Tools, or the Trade

Jack of all trades, then master of one.

The most recent episode of "Lets Make Mistakes got me thinking about some of the problems compartmentalization in my industries causes.

As Mike and Katie explained, channeling Jared Spool from his Event Apart talk, so-called specialists in fields such as design, or development (and I’d add that this applies to much of the engineering world as well) are more accurately “compartmentalists”: they are highly trained in a very specific skillset, but they have little understanding or ability to solve the problems that the broader organisation they are in faces. Contrast that to the medical profession, where doctors are trained broadly to diagnose and treat health problems first, and then once this base is established, physicians specialize within their field.

But the compartmentalization problem is larger than just this issue of missing context and generality in our profession. Our trades are also centered around achieving mastery of tools to complete a task, rather than an understanding of the critical thinking needed to design an optimal solution.

The focus in the engineering and tech industries, is on the proficiency with which one uses tools, rather than the care and expertise one employs in practicing the actual trade. It’s very easy to quantify how good one is at creating parts in assebmlies in solidworks, or write lines of code, or design a page layout in photoshop. These aspects of our work can be easily counted, measured and quantified. But they say very little about the skill and expertise that goes into the actual creative act; there’s not much in the way of exploring how well-designed the result of these endeavours are.

Doctors, on the other hand, are almost exclusively taught the trade of their profession: the anatomy, the pathology, the critical thinking skills required to effectively perform as a physician. They are taught clinical techniques as well, but these are almost supplementary to the main goal of teaching doctors how to think about medicine. And, more importantly, doctors are also required to stay up to date on the latest techniques in their fields. This constant updating of the underlying how something is accomplished is only possible because doctors are fully versed in the why that the something is necessary in the first place.