has said, “labor is a way of knowing.” In other words, what we work on is what we understand about the world. If this is true, and I think it is, then those of us who have disproportionately relied on principles of efficiency over innovation and data over intuition, have disproportionately benefited from the most profound kind of principle of the industrial age: efficiency and data only cover part of the problems we face. Predefined problems no longer dominate our workdays. Our world is becoming more complex. We can no longer limit ourselves to playbooks, worksheets, and top ten lists. Those tools help but are ultimately limiting. If something happens that the playbook doesn’t account for, you are left wondering what to do, able to shift blame elsewhere or hand the problem down the line.

Now, this means that in a climate where new technology quickly becomes obsolete, and whole business sectors are being born and dying every day—the objective view, the traditional problem solving of plan-test-adjust, is no longer working as well as it once did. Subjective skills are being called upon. So the question we need to ask ourselves is not only, “Where do you want to go from here?” but, “How do you want to go from here?” Success is yours to define. School focuses on exercises, problems with pre-defined solutions and the right answer. When we leave school, the problems we solve and how we go about solving them will be in constant flux. The common denominator is how we approach our own development. So the more we understand our gifts and create supportive communities of practice, the better off we will be.

~~~

The overall premise I’m discussing here is the foundation of a book I’m working on–a business book. It offers ideas for consideration in business school curriculum and for anyone looking to get better at what they do—a way to develop their craft. Why, then, are we about to meet a ceramicist, a stone mason, a wood turner, a fiber artist, a metalsmith, and a mold maker alongside CEOs and leaders of professional organizations?

My answer is based on a simple idea: The most perplexing problems confronting us are the ones we haven’t directly experienced (yet). We are, in fact, dealing with exponential changes amplified by changing technologies and globalization. Issues and information are coming at us at a faster pace. Regardless, I think every generation has felt the same sense of overwhelm when looking at what they need to accomplish.

In our day-to-day work we confront every type of problem. Some problems take us to the edge of our thinking and experience. Yet, over and over again we rely on tools, operational excellence, best practices, and proven methodologies—only to repeat the same mistakes or get caught up in recurring issues. We like to return to what we think we know.

Our best solutions to problems, I believe, are not just in better tools but in fundamentally different approaches to our work. Specifically, an approach that follows from using our work as a creative medium and nurturing a craftsman’s mind in our given profession.

The concept of craftsmanship explores the dimensions of skill, commitment, and judgment in a particular way. It focuses on the intimate connection between head and heart. Every master craftsman conducts a dialogue between thinking and doing. This conversation evolves into habits, and these habits establish a rhythm between problem-solving and problem finding. Working with craftrequires distinct attitudes and capabilities of solving the problem at hand, but also the intellectual vision and insight to find new problems. Seeing what is missing involves the application of ingenuity.

“Ingenuity” used to mean the quality of being ingenious, of having a capacity for invention, but it also could mean being open and frank. At one time, frankness was not just a personal characteristic; it was an indicator of social status, of being “free-born” and having full access to all that society might offer. In many ways, craftsmen are the embodiment of this idea. They are untethered from the factory. They work with great freedom at the edges of society breaking boundaries in their mediums. The lost meaning of ingenuity as being open to knowledge and opportunities in order to shift awareness is a recurring idea throughout this book.

Learners of any age—even children—have the ability to reason. They lack the knowledge and experience of what they are trying to learn. The shift toward inquiry is a movement from the traditional approach that asks “what do we want students to know?” to one that asks “what do we want students to be able to do and what do they need to do it?”

Thinking like a craftsman, as I’ve come to call it, is not about investing in maintaining the status quo. It is about investing in the imperfect path toward tapping our multiple intelligences. The interplay of these ways of knowing tap the ingenuity needed to progress us as individuals, as organizations, and as a society. We may really listen to and follow early interests. We may learn on your own like I did. We may form learning communities within organizations. It’s good common sense, right? And yet, the desire to fit into a template defined by an organization or by society has often made us dumb about learning. The most reliable path toward ingenuity is found in how integrated we are with our ability to reason subjectively, to be flexible in our purpose, and to manage ourselves well in the presence of uncertainty.

This stance toward problem-solving is significant and necessary at an individual level, in our work and in society now more than ever.

This post is part of a series #LookToCraftsmen set for publication in 2019.