Think of Something, Quick!

You’ve heard the old engineering joke, right?

There was an engineer who had an exceptional gift for fixing all things mechanical. After serving his company loyally for over 30 years, he happily retired. Several years later the company contacted him regarding a seemingly impossible problem they were having with one of their multi-million dollar machines.

They had tried everything and everyone else to get the machine to work but to no avail. In desperation, they called on the retired engineer who has solved so many of their problems in the past.

The engineer reluctantly took the challenge. He spent a day studying the huge machine. At the end of the day, he marked a small “x” in chalk on a particular component of the machine and stated, “This is where your problem is”. The part was replaced and the machine worked perfectly again. The company received a bill for $50,000 from the engineer for this service. They demanded an itemized accounting of his charges.

The engineer responded briefly:

One chalk mark $1

Knowing where to put it $49,999

It was paid in full and the engineer retired again in peace.

Where does the chalk mark go? It’s a typical information economy question. And the answer to this sort of question, if you want that answer to be brief, needs to come from someone who’s spent a lot of time investing in knowing the answer.

Knowing answers cold, making connections, coming at a problem sideways, knowing where to find other answers … all this takes time. Time spent studying and ruminating, perhaps practicing, but not always producing an immediate result. Computing technology has made knowledge work even more invisible, without so much as eraser marks left to tell us where there were intermediate stages of thought involved in crafting an original product.

Too many people are impressed early on with a disdain for exactly the sort of daydreaming, navel-gazing and intangible creative processes that are now essential to the modern economy. Though even if not disdained from the outside, people inclined to the creative professions often carry some sort of guilt over work that seems more fun to them than the other paths they were offered.

Yet knowledge work, and the various forms of related cultural production, demonstrably add value to our lives and organizations. Even when the prep work was done as we worried at a problem over daily chores, got a great idea when a random conversation reminded us of something from years ago, or hit on the exact right way to phrase an idea in a presentation only after briefly setting aside a much-abused rough draft.

The time spent at the keyboard might be brief, but perhaps that course really took ten years to write, give or take — not the handful of weeks in which the final product was hammered out.

So part of gathering the fruits of knowledge work, in addition to directly stimulating knowledge acquisition and synthesis through new training, has got to be creating a culture where it’s valued as ‘real’ work and explicitly promoted as such. A culture where local practices that promote peer-to-peer learning, encourage your resident knowledge craftspeople, and produce consistently good results, are identified and included in any inventory of needful tasks.

No latent guilt about navel-gazing allowed

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 1:11 pm by Dawn and is filed under Industry talk, On-demand learning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.