Artisans Improvise

image: ABC13 Houston

When complicated moves over to complex, the rules change.

The systems and processes so carefully and expensively crafted to get to efficiency start failing. Events occur that were not only not foreseen, their characteristics are different. It's when our learned dependency on predetermined systems fails us.

Artisans have a natural advantage in these circumstances. By their nature, they are masters of their craft, whether that is coding or carpentry. They know how to use all the tools in the box rather than one or two, and have an easy familiarity with the materials they work with, whether lathe or operating system. Rather like the famous scene in Apollo 13, they can tip out whatever is to hand, and work with others to put something together to deal with "now" whilst trying to understand what happened.

One of the key tools of efficiency is deductive thinking - taking the whole, breaking it down into its component parts, optimising each part and then putting it back toge…