Suddenly

and the danger of dogma

The notion of vocation has continued to occupy my thoughts this last week. It is a powerful force, partly because it means that the work we do refines and defines who we are in ways that “jobs” don’t, and partly because having a vocation means, consciously or not, we are engaged in deliberate practice as we seek to understand more. Deliberate Practice causes us see differently. I understand that Aboriginal Australians can look at the land and see where the water flows beneath it, whereas we just see land. Painters see light differently to the rest of us, and Joiners develop a relationship with wood that shapes what they make with it. These capabilities do not come with a job spec; they are a function of a relationship.

For a good chunk of my life, “best practice” was a keystone element of strategy. Find the best competitor in your field and copy them faster than the rest; be a fast follower. John Nash’s game theory insight shows that in competitive scenarios, the optimal strategy isn't necessarily what's best for an individual company but rather what's best given what others will likely do.

We got good at it, and then, following the same logic, we reduced best practices to a process and trained people in it. There is no need for imagination, creativity, or insight; we can go faster and deeper.

Until, of course, the seam runs out, and when it does, nobody is ready. The change happens, as Hemingway notes in “The Sun Also Rises”, gradually, then suddenly.

The “suddenly” moment in geopolitics has had everybody transfixed this week, in states from excitement to horror. Standing back from it, it should not surprise us - those who watch the world with deliberate practice have not been surprised.

Business is also bemused, even though what is happening in tech has been intimated, in broad terms, for decades. We are awash with stories of fortunes made by facilitating similar disruptions to the Orange One, and life is getting quite fractious for those strip-mining the best practice process. It is less so for those watching and exercising deliberate practice rather than best practice.

An example close to home. The coaching market is worth something North of $20 billion. It comprises a whole host of players, qualifications are unnecessary, and oversight is mediocre. Best practice dogma is rife (*G.R.O.W Baby G.R.O.W”) and, for the most part, aimed not at creativity but at finding ways to be more effective at what we already do to patch up obsolescent “strip mining” business models.

Suddenly has arrived.

Claude.ai released Sonnet 3.7 this week. Its reviews have been excellent, and I like its conversational style, so I asked it to create a vocational programme for me (you can see it here). It’s not bad, and I think it is comparable to many of the hundreds of courses on LinkedIn. Then, I asked it to create an app, which it duly did. The entire exercise took less than ten minutes.

For those who take coaching seriously, what Claude produced is an “80%” product. It is useful and a starter, but 80% is likely to be of little use in emerging markets Claude can cut out the intermediary - we can go direct as individuals). Neither is the next 17.5% that can be accessed by skilled use of Claude by those tasked with coaching others. The value in most coaching markets seems likely to be dissolved for most human coaches.

The value will migrate to the small percentage of coaches who consider coaching a vocation. These individuals are committed to continuous skill development and understanding their clients' environments. Like the Aborigines, they have developed the capability to see the water beneath the landscape that technology cannot penetrate.

They are lock pickers, and the locks are the ecosystems where the value imprisoned by process, dogma and short-term of “more, faster, cheaper” attitudes can be released.

I think those ecosystems are more accessible than for many years. Tired companies shoring up tired business models open them up by unloading talented but expensive individuals, constrain those left through risk aversion, and hope “suddenly” will go away. It won’t, and to borrow a metaphor, the energy they hold will seep out. They will be totally fracked.

The question becomes, where will it seep to? There is little like being screwed by an organisation shoring up short-term profit to make people think. An immediate reaction to find another job like the old job gets dented when we discover everybody else is playing the same game.

It dawns that the label they have been given, “job title/ industry” is a box inside which they have been imprisoned. That their value lies less in what they do, and more in what they can see and bring about in the economies being reshaped by “Suddenly” that offer far more potential for who they are than where they have been.

Increasingly, where they have been is having its carcase picked over by technology that understands the dogma of the past. Technology has no vocation, imagination, or concept of the future.

Like every “Suddenly,” it is driven by new ways of doing what has been done before, while those who can see what might be done are unseen within it —New Artisans.

What is unclear is how the migration will take place, but we can be sure it will.

I want to think it is happening Outside the Walls of our conventional business structures, in areas recruitment consultants have not yet heard, unknown to HR, in conversations between people with ideas that are not enriching passive shareholders. Who, as Steve Jobs advised, “Don’t settle, stay hungry, stay foolish” in pursuit of something more substantial than amusing ourselves to death in service of advertisers.

It would be good to help it a little. More on that another time.

This quote seems appropriate right now.

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing”

Arundhati Roy in her book War Talk

We need to listen for it

In the company of others doing the same,