Toys In The Attic
Hyman G. Rickover was an admiral in the U.S. Navy, where he directed the original development of naval nuclear propulsion and controlled its operations for three decades as director of the U.S. Naval Reactors office. In addition, he oversaw the development of the Shippingport Atomic Power Station, the world's first commercial pressurized water reactor used for generating electricity. Rickover is known as the "Father of the Nuclear Navy," and his influence on the Navy and its warships was of such scope that he may well go down in history as one of the Navy's most important officers1. On May 24th, 1979, Admiral Rickover spoke before the Subcommittee on Energy Research and Production of the Committee on Science and Technology at the U.S House of Representatives. He said:
“One of the elements needed in solving a complex technical problem is to have the individuals who make the decisions trained in the technology involved. A concept widely accepted in some circles is that all you need is to get a college degree in management, and then, regardless of the technical subject, you can apply your management techniques to run any program. This has become a tenet of our modern society, but it is valid as the once widely held precept that the world is flat. Properly running a sophisticated technical program requires a fundamental understanding of and commitment to the technical aspects of the job and a willingness to pay infinite attention to the technical details. This can only be done by one who understands the details and their implications. If you ignore those details and attempt to rely on management techniques or gimmicks you will surely end up with a system that is unmanageable, and problems will be immensely more difficult to solve. I take individuals who are good engineers and make them into managers. They do not manage by gimmicks but rather by knowledge, logic, common sense, and hard work.”
Right on point, Mr. Rickover. He was also a coiner of other great phrases, including one that I particularly use a lot: “Optimism and stupidity are nearly synonymous.”
The point has been made ages ago: when technical complexity blooms, technical depth across the board is essential. Otherwise, the problems appear quickly: how can a technically shallow decision-maker weigh the inescapable uncertainties around complex technical projects and make good decisions between two or more competing options? How can a technically shallow sales workforce attract customers when they do not really know what they’re selling? How can a technically shallow recruiter capture the right talent for an overly specialized position? How can a technically shallow investor perform proper due diligences?
Now, here’s where Rickover’s nuclear submarines stop being a good yardstick. Defense acquisitions are immensely different endeavors, commercially speaking, compared to more massive, civilian markets like software, robotics, automotive, aerospace, etc. Admiral Rickover ran with the advantage that he could populate entire projects with purely technical nerds because his submarines were mostly probably sold up front. In reality, you must blend your technical workforce with other supporting expertise like project management, product management, marketing, etc, to make your things more attractive to highly competitive markets. The burning questions are:
How to achieve a more homogeneous technical depth across such heterogeneous board?
How to keep it current as the technology evolves and things change?
How to make sure important technical knowledge is retained amongst the constant bombardment of every day emails, meetings and conversations that contain tons of information?
How to network and augment that knowledge with others’ knowledge in a way that their sum is bigger than the individual contributions and not a mere collection of isolated “bubbles”?
How to sow the relevant technical knowledge for newcomers so they can reach ‘steady state’ soon and in the meantime avoid overloading others?
In Sherlock Holmes’s "A Study in Scarlet," Dr. Watson expresses surprise that Holmes is ignorant of the Copernican theory and the composition of the solar system. Holmes explains that he does his best to forget any information that is not relevant to his existence:
"You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has difficulty laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."
"But the Solar System!" Dr. Watson protested.
"What of the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently: "you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work."
Another question must be added to the stack: how do we prevent ourselves from cluttering everyone’s attics? How do we provide the assortment of “tools”, in Holmes’ own words, to make a better use of the non infinite ‘walls of the mind’?
In 1885 the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus experimented with his own ability to retain various information. Specifically, he studied the memorization of nonsense syllables like “WID” and “ZOF”, then plotted the results over a period of time. The graph of his results is now known as the forgetting curve. The forgetting curve and supporting research2 estimates that within 1 hour people will have forgotten up to 50 percent of the information presented in an earlier learning session. Within a day, an average of 70 percent of the new information may have been forgotten.
Professional training must stop being about machine gunning encyclopedic knowledge in endless, mandatory training sessions that finds no immediate practical application and will rapidly and exponentially decay.
A non-bullshit professional training strategy must revolve around designing learning experiences with content packaged in short, zero-filler, concise self-paced micro courses which aim to provide learners with the tools and the patterns that can be applied in a breadth of different situations, and not about memorizing figures and equations that will be forgotten in a matter of days.
https://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/handle/1903/8525/umi-umd-5589.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0120644