Is Critical Reasoning Dead?

May 22, 2009 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off 

I’m not surprised that the most inspiring essay I’ve read in years is written by a motorcycle repairman, who also happens to be a great writer and who has a Ph.D. in political philosophy. His essay contrasts the levels of critical reasoning, intuition, judgment, experience and metacognition in both the bike shop and in the think tank. The former wins hands down.

Although I’ve never been a mechanic I did work for a decade in the machine-tool industry, both as corporate controller and entrepreneur/start-up partner. But the industry was in decline so I got an MBA and a year later started my career as a knowledge professional, specifically a Web 1.0 strategy consultant. It didn’t take long for my elation to turn to disillusion.

I remember a conversation I’d had with one of our solution architects, which in Web 1.0 meant he could write a paragraph and include a diagram. I showed him a brochure from my former company that I’d co-founded, highlighting one of our portable, lathe-mounted superfinishing machines that we designed and manufactured. He smirked and remarked “boy, you’ve come a long way”. The web consulting company merged several times and was eventually absorbed by a larger Web 1.0 company which then went away several years later. I think my co-worker ended up in financial services. After a another short interactive strategy consulting position I became self-employed. The machine-tool company I’d co-founded was under-capitalized and it folded. I lost touch with my former partners but occasionally drive through the industrial park where we were once located.

Its been 10 years but reading the essay reminded me exactly how I felt when the people who made concepts disparaged the people who made capital equipment. I’m grateful that I still have the traces of grease and oil in my blood to be able to appreciate one of the writer’s examples of the kinds of crises that industrial workers and mechanical engineers experienced on an daily basis.

I once accidentally dropped a feeler gauge down into the crankcase of a Kawasaki Ninja that was practically brand new, while performing its first scheduled valve adjustment. I escaped a complete tear-down of the motor only through an operation that involved the use of a stethoscope, another pair of trusted hands and the sort of concentration we associate with a bomb squad. When finally I laid my fingers on that feeler gauge, I felt as if I had cheated death. I don’t remember ever feeling so alive as in the hours that followed.

But what I most identified with in this essay, is author’s description of the “feel” of the knowledge work jobs he’d had and how most everything about management and process contradicted anyone’s ability to produce great, creative work in order to churn out banal, yet profit-maximizing, output. Perhaps I’m over-idealizing my former life, but I don’t remember that kind of creativity stultification in my machine-tool days. But I still cringe to remember how as Web 1.0 consolidated, management continually tightened the throttle on critical reasoning and creative ideas that didn’t fit with their formula. They hated it and I couldn’t live without it. So, like the writer, I got out, not by opening a motorcycle repair shop but by starting my own solo professional service firm. I’d had enough of a taste of “process management” as a Web 1.0 knowledge worker to realize that if I wanted to create and produce at and beyond the level of which I knew I was capable, I’d have to do it as an independent.

Yet like him, I can imagine the possibilities of a more entrepreneurial, post-crisis economy and some resurgence of industry, the trades and the artisans. And I have faith that there’s even a chance for new and better knowledge work as hierarchies flatten and social business models and technologies replace conformity, formula, centralization and control with collaboration, networks, sharing, ideas and critical reasoning. He eloquently describes how our quality of life depends on it.

Our peripheral vision is perhaps recovering, allowing us to consider the full range of lives worth choosing. For anyone who feels ill suited by disposition to spend his days sitting in an office, the question of what a good job looks like is now wide open.

Filed under: Cognition, Creativity, innovation, intuition, multi-dimensional, self-awareness, shift, social networks
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