Good morning from a foggy Vancouver. The Blues are playing in the background, my day is filled with writing and meetings, and what promises to be a great lunch at a club talking about the plans for Young Leader’s Conference later this spring. I hope your day is as rewarding.
Last week, I wrote of some suggestions for broadening our scope. A dear friend sent me a link to a blog that talked of “deepening” our work.
I enjoyed the post. Cal Newport raises some interesting points, especially for those of us, and that includes most of us in this conversation, who are “knowledge workers.” I was also reminded as I read of the late Stephen Covey’s great graph about time management with important and urgent as the labels on the two axis:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/dont-delay/200805/how-are-you-managing-your-time
I want to add a framing point to Mr. Newport’s four steps. I suggest that those of us who are so-called knowledge workers recognize ourselves as craftspeople, as artisans, and based on such a frame, our work processes might shift. As a starting place, a quick story. 35 years ago I was accepted to what was then the finest acting school in Canada. I was 18 and not the brightest bulb in the chandelier; although you couldn’t have told me that at the time! I struggled for most of my time there, and because I failed the dance class, I failed that first year and was cut from the team, as it were. I was devastated. A dozen or so years later, having done some growing myself, and having begun to find my work stride as a facilitator and teacher, I was back in Toronto for a gig. I had some time during the day and wandered up Yonge Street to the campus of the acting school. Memories took me inside and I asked if a teacher who had taught me a lot might be around? He was now the Dean of the school, and he graciously received me and we had a cup of tea together, sitting in sunbeam in his office. He asked what I was doing, and I explained about the facilitation work and the teaching work. He said simply, “I’m so glad you’re still in the craft.”
And that is my point; I am still in the craft; I write, design, produce and perform interventions that challenge, provoke and even entertain people in the same way that writers, producers and directors of theatre and film do that same. And all knowledge workers are craftspeople; we are artisans. We create. And Cal Newport is right, we need to build “systematic improvement” into our culture and daily work lives, and therefore into our crafts. That takes time and practice. And we need to honour ourselves as craftspeople; we are not automated systems on an assembly line. And how we create, how we work at our best may be as varied as we are. So, Cal Newport suggestions preparation, clarification, stretching and obsessing are good additions to increase depth. He and I are of the same mind. And I add that the marks of crafts people, artisans, are the same.
So, rather than suggesting that we are bad at working, (and I do appreciate his provocation here), it’s more that we honour our work as artisans. And as leaders, who may have such artisans working for and with us, the usual metrics of “work” do not necessarily fit. The challenge is quite frankly that our economy is still stuck in an industrialized model of measuring output like 72 widgets an hour. If our role is to create, challenge, design, build, or imagine a new widget or new ways of using widgets, we can find ourselves having to apologize or defend our work as somehow less than valuable than the work of the person producing 72 widgets an hour. As the economy has evolved over the past 35 years, so has the kind of work that many of us do. We have to some extent, returned to the pre-industrial age of artisan craftspeople; the butchers, the millers, the silver smiths, the musicians, the weavers and the coopers. And each of these was respected for not only their output, but for the contribution they made to the welfare of the community as a whole. And they were, at their best, proud of their work and their contribution to the community.
May this week be a week of deepening our work as artisans.