Lumberjack or Ballerina or Bricoleur?

Dave Snowden at Cognitive Edge had a couple of nice observations yesterday about what "saps the vigor of our minds":

1. Stability and resilience are opposed, any stable system lacks resilience, any resilient system is never stable. In a resilient system we need to introduce a degree of inefficiency, noise in a way, if the system is to be effective. An over focus on efficiency, creates an equilibrium state which as the context shifts becomes increasingly sterile.
2. There is a huge difference between a chef and a user of recipe books. The recipe book user (for which read the manufacturing model of consultancy) uses best practice to assemble the same ingredients in the same context to produce the same meal, time and time again. If they come into your kitchen, it will have to be re-engineered to confirm with the requirements of the recipe before they start to work (and you will pay in many ways for that). The Chef in contrast can work with whatever ingredients and utensils you happen to have to hand and create a great meal.

We need more chefs, more resilience, more variety in all aspects of a modern organisation. The problem is that the desire to have repeatable process leads to a sapping of the vigor of the mind.

"Stability and resilience are opposed." Now there's a truth so quiet, yet so important, that it begs for fireworks, a raffle and a charity rodeo.

Below is maybe an apocryphal story shared by a friend, but in its way, a handy reminder of how a shrink-wrapped world saves us snips of time but robs us of something maybe much more vital -- something psychoanalyst Leon Saul called "Inner Sustainment," probably a thing partly contained in a circle of resourcefulness and resilience. A story I've used to describe the concept of Bricolage:

At the outbreak of WW II, American aviation was caught with its collective pants down: Our planes were clunky, slow and suffered from a stagnation of R&D since World War I. No planes, no experienced workers, no ideas, no time. A summit of captains of industry was called on defense issues. After much discussion, a telegram went out: Send us the farmhands first...

Why?

Steelworkers had no finesse.
Autoworkers had no curiosity.
Carpenters didn’t do metal.
And Teamsters wouldn’t do unless they felt like it.

But farmhands… Imagine it’s 1941 and a tornado blows through your farm or the river has jumped its banks. You’re miles from anywhere. The plumbing is broken, electricity—if you have it—is down, your tractor’s been flipped, and your barn’s a wreck. Do you pick up the Yellow Pages and start dialing? What phone? Who?

Farmers are perhaps our last remaining generalists.

Farmhands were problem solvers. Not engineers, not inventors—something in between. The French call them Bricoleurs, many of us call them innovators. Regardless of the term, they are, in the end, two things:

Curious.
Resourceful.

Make that 3 things: Resilient.

Next post, change and boxes and frames.