Craftsmanship refers to something made with the highest quality. It requires a distinct mindset and approach. Values like durability, integrity, and calling are often associated with craftsmanship.
In this story, AI enhances the notion of craft for a Carlsberg brewing team, extending capabilities that have been practiced for centuries.
Read MoreTo tackle the wicked problems of our present and future, we need to embrace a strange, counter-intuitive irony: as organizations across all sectors continue to create and adopt technologies like artificial intelligence, employees need to stay relevant by increasing their subjective intelligence. My research on master craftsmen and how they gain mastery helps connect the dots on this new dilemma, and might be the place to seek initial solutions.
When it comes to open ended problem solving and learning to improvise with what we are given; master craftsmen have something to teach us. Having to work with a material where they cannot be sure what will happen is something they are used to. Combined with the more structured training and education offered to us today, improvisational thinking in the face of uncertainty is useful to leaders in any sector. Even in the face of countless books and articles about how important it is, most traditional business school programs and organizational training fail to address sophisticated thinking about ambiguous problems.
Craftsmanship refers to something made with the highest quality. It requires a distinct mindset and approach. Values like durability, integrity, and calling are often associated with craftsmanship.
Awestruck at the sight of a Grinling Gibbons carving in a London church, David Esterly chose to dedicate his life to woodcarving—its physical rhythms, intricate beauty, and intellectual demands. Forty years later, he is the foremost practitioner of Gibbons’s forgotten technique, which revolutionized ornamental sculpture in the late 1600s with its spectacular cascades of flowers, fruits, and foliage.
After a disastrous fire at Henry VIII’s Hampton Court Palace, Esterly was asked to replace the Gibbons masterpiece destroyed by the flames. It turned out to be the most challenging year in Esterly’s life, forcing him to question his abilities and delve deeply into what it means to make a thing well. Written with a philosopher’s intellect and a poet’s grace, The Lost Carving explores the connection between creativity and physical work and illuminates the passionate pursuit of a vocation that unites head and hand and heart.
Esterly kept a daily journal during his year carving the restoration, a diary that became the springboard for The Lost Carving two decades later. The book narrates his evolution as a woodcarver and describes how the project crucially shaped his own artistic development.Philadelphia Inquirer reviewer Rita Giordano noted that even a reader who cared nothing for woodcarving could “still be absolutely in thrall to the lushness of Esterly’s language, his passion for creation, his reverence for the physical act of work. The Lost Carving is a study in the marvel—both the pain and the joys—of doing a thing well.”
PhotoCredit: Harvard Magazine
[From Harvard Magazine] Then as now, Esterly was and is internationally regarded as the most accomplished practitioner of the “subtractive art” of limewood carving since Gibbons. Indeed, Esterly is something of an anachronism: he has devoted most of his adult life (“I work seven days a week, after dinner, all the time”) to chiseling soft, malleable limewood, a particularly receptive medium for these delicate renderings. Many of his pieces take a year or even two to complete: such carvings are a painstaking art that calls on skills cultivated over decades. Thus Esterly has created a magnificent, if small, oeuvre: his 38-year career has produced only a few dozen carvings, almost all in private collections.
They are not hidden from the public, though. This January, Esterly assembled 15 of his most recent works for an 11-day show at the W.R. Brady and Company gallery in Manhattan. Soon thereafter, the collection went on display for six weeks in an exhibit, The Art of Subtraction, at the Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute, an elegant museum in Utica designed by Philip Johnson ’27, B.Arch. ’43. Borrowing the carvings from their owners, transporting the fragile works, and putting them on display was “an arduous undertaking,” Esterly reports. “It will probably never happen again.” Photographs, however, are viewable on his website (davidesterly.com).
Of his improvement as an artist over the years, he says, “I never had a sense of getting better, but my earlier work gets worse and worse.” Carving, for him, is “a profession for high-functioning obsessive-compulsives.” He explains that “the first 90 percent you can do with 50 percent of the effort. The last 10 percent may take another 50 percent of effort. But that last 50 percent is what changes it into something good.”
Christine Haskell’s research focuses on individuals dedicated to the craft of their professions, in pursuit of excellence, sustainability and integrity. Craftsmen and women use those principles to raise standards toward a better world. Her current work is featured in Look To Craftsmen Project. featuring the Profiles in Craft Series. You’ll find a trove of profiles of intriguing artisans and innovators spanning a wide variety of professions across the globe that illustrate her research with links to the full articles. Christine’s book The Future of Work Will Require Craftsmanship is due in late 2019. To understand more about Christine’s work, check out Our Current Problem.
To tackle the wicked problems of our present and future, we need to embrace a strange, counter-intuitive irony: as organizations across all sectors continue to create and adopt technologies like artificial intelligence, employees need to stay relevant by increasing their subjective intelligence.
As production work and other jobs automate, the skills people need to stay relevant are becoming elusive.
The structures that supported organizations and strengthened the American workforce for generations have been gradually breaking down in every sector. My research on master craftsmen and how they gain mastery helps connect the dots on this new dilemma, and might be the place to seek initial solutions.
It’s a cliché now to even reference the pace of change, exponential growth, and irreversible catastrophes as necessary catalysts for adaptation. We all know that tomorrow’s work will be very different than today’s — we just think tomorrow will remain forever “in tomorrow.” Regardless, in between these recurring reports a truly new change has appeared–one that creates tremendous opportunity with one hand, and keeps the employees from taking advantage of it with the other.
To fully understand this quandary, we need to understand how it took shape. Three primary structures that both support and perpetuate longstanding American traditions are weakening: education; workforce training; and the traditional 9–5 job, and the assumptions of advancement that go with it. Decline in each of these traditions has eaten away a different corner of the economy. All three areas wear down, spread and merge together with technological change, enabling a brand new problem: a job market mismatched to the skills and needs of the workforce.
According to McKinsey, the global consulting firm, the upcoming shift of workers to new occupations “could be on a scale not seen since the transition of the labor force out of agriculture in the early 1900s.”
This dynamic has put American workers in a dilemma. Job reports continue to show bursts of new jobs from time to time, but a range of solid opportunities geared to the future is not broadly reachable for most people. In fact, my research suggests that those best able to adapt and thrive in the years ahead will be people who learn to learn well, and the discipline to think like master craftsmen. However, the American system of advancement has never been designed to prepare people for these requirements.
Previous generations could expect a structured, predictable path for career advancement that could last most if not all of their working lives. After attaining a specific degree, you were categorized into a current job, and worked to advance within the company or industry. Not anymore. Today, an employee’s average tenure is just over four years. Companies are increasingly hiring people on a part-time or contract basis.
Enabled by technology, gigging has become more and more mainstream. It has been estimated that 94 percent of the jobs added to the economy from 2005 to 2015 were in temporary, contract, independent, or freelance work. A recent Marist/NPR poll found that approximately 20 percent of Americans’ jobs are untraditional — a figure that could rise to 50 percent in the next ten years.
Since 1995, the percentage of workers engaged in part-time or freelance work has almost doubled. Image Credit: Laura Zulliger
Stability has another enemy: skills connected with a specific occupation are becoming outdated faster than ever. By one estimate, the “half-life” of skills today is about 5 years, and quickly shortening. As digital skills become increasingly required across every job function, employees will have to update and invest in their skill sets even more often. Thus the decline of the 4-year degree in favor of targeted, flexible learning alternatives.
With as much as 45 percent of job activities automated with existing technology there is tremendous pressure for employees to complete with machines to do work faster and cheaper — or decide to change occupations altogether. Pearson, an ed-tech company, estimates that 7 of 10 workers today are in occupations that will see increasing uncertainty by 2030. In McKinsey’s view, the shift of workers to new occupations “could be on a scale not seen since the transition of the labor force out of agriculture in the early 1900s.”
Common sense would dictate that organizations spotting these trends would want to increase internal training efforts to maintain the relevance of their workforce. Some do. Employers like Facebook, Apple, Walmart and the Container Store are just a handful of organizations with notable approaches to internal employee training. Others like General Assembly, Galvanize, and various coding boot-camps are experimenting with new ways to train employees with skills targeted to an emerging need in a specific company.
The last Annual Engagement report published by the U.S. government suggests that 90 percent of leaders believe that building capabilities is a top-ten priority for their organizations; 8 percent track the programs’ return on investment; and, one in four employees get anything out of training.
Internal training programs are increasingly hard to find. One recent study found a 28% decline in employer-paid training across the United States. According to another, Annual Engagement analysis by the U.S. government, 90 percent of leaders believe that building capabilities is a top-ten priority for their organizations; 8 percent track the programs’ return on investment; and, one in four employees get anything out of training.
The lack of training opportunities disproportionately impacts lower-skilled and lower-educated workers, who are the most vulnerable to automation, and those workers who would benefit most from knowing in advance the outcome to which a specific type of training would lead. But make no mistake, lack of upskilling will impact more than just manufacturing. This dilemma will touch every profession from law, healthcare, psychiatry, education — just to name a few.
For most of us, advancing in our lives and careers in a climate where much of what we do is being automated will require different skills — specifically, the capacity for imagination and deep learning. A recent report on the occupations of 2030 showed that 80 percent (8 of 10) top jobs will require creativity, an understanding of systems, and judgment. It is becoming clearer that employees need to start to seek out their own pathways toward training, if not outright invent the job they want to have.
Starting at the turn of the 21st century, the U.S. job market entered a decade of upheaval. As can be seen from this graph, at various times many more jobs disappeared than were created–the worst being just after the 2008 recession. Since 2010, those wild swings have begun to level off, leading to today’s uptick in demand for skilled workers. Image Credit: New America and Bloomberg
Our current systems are not built for just-in-time effectiveness to face adaptive challenges. According to Dr. Anthony Carnevale, head of Georgetown University’s Center for Education and the Workforce, the U.S. spends just $8 billion a year on training, compared to $500 billion on higher education — making the U.S. an education nation, not a training nation.
Adult training programs have had an uneven and often disappointing record of effectiveness. One reason is that they are almost always chasing a problem rather than preventing one which makes them appear out of step and experienced as irrelevant. Another reason is that there is little political will, within the organization or even more broadly across society, that ‘retraining’ is a solution, even as we learn that the ways we’ve tried to retrain workers have not been that successful.
When confronted with this challenge we too often opt for the easy way out or choose challenges with which we are familiar, leaving the hairier problems for the next leadership change. Some of the most promising, innovative approaches to credentialing and adult learning — such as “nanodegrees,” virtual and augmented reality, alternative MBA programs, coding boot camps and MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) — attract people already digitally sophisticated or highly educated. In other words, there are so silver bullets on what works at scale to retrain employees for jobs of the future. The challenges to upskilling are especially acute for low- and middle-skilled adult employees — a group that receives little support from employers, and faces many obstacles to advancing, stay up-to-date on market trends, and search for opportunities. They must, therefore, navigate this territory on their own, despite having less financial cushion, scheduling flexibility, core skills, and belief in the payoff of pursuing training in new skills.
Volatility in any part of the market hits the low and middle-income the hardest placing them at the highest risk of poverty. In a recent report from the Federal Reserve, researchers found millions of families experiencing significant month-to-month fluctuations in pay. Many of us are already there. Data from the report suggest that 40% of households have no emergency savings and 44% of the adults who responded said they could not pay for a $400 emergency expense without selling something or borrowing money.
As mentioned, support structures (e.g., education, the 9 to 5 workday, and workforce training) that have long held up the economy have not kept pace with the changing nature of work. As employees opt out in greater numbers toward independent work and with increasing turnover in traditional employment, the safety net for many is still built around employer-provided benefits. Workers struggle to find affordable healthcare, start retirement accounts, and many lack disability or unemployment insurance entirely.
A worker saddled with that kind of economic instability has little time to consider self-development. It is not within the realm of possibility to forgo income in order to study. They likely have little savings enabling him or her to invest in starting a small business, undertake an uncertain job search, or invest in a career pivot. Regrettably, taking those kinds of chances is quickly becoming the way to advance one’s career prospects.
The World Economic Forum predicts that upwards of 65% of children entering primary school today will eventually work in jobs that do not even exist today. How are schools preparing tomorrow’s adults for a world like this?
44% of the adults in a 2016 survey said they could not pay for a $400 emergency expense without selling something or borrowing money.
We are on a crumbling foundation. A recent study by labor economists found that “one more robot per thousand workers reduces the employment to population ratio by about 0.18–0.34 percentage points and wages by 0.25–0.5 percent.” Despite students’ optimism about their prospects and confidence in their abilities, most employers found recent college graduates poorly prepared for the workforce. About a third of respondents expressed no confidence in training and education evolving quickly enough to match demands by 2026. Some of the bleakest answers came from some of the most respected technology analysts. A primary concern remains about employees’ capacities for applying knowledge in real-world settings, critical thinking, and communication. And those are just a few of the “soft skills” considered increasingly important.
A focus on nurturing unique human skills that artificial intelligence (AI) and machines seem unable to replicate: Many of these experts discussed in their responses the human talents they believe machines and automation may not be able to duplicate, noting that these should be the skills developed and nurtured by education and training programs to prepare people to work successfully alongside AI. In an economy that is getting increasingly dynamic, most schools continue to teach as they always have: with students working by themselves at their desks instead of collaborating on creative projects.
Respondents of the study suggest that workers of the future will learn to deeply cultivate and utilize individual creativity, collaborative activity, abstract and systems thinking, complex communication, and the ability to thrive in diverse environments.
In a 2017 book called “Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,” Joseph E. Aoun, president of Northeastern University, challenges universities to revamp their entire approach to education. He illustrates a new discipline called “humanics,” which he believes would help students prepare for jobs that will increasingly exist alongside automated machinery. The study of humanics would stress three core skills: data literacy, technological literacy, and human literacy. Aoun also calls for more experiential and applied learning, including regular internships and work experience.
If Aoun is right, how far should schools go? It might be prudent to invest in coding and computer science skills, but since we can’t plan for what change is coming — but we can prepare for change itself. If schools adapt their curriculum to emphasize computer or IT skills, and computers themselves do those jobs within such a short time, won’t those skills be obsolete? Timing and relevance are certainly big concerns. But education needs to last a lifetime, not be targeted toward the half-life of a job or a particular technology. In other words, adult workers should get the same sort of in-depth studies that a youngster receives in elementary school.
If you can’t see yourself doing what you are doing for the rest of our life, you will never advance.
To make such a change really work, those elementary school studies must be truly in depth, and foster a capacity for change and innovation. But in elementary schools, where standardized testing is emphasized, failure is often seen as unacceptable, which discourages thinking outside the box. The current system is designed to “educate people out of their creativity,” says Sir Ken Robinson, author of “Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative” and other books about revolutionizing education. “If you’re not prepared to be wrong,” he said in a 2006 TED Talk, “you’ll never come up with anything original.” This sentiment is echoed by the last carousel craftsmen in America, Art Ritchie, put it “If you can’t see yourself doing what you are doing for the rest of our life, you will never advance.” Surprisingly, some of the most vocal critics of education’s status quo are teachers themselves. Regardless, our schools continue to line desks in neat rows, distributing memorization-based worksheets reinforcing the student as the empty vessel to be filled rather than a whole, creative person with perspective.
As technology continues its path of creative destruction, of one sort or another, not everyone will need to be an entrepreneur to get ahead. They will, however, need to be entrepreneurial. The tumultuous changes we just described in the economy will require more people to be self-directed, seeking out their own opportunities and charting their own path through them. Reid Hoffman, founder of professional social networking site LinkedIn, calls this needed mindset “the start-up of you.”
To the institutionalization mind of memorized education and organizational conformity American ultra-independence feels like a distant myth, but the pendulum is swinging back. “The whole concept of a 9 to 5 job for life was a historical quirk,” says Susan Lund of McKinsey. “In 1900, 45 percent of people in the United States were self-employed. Today, with the rise of new employment and wealth generation platforms such as Uber, TaskRabbit, and Airbnb, it looks like we’re returning to that.”
The rising percentage of older people in the workforce over the coming decade presents a double challenge: As skills become obsolete with increasing speed, more and more adult workers will need retraining. But most retraining programs still haven’t proven effective.
Image Credit: NY public library
In spite of the many articles being written about the economy’s turn (or return, it seems) to an entrepreneurial future, there is a disconnect between trends and the preferences of the American worker. An Economic Innovation Group (EIG) report found that there is actually a decline in the number of businesses being started, the number of people moving for job opportunities, and the number of workers changing into new jobs.
EIG referred to this phenomenon as the retreat of “economic dynamism” and it impacts multiple demographics. Even millennials seem averse to taking risks and “are on track be the least entrepreneurial generation in history,” according to EIG co-founder John Lettieri. In a 2016 poll from the United States Senate, millennials overwhelming responded that entrepreneurship is essential to the economy, and they consider someone working at a startup a success. Yet when asked about the best way to achieve success, a majority chose employment at one company and working their way up as the best option. This conservative preference is not a coincidence. Millennials carry more student debt, face rising housing costs, and have less confidence about the future than previous generations.
In policy debates about the future of work, experts emphasize opportunity, training, and skills. They compartmentalize and therefore rarely mention the financial stability people need to explore those opportunities.
No one doubts that the situation we are in is complex and thorny. There are many reasons why workers are reluctant to take chances, but it’s also likely that a good number of them would feel bolder if they could afford to and felt psychologically safe enough about their future to experiment. Few connect the dots on this problem.
In policy discussions, these conflicting trends — career instability and income volatility — are continually treated as entirely separate and unrelated. Conversations about the future of work emphasize opportunity, training, and skills; meanwhile, the financial stability that people need to explore those opportunities is rarely mentioned.
Today’s job market is littered with these very dangerous potholes, which can be summed up as follows:
Jobs are less certain and structured
Skills lose relevance more quickly
Pay is becoming highly unstable
Employers provide fewer benefits, training, and assistance with career advancement
The traditional safety net is ill-suited to the sources of disruption and instability that workers face.
A clear take-away from all these competing trends is that in tomorrow’s world, courting risk and embracing surprise may be the safest routes to take. For more people to will be willing to dance with this kind of uncertainty, a stronger foundation will have to be laid. Among other things, education needs to prioritize individual creativity, adaptability and entrepreneurial through simulation-based learning; re-investment in on-the-job training instead of just classroom or online learning; and update the safety net that gives people the stability, time, and resources to take risks.
As we wait for our political leaders to catch up with this reality, individuals can take the lead in upleveling themselves. In fact, inspiring outliers to the economy’s declining support structure already exist — and the jobs people are finding aren’t all in high-tech. Benefits of automation are real (and if past trends hold, automation will spawn as many new jobs as it eliminates), but there are lots of people seeking a life, and interesting work, beyond a computer screen. And plenty of consumers are looking for products made by entrepreneurs who think like master craftsmen.
Charles & Hudson / Flickr / Creative Commons
In 2010, Etsy cofounder and Chief Marketing Officer Matt Stinchcomb had succeeded at something that seemed impossible: he and his partner took an idea about creating a durable business from joyful, ecological and more connected point of view over simply an economic one. What started as a marketplace to buy handmade things became a platform for building more connected human scale economies. Yet, by 2010, he found himself disillusioned with his job.
Matt moved to Berlin for a couple of years to run their international operations. His business partner left and the company appointed a new CEO, Chad. Chad asked Matt to take over marketing, again. “I hated it. I was less interested in email open rates and more interested in the real connections we could create with the platform which is hard to quantify from a marketing point of view.”
“The birth of my son made me question what I was doing with my life. We’re doing a lot of great things with Etsy, but I know that I need to be doing something of service to make this world better. I thought about running for office, and running a nonprofit…”
This birth of his first son made him question is career path and “in exploring some of the ways that fear was keeping me from the convergence of myself and my business, I put forward a proposal to say ‘if we really want to actually be this engine for impact, it needs to be someone’s job to steward it. Not someone’s job to do it.” Matt wanted to go deeper, to think about how do we use the business as the engine for impact and work across the company to give everyone not just the tools, but also the desire to maximize benefit for everyone in the system — he wanted to craft the business.
In 2015 Etsy.com went public, Matt saw an opportunity to pre-endow a different entity with stock. The CEO tasked Matt with the strategy of the new venture, leading to Etsy.org (later the Good Work Institute). Matt took space and risk to re-imagine how business is practiced and taught. He saw a need to “change what we are teaching, how we are teaching, who the teachers are, who the students are…. The things I was reading in all those marketing books wasn’t actually helpful. It was the things I was reading in Buddhist books, or permaculture books, or just what I learned by doing.”
Fear kept Matt from the embracing risk. “I always like to think about the idea that business as usual is destroying the world. Business as unusual could heal the world.” Having no formal business education he felt like an impostor when suggesting alternatives. Ultimately, he was willing to be misunderstood and challenged as he forge in a different direction. “The fear isn’t that you are not an intuitive person. The fear is that you actually listen to your intuition.”
“What I had been feeling on a personal level was disconnection — from nature, from community. That’s what initially led me to start exploring Buddhism. The more I explored that, the less willing I was to be in that disconnected state. I had to overcome those fears to connect these two things.”
The Good Work Institute. conducts something other than business as usual. Image Credit: Franco Vogt
For the Matt, the keys to success were basic principles that are time-honored but often forgotten: deep connection with a particular problem (or medium), confidence with one’s own creativity, self-management through trial and error, and the constant ability to pivot and learn on the job. In similar ways, countless creative entrepreneurs have used services like Etsy and Ebay to create, and then expand, their businesses.
With robots doing everything from conducting funerals, evaluating rules in legal cases, assisting surgeries, and erotic dancing, it doesn’t take much to feel replacement is imminent for everyone. Yet technology has clear limitations — today, and for the foreseeable future.
The trend in automation is to do things more cheaply and smaller. As such, machines excel at processing data and performing routine tasks. However, they fall short on inherently human traits such as humor, empathy, social intelligence, communication, and leading and inspiring others. Machines also aren’t particularly good at a range of other qualities, often identified with craftsmanship, which are expected to be in increasing demand as well. These include deep expertise, creativity, artistry, adaptability, and the capacity for individual creativity that leads to innovation. Master craftsmen are in the business of raising standards.
What will it take for today’s workers to flip their fear and convert threat into an opportunity? Taking the first step requires a shift in mindset — to see technology as not just a machine that must be operated, but a challenge that must be mastered. And it goes a step further, the problem that machine is solving needs to hold a deep fascination for the worker, so that compulsion and drive to solve it under any conditions aids in persistence in our thorniest issues, making any technology that aids the worker a means to a much larger end. The problems people are attaching to, if they are the right problems for them to solve, become their medium of individual expression — much like master craftsmen contend with the idiosyncrasies of wood or stone.
Apprentices of Siemens USA, provide an example, explaining their goal is to move beyond being simply a “machine operator” who “pushes a button.” Instead, they want to learn to become true “machinists” — employees who can understand the bigger picture, program the machine, fix problems, apply judgement, and comprehend with precision how their programming will impact production. This kind of end-to-end perspective returns us back to craftsmanship as it was and moves away from the kind of line specialization that had workers competing with machines to do work more cheaply. End-to-end thinking requires openness, discernment, self-management, and the ability to both seek and find problems.
Learning to think like a craftsman as a manufacturing worker could be applied to warehouse workers at Amazon, Walmart, and others. And the story doesn’t end there. As technology advances and the nature of work changes, both the apprentice and the master craftsman alike will need to constantly evolve, take risks, re-learn and adapt. But far too many will not, unless we start making changes — now — to our systems of education, workplace training, and employee support.
Christine Haskell, Ph.D. is a leadership consultant and adjunct faculty at Washington State University. She helps busy leaders take responsibility for their learning and development. She writes on the topic of “Craftsmanship and The Future of Work.” sharing lessons from master craftsmen and women on personal and professional mastery, is due out late 2019. Sign up for her (semi-regular) newsletter here.
Learning Craft
What does it mean?
My career has been focused on two things: building products that would present new user paradigms and cultivating data-driven systems to determine what to do with those products. In the 90s and early 00s, building products was an electric experience because we were reaching and interacting with the first online audience—ever. The internet enabled unprecedented creativity in rethinking and redefining communication, productivity, personal information management, marketing and advertising, and community (to name a few things) as we knew it. Then, we were tasked with figuring out how to drive revenue from those ideas. Data was needed, and a lot of it. Attitudes clashed about innovation, ethics, and basic economics. What information could we ethically maintain and utilize in our systems and for what purpose? How should the “user” be “managed” during a “transaction?” What were the core elements of loyalty, and role would that play? Eventually, the market stabilized. A few products business models rose to the surface. Businesses grew more predictably. Creativity started to decline. Risk taking was discouraged in favor of efficiency, productivity, and scale. The the first conversations of artificial intelligence and machine learning were just getting off the ground.
It was in that climate I decided to move in another direction, earning degrees in applied behavioral science and psychology to gain more perspective on intuitive knowledge and subjective intelligence. The innovative, creative thinking that had laid the foundation for e-commerce, personalization, and communication had begun to spark some ideas about innate human knowledge (subjective intelligence), and the kinds of decision making we engage particularly when we are in under pressure. I wasn’t finding AI to be that creative. Leaders had developed such a heavy dependency on “data-driven decisions” that they stopped relying on other ways of knowing. They denied their own experience and that of others. They ignored insights from other disciplines. When developing core corporate strategy leaders too often asked, “What does the data say?” instead of synthesizing analysis with a grounded value system and seasoned perspective. If the quality of our thinking was potentially declining in favor of being told what to do by machine output—what was our state of mind when we were engineering these solutions? or making big decisions about what these machines would do? My fear was: if AI develops the abilities beyond humans (e.g., playing chess, surgery, law, etc.) how would humans maintain an adequate partnership?
These questions both excited and terrified me. And if I’m being honest, they still do. We get offended at the thought of losing jobs to machines, yet we have an ever-increasing reliance on them.
As each wave of technology passes over us, we go through phases of emotions. There was an infectious enthusiasm that took over when the iPhone, iPod and iPad launched. iPhone adoption was unprecedented and the iPod changed how we listen to music almost over night. There is a lot of anxiety and deep fear about technology replacing humans at work. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is quickly and seamlessly becoming involved in every aspect of our lives. It assists us in our schedules, helps us through our days, finds us a mate, keeps track of us while driving, remembers our fitness levels, and it answers questions as our partner in getting things done. It has shown up as a servant (AskJeeves) and now it shows up as a virtual assistant (typically female) keeping track of our behaviors. Artificial intelligence is the GPS for our lives. This slow “invasion” of our human experience shapes our expectations of what role technology could and should be in our lives.
As data advances more and more into our lives and decision making, however, it’s important to remind ourselves that we have the capability to chart our own course. AI (for now) is there to enhance our abilities and experiences. This knowledge can, quite literally, confirm we are on the right path. If we change our direction, our GPS can respond to us with an alternate route, another series of choices. “I’ll remember the grocery list; I’ll get this ready for you; You like these items, maybe you’ll like these recipes; I’ll make this reservation; I see you’re out of this item, I’ll buy this thing. No problem, you changed your mind; I’ll send it back, no worries.” Slowly, we are training an other, more efficient version of our presence to anticipate and help us manage our life.
People who live and work with Craft—engage in the struggle for individual agency in a world telling us to fit in. They use their work as a medium for personal expression and they know something that top analytic minds still need to learn: how to solve the problems when no predetermined plan, no template, and no quick fix will save the day. They cultivate, inhabit, and maintain a state of mind capable of holding paradoxical tensions:
Subjective reasoning: the ability to arrive at a conclusion based on intuition and/or experience. Craftsman 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.
Craftsmen take risk. Their very character influences the outcome of their work. They display a level of insight in their respective mediums due to a deep fascination with the idiosyncrasies and nuances of their medium that borders obsession. They subject their humanity to the market’s scrutiny, demanding exponential growth and scale as a primary value. While craftsmen are very adaptable in terms of their improvisational problem solving, they are unwavering in their values and ethical boundaries.
It is here we can benefit from learning to think with Craft. We must learn to understand ourselves on a fundamental level. We need profound insight, not just annual feedback. We need work that is worthwhile, not a mere transaction. When we lack true alignment with the work we were meant to do, we live our lives 6-degrees off course. We ameliorate versus resolve problems, failing to gain and therefore missing the opportunity for the kind of proximity needed true, creative solutions.
Craftsmanship is a set of principles that apply to the modern world—to us as potential craftsmen. We can learn about ourselves through our approach to life and work. I’ve experienced this myself, and I’ve witnessed it in my clients.
It is my hope that my work about living and working with Craft can help us navigate this period of change, where the pull for ever more data requires us to dig deeper into ourselves for knowledge and insight, giving us new ways to think about the problems we are confronting. These themes remind us that there are multiple forms of knowledge innate in each of us—but we must mine it and synthesize it in order to more deeply understand it.
Photo by Nathan Dumlao
Consider the following questions:
What is craftsmanship and how do you achieve it?
What effort does good craftsmanship demand?
How do you feel craftsmanship in any activity?
What can you do when you focus but still miss important things?
How do you handle situations when fear, discouragement and boredom take over?
How do you continue to advance in your work if your skill level fails?
How do you reckon with goals and awareness in the moment?
How do you integrate awareness, skill, perspective, and motivation?
Answers to these questions are critical to students and practitioners alike, across every discipline. They can guide the novice to achieve that meditative state of practicing their Craft, where time slows down and they see choices that were absent to them before. The simple routine of throwing or glazing a pot can demand intense concentration, focusing the mind while the rest of life’s concerns melt away. Answering these questions allows novices to become exceptional and the average result of effort to become memorable.
In his book Dreams Within a Dream Peter Weir reflects, “A Japanese potter explained to me how pottery to the Japanese is highly regarded as painting in our western tradition. The potter serves a long apprenticeship, working under a master, turning out plates, cups, and bowls. Every now and then the gods will touch the potter’s hands, and that object will be a work of art.” This quote is emphasizing a concept critical to craftsmanship: deliberate practice.
Not all practice makes perfect. You need a particular kind of practice—deliberate practice—to develop expertise. When most people practice, they focus on the things they already know how to do. Deliberate practice is different. It entails considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you don’t currently do well—or even at all. Research across domains shows that it is only by working at what you can’t do currently that you turn into the expert you want to become.
A CEO’s Perspective
The skill of self-management is about leading the life you want to lead. It doesn’t make things perfect. Every child you have isn’t going to be perfect. Every customer you have isn’t going to behave. It is about creating more positive things in your life than negative.
The better you manage yourself, the more effectively you respond to the problems in front of you and the more your life is rewarding.
–Ari Weinzweig, Zingerman’s
Why is craftsmanship so rare? What can a novice do to cultivate craftsmanship? Answering these questions is the reason I did this research. It is also the reason I write nearly every day. I learned the importance of practice. I understand in a more nuanced way an approach to learning led by inner motivation. I’ve learned from many craftsmen—a wood turner, embroiderer, jewelry maker, felt artist, stone mason, mold maker, knife maker, and blacksmith—with the perspective of a novice, their path toward mastery.
This post is part of a series #LookToCraftsmen set for publication in 2019.
Thought Series provides actionable ideas and anchors for reflection on your life or your work.
The work we do matters. Doing is the new leading.
Sustainable development, growth without depletion of natural resources, has become synonymous with sustainable growth—doing what’s required to sustain corporate growth and profits to increase shareholder value. We hold the assumption that our responsibility is to increase shareholder value. Outcomes are generally to sell more stuff, file more claims, increase programs—the list goes on.
Change, almost always, comes too late. Post-crisis solutions gradually chip away at a persistent problem or maintain steady growth, and ultimately define the problem. Post-crisis creativity ultimately enables the problem to persist.
Our inability to embrace the emotional labor of learning, I am persuaded, is one of the greatest threats facing our society today. Investing (and betting) that post-crisis innovation is the primary turning point for an entire sector limits us considerably.
Learning to dance with uncertainty is the wisest investment we can make in our future. Embracing something that might not work is necessary to stimulate creativity and growth. What if our work (in business, government, or nonprofits) was naturally responsible for conservation not just of environmental resources, but human potential? What if each one of us could utilize business as a creative medium for self-expression toward opportunities and problems that face us today?
This is a manifesto for learning how to dance with that uncertainty.
We need companies that empower people to think like craftsmen again.
Craftsmanship requires self-reliance; knowledge of a process—end to end.
It designs something to work within the constraints of the ecosystem it came from, demonstrating an inherent elegance and sustainability.
It adheres to guiding principles of aesthetics and function.
It 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 creativity.
It requires discipline and—most importantly—joy in working through such challenges.
It incorporates and embodies the decomposition of its primary material. It makes the problem part of the solution.
Entropy adds value.
Master Craftsmen generate and reshape the process and the result as the work evolves. Inviting surprise, they are engaged in ongoing learning and adapting.
Master Craftsmen evaluate the effectiveness of what they create, and their methods, rather than measure. They are in constant conversation with their work, embracing the pursuit of balancing agility and stability.
For the Craftsman, the process of thought happens through making and repeating; making is a form of thinking. With muscle memory inscribed with thought, they take action. In the thinking and the doing they lead.
Craftsmanship deepens with understanding.
Craftsmanship is fundamentally different from business.
Craftsmanship engages in the uncertainty of projects that might not work. Craftsmen experiment. They ask permission from the market to get up the next day to do it again. Business requires the predictability of knowing what will happen tomorrow.
Business is a field primarily defined by its ability to grow.
Business is built around the ability to create customers (not necessarily solve or proactively find problems).
Natural and human resources are finite. Sustainability, responsibility, and citizenship are preventative efforts generally built in response to a crisis point. How these programs are practiced day to day represents the heart and soul of an organization’s core values.
Business takes many creative forms.
Could a non-profit exist, if there were not sizable gaps in the systems built to serve us? No.
Could a social business exist, if humanity’s most pressing needs were being met? No.
Theirs are businesses built upon the failure or collapse of an ecosystem.
They observe signals of failures and are inspired into action by the crisis in the present. Their innovation is byproduct of the emergencies they perceive.
Crisis gives all organizations permission to innovate. But living in a state of crisis is not a sustainable state of being.
When innovating out of crisis is the leading growth strategy, whole industries are diverted from their unique potential to go far beyond the opportunity of yesterday’s disaster. Instead, crisis defines them.
Could a venture-backed startup exist, regardless of a crisis? Yes.
Compared to other structures focused one and largely defined by crisis, business has incredible opportunity for flexibility. Yet it tends to adopt the straightest most reliable path toward growth it can find.
When economies are on the rise, innovation is actively encouraged and incubated.
The encouragement to think creatively and to anticipate needs are among the key differentiators between companies lauded as outliers or merely lucky, and traditional enterprises.
Leaders of creative companies embrace uncertainty. The entire premise of their organizations relies on their ability to learn and do.
While business finds success on the basis of balancing innovation and the status quo of steady growth, it misses out in not investing its energy into the craft of doing.
Simple reactivity (to markets, to competition, to crisis) can no longer be admired as the holy grail of steady growth. We must be more agile and responsive.
The craft of doing and learning are necessary for progress. In doing, we create new understanding. This understanding leads to shifts in behavior. In the doing we learn. In the doing we lead.
Traditional enterprise has failed to develop the discipline to split its attention from the din and crisis of the present. Strict expectations of growth have failed to encourage a diverse set of models and initiatives centered around the creativity needed to find the problems of the future.
Future leaders must anticipate needs.
Leaders of work of the future need to find balance between a set of new, previously unimagined problems, as well as the next evolutions for the present day’s most persistent social and environmental issues.
The next wave of leaders must include a community of those who choose to stop growth for growth’s sake. These are innovators who refuse to wait for the ticking bomb, or the building to collapse, or the ground to open up.
Leaders of new work embrace the proximity of problem solving in order to increase the potency of their solutions. Not only are these leaders carrying out change based on the information they are receiving, but also contributing to a new understanding. Let’s call these bright Counterpoints.
Counterpoints gain capability to make change in the world by first gaining awareness to their own uniqueness.
Counterpoints imagine a future that is tailor-made. They envision an ideal and backwards from the big vision.
Counterpoints are visionary and concern themselves with the study of systemic interventions.
They envision implications.
They generate scenarios.
They plan strategically.
They balance theory and practice.
Who are they?
Some are saving children.
Some are feeding the poor.
Some are housing the homeless.
Some are curing diseases.
Some are donating goods and services.
They are not necessarily in business.
Leaders of the past are fueled by reaction to these circumstances and as a result it defines them. Leaders of the future know they must be engaged with the crisis of the present, but also be responsive to crises of the future, ones that have yet to be defined.
These leaders are bright Counterpoints.
Counterpoints ask, “What if?” By embracing projects that might not work, they are facilitators of change.
Counterpoints will strike a balance between reactively embracing growth as a goal, and responding with a long term perspective of conservation.
The next generation of organizations must welcome and help develop these new leaders.
The individual practicing their life’s craft is the new leader of the future.
Purpose and creativity.
Prevention and reactivity.
Doing is the new leading. The world needs companies filled with craftsmen mindsets, now more than ever.
Welcome, Counterpoint.
We need you.
We’re glad you’re here.
The work we do matters, more than ever before.