Across various subjects of popular interest, such as various forms of sport, science and technology, and art, there are celebrated journalists and commentators… who have never performed in those fields! Harsha Bhogle, Carl Zimmer, B N Goswamy, …
This raises an interesting question: what do such people really know about the subjects they cover? They do seem to have encyclopaedic knowledge and recall of their subjects. Harsha seems to have a more authoritative grasp of Cricket than many players. He articulates all kinds of nuances of the skills of various bowlers and batsmen. So then he should have been able to play skillfully too, right? In fact, he did play A Division cricket in his teens. But compared to his stature as a commentator, that accomplishment seems trivial. Zimmer’s story is slightly different. He did not dabble in science early in his career. With a BA qualification in English, he joined the magazine Discover as a journalist, that exposed him to various subjects of science. This is slightly more understandable than B N Goswamy’s journey. He resigned from the IAS after serving for a couple of years to pursue his interest in art, starting with studying for his PhD.
What then is the difference between the skills of a young Harsha and a test, ODI player? What is the difference between Zimmer and a scientist? Between Goswamy and those masters he covered? Let’s call them communicators and expert performers, respectively.
We call the difference “Situated Skills”.
Situated, in the sense that the skill of the expert performer only comes into play in a specific place or context. Typically, some kind of equipment and a special place is involved. Not always, though: we see sports (athletics, gynastics, Yoga), the performing arts (singing, dancing, theatre) and Meditation / Mindfulness Practice as contexts rich in Situated Skills where not much equipment is involved.
There is a rich, moment-to-moment interaction that unfolds when a person immerses herself in a skill arena – a kitchen, a cycle, a swimming pool, a cricket pitch, a science lab, a legal case (for a lawyer), interaction with a patient (for a doctor), an IDE (for a software coder), etc. This is regardless of skill levels. An expert performer (that includes, in this context, someone rolling out a chapati) is acutely familiar with the nuances of what they perceive, their meaning, and their significance. They can sense the varying thicknesses of the various segments of the forming chapati. There are also many more points of control and manipulation that the expert performer operates while in the arena, compared to novices or dabblers (including those communicators). Subtle pressure applied with the rolling pin keeps flattening out the dough evenly in such a way as to form a wrinkle-free, circular chapati in a short while.
And what we get is magic. This close, intense interaction between the arena and the expert performer is largely inexpressible (for another example, try and explain what you do to stay on a bicycle without falling).
As we just saw, at lower levels of virtuosity, we all have some skills of this type. Many employees in organisations carry out tasks that call for situated skills – operating equipment, diagnosing equipment failures, designing products, verifying documents (e.g., for bank employees), and so on.
Some jobs require much more time to be spent in using situated skills than others. This in itself, however, does not imply rarefied levels of expertise – a person can go from complete unfamiliarity to acceptable proficiency levels in many of these skills in a matter of a few days. Think typical car drivers and shopfloor operators (or Operations team members in banks). However, it is unlikely that jobs involving high levels of expertise do not entail large proportions of time spent on situated skills. Thus, those who perform complex surgeries, develop ML models for credit decisions in banks, repair critical equipment (for instance, in an HRO – High Reliability Organisation – such as an oil refinery), etc., are unlikely to be spending large amounts of time and mental space on other tasks.
Differentiating them from ”General Skills”: Purposive conversations, such as feedback sessions, candidate interviews, etc., also have the same quality as Situated Skills. But there is a sharp difference in what has been called in the world of expertise studies as “esotericity”: The computer programmer can also, typically, conduct interviews and decide whom to hire in her team. The person who does not know programming and has learnt interviewing formally might be able to conduct more rigorous interviews, but only about “General Skills” (as applied in a layperson context), and is likely to be clueless about assessing programming skills (or even assessing a seemingly General Skill such as project planning, when applied in the context of developing a complex programme).
In the rest of this write-up we give brief overviews of the categories of Situated Skills we see.
Tool / Process Proficiency
To see it in a slightly different way, what we have referred to as ‘arena’ so far, comprise of two parts, which we call tools and processes. A process is unfolding whether one does anything about it or not. Patients’ illnesses might worsen, legal matters might move forward, a loan application might fall through as the customer might move on to another loan provider, a piece of equipment might stay broken down (leading to further complications such as plant shutdowns or effluent releases), and so on. A tool is what a person can operate or manipulate – equipment, including hand tools and software applications.
Scrutinising collateral-related documents while sanctioning a loan application, or drafting a legal application or response to be filed in a court of law are, actually, fairly analogous skills, but we name these skills separately as Technical Document Authoring / Scrutiny.
Usually, a person activates a combination of Situated and General Skills to get things done – you may need to convince a vendor to prioritise your issue and respond early, and coordinate across a couple of teams, while working on repairing a critical piece of equipment.
Anticipating, Estimating, Planning, Designing
All the examples mentioned so far are about expert performance in the here and now. However, there is another type of situated skill that expert performers typically develop. Someone who develops “pattern vocabulary” of these arenas, very soon also starts imagining what might unfold, and what can be done additionally or differently with different aspects of the skill, using different resources (tools, materials, etc.), etc. Hence, they are able to anticipate and estimate likelihoods, plan future actions, conceive product and process designs that will meet future needs, etc.
When we see the word imagination, we tend to think of inter-stellar travel. But suppose you are told that a new appliance in the market enables one to heat food quickly using electricity in a specially made pan without wastefully heating up a coil underneath (or using a microwave oven). Your mind then races to figure out how they could be achieving the outcome. This too is imagination, but one that is trying to deploy known principles of science and capabilities of technology to work out how the outcome could be achieved. This too is a Situated Skill.
The pattern vocabulary need not entail very deep tool/process proficiency, though. A famous case in point is Steve Jobs, someone who was not much of a coder (Bill Gates, by contrast, for instance, was seen to have given himself extensive coding experience at a relatively early age). Yet, he obviously knew enough as to know what could be demanded from expert coders. He constructed vivid images in his mind of products that were new to the world, and got them developed along those lines. Thus, we do not see this skill as an ‘advanced’ level of Tool / Process Proficiency. Another famous case is that of Thomas Edison, who used to employ a large number of employees to develop the technologies that his name is associated with. R&D managers of today, similarly, typically, are not the most proficient in the tools and technologies being developed in their labs. Yet, they know enough as to be able to judge where to direct investments and the team’s energies.
Related Readings :
LAVE J & WENGER E. ( 1990 ) Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, Cambridge University Press
