Training Makes You Stupid

End of the Day - the Nysa Tree, a photo by gingerpig2000 on Flickr.

The title might sound a little strange, and you would be forgiven if you thought I did not believe in training. Training can be a very good thing, the problem is the beliefs that training, and education in general, imply.

Imagine I asked you what steps the World Bank should take to improve its operations. If you have no link to the World Bank you might feel overwhelmed by the sheer lack of knowledge of the bank's operations.

This is OK, it is not what you know now that is important, it is what you will know before completing the task.

And if you do have some links with the bank, then you have a major handicap - you assume you have some knowledge.

Training always involves past knowledge, in the hope that this knowledge remains relevant in the future, and that if the knowledge changes then hopefully the new knowledge will be deducible from the old, or at least resemble it.

In an expanding economic situation the mismatch between what you know and the current requirements of the environment is often not that significant, it is more important to be taking some actions that resemble those required than to not be taking actions. However, in a freefall situation, those mismatches will grow and the matches shrink, or will appear to grow as one's means shrink. For example, if you are making 20% profit, not making 21% is not significant. If you are making 1% profit, not making 2% is much more significant.

Most training does not deal with the mismatches, because those mismatches are from the unknown future, there is no knowledge of them. What is worse, those mismatches may not resemble our past knowledge, and our normal responses may make our problems worse because we are using up resources without achieving a solution. And this situation happens every day, all around you, it is just people don't notice it or they make excuses for it - it is just a trouble-making client, for example.

The problem with training is that it often attempts to instil confidence in the trainees - learn this and you WILL be able to do that job. What it mostly fails to instil is the concept 'keep an eye open for situations where the fix does not work as well as expected, it might need a new idea to solve it'.

In almost every situation where things have started to go wrong, the biggest fight has been with the people who believe that their training and position means they can solve the problem. And they cannot.

So, it is not what you know now that is important, it is what you will know.

Ancient Town Square

Ancient Town Square, a photo by gingerpig2000 on Flickr.

Via Flickr:
A quiet square in the old town of Lublin, with a mixture of building styles from different eras.

European architecture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries saw the creation of large blocks of apartments, with an archway that gave access to both the building and a small square behind the building. The idea was that your carriage could pull in under the arch, and you could alight and enter your building comfortably in even the worst of weathers. If you owned your carriage, then it and the horses could be housed in the enclosed square.

Of course, most people could not afford a carriage, but the design persisted. Today, it is hard to find original stables and carriage houses, but here and there they survive with new uses.

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House on the Hill - Winter

House on the Hill - Winter, a photo by gingerpig2000 on Flickr.

Completely apparently irrelevantly to the image, I would like to say something about the con that is the might of knowledge. Wherever you go, people talk about what they know but less frequently about what they understand.
When I was at college, our lecturer in systems proved on the board that the equations for mechanical systems were identical to that for electrical systems. Big deal, you might think, but I was astonished - these two subjects, always taught separately, were basically the same, only differing in the names we give the different things and concepts? And if these two subjects used identical equations, what other subjects also used them?
Well, the more I look, the more everything seemed to run on those same equations, even the universe: e = mc2. Even people systems.
Later I realized that statistics also relied on the fact that any system we care to think was the same, because if a system were different then we could not apply statistics to it. We can predict any event in any field of study using the same statistical methods.
So I can apply my engineering training to this image, because engineering is not about clunking things, its about concepts.

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