Purposive Drift

Collaboration rules

I often go to Pat Kane's site "The Play Ethic", in part in the hope that he has posted something new, but more often to look at his Delicious entries, which invariably take me to some unexpected and interesting places. Today,I came across a real gem, a piece by Richard Sennett from the Times back in February. He's talking about craftsmanship and how we teach skills in the UK. This extract seems to sum up the heart of the argument:

"Take the creation of the mobile phone. This essential bit of modern kit resulted from the joining of two technologies, the radio and the telephone, which in the 1980s were not easy to link up. The technical problem lay in the switching mechanisms between the two. One approach to crafting a better switch was pursued by Motorola and Nokia, which encouraged engineers, salesmen and designers to collaborate in an open, easy fashion. By contrast, Ericsson emphasised benchmarks and targets for its various offices working on the switch; each office tried to make its mark in a firm that was internally highly competitive.

The creation of the mobile phone switch is a model for how skills develop best. There’s nothing new about this model; medieval craft guilds enshrined collaboration in their rules. Perhaps the more modern note here is the emphasis on open-ended experiment, which took flight in the scientific revolutions of the 17th century. Good scientific craft emphasises the virtue of curiosity, which now, as then, means curiosity about what others know, think or doubt."

The whole article is well worth a read and I just hope, without much hope, that those running our education and training system, who have largely taken the Ericsson route, will take heed.