I am assuming, dear reader, that you are familiar with the concept of cultural dichotomies. A few examples are East versus West, Republican versus Democrat, and so on. So today I would like to introduce another large-scale cultural dichotomy into the lexicon, one that I’ve been trying to articulate for decades: I call it
Assembly-Line Versus Mastery.
When I was in the third grade, they taught us all about assembly lines. Our public school social studies book placed tremendous emphasis on the superiority of assembly lines over old-fashioned individual artists and craftspeople, because assembly lines were able to produce far more manufactured goods for far less money. Since these books were paid for by people who owned factories, there was no opposing viewpoint presented. And so, being a good little obedient student, I accepted this without question.
Assembly line thinking is more than a technique, it is a cultural phenomenon. Throughout the early assembly-line era, and especially during World War II when unskilled labor (think “Rosie the Riveter”) was brought in to take the place of gone-to-the-front skilled and experienced workers, the answer to making unskilled labor more productive was, in part, to “break things down” to their basic steps, and quickly teach people how to do one single task “on the line.” The simpler the task, the easier it was to train, and the less you had to pay them. Granted, having such a narrow skill set usually leads to doing dull repetitive work, but in the industrial/factory era, this was the most efficient way to do things.
I wonder if we as a culture are aware of just how far we’ve taken this culture of “develop a quick narrow skill set.” As a youngster, I was completely immersed in it myself. In all of my academic courses, I took this assembly-line engineering approach to all of my schoolwork. I consistently sought the most benefit out, i.e., the highest grade, for the least effort in. Even as a music student, most of the training and method books available to me had this assembly-line “quick acquisition of skill” component embedded in it. In fact most commercial learning materials promise an element of “learn quickly and easily.” Rarely will you see a language instruction or guitar-learning DVD whose cover reads, “we will show you how to spend an enormous amount of time agonizing over minor details, and how you can experience chronic and occasionally suicide-inducing massive frustration.” Given that true mastery involves an awful lot of the latter, it’s a much tougher sell. It is far more rational and appealing, at least at first glance, to do it the quick and easy way.
It was only when I tried to make the leap into being a professional performing artist that I realized that the assembly-line quick-acquisition-of-skill approach simply did not work.
In fact, I found that the standard teaching methods I had been exposed to (which were all extensions of this implied quick achievement system) were actually getting in the way of achieving true mastery. It was only when I got out of “school” and the tangled everybody-takes-every-class distractions and time loss, and focused on nothing but mastering the fingerboard of the double bass, that I was able to “make the leap.” And then, once I got a fragile toehold in the culture of the Boston Symphony, I realized that I was a mere journeyman, and I had to drive myself to the very limits of mental and physical capacity in order to meet the culture’s standards of mastery. But while this kind of learning was never “quick and easy,” once done, I had technical command that it’s hard to believe is even humanly possible. I had transcended the old clunky systems, and everything that used to be tricky became effortless and automatic.
Once you make that leap into mastery culture, anything that smacks of “quick fix” assembly-line culture becomes really annoying and irritating. The people who live in it are perfectly happy with the inaccuracy and the paucity of personal freedom that comes with it, but once you have “paid your dues,” that sort of thing becomes intolerable. Mastery makes you aware. It’s not just the technical part, it is the personal growth element as well. It’s like being 17 years old and being forced to attend your 5-year-old sibling’s birthday party. Going back is torture.
And perhaps the most annoying part of all is, these assembly-line systems always include this element of rationalization and self-delusion. The goal is always to escape any annoying self doubt instead of really digging into it and discovering the truth of yourself. This video of Branford Marsalis captures this phenomenon well, and I apologize for the coarseness of the language he uses:
The reason I spend so much time talking about this concept is that I do believe that, just as Communism lost the Communism-vs-Capitalism debate, assembly-line approaches to developing a labor force or a management team are now obsolete, because when taken to their ultimate conclusion, all you get are higher and higher levels of uniformity and obedience. Any mental task that can be broken down to a series of steps can, or soon will be, done by robots. The idea of taking unskilled laborers and making them truly productive with a pre-set training program is a phenomenon of the past. Even the concept of K-12 classroom learning is obsolete. Achieving mastery involves individual self-discovery and heartache. It involves a lot of non-linear staring in the mirror. It involves trial and error. It cannot be achieved by simply following an externally created list of steps, no matter how precise. And yet, there is no shortage of such lists, as that culture persists.
As we try to divine our economic future, it is key to remember that what makes things valuable is their rarity and their desirability. As machines and computers do more and more of what we traditionally refer to as “work,” I do believe that what human beings will find to be of value in other people will be limited to what you can’t get from machines, and that is . . . your unique presence. Leadership and innovation are not mechanical skills, they are artistic ones, therefore their true essence cannot be broken down into mechanical steps. There is no “quick and easy” way to learn how to do it. But when we put people into assembly-line teaching, where they are actually asked to suppress their unique selves in order to execute the “program,” we are actually going backwards, away from the future.
“Mastery” isn’t just mastery of a technical skill. It’s very much about knowing who you are in an artistic, or perhaps even in a spiritual, sense. It’s about marrying your core emotional energy to the task at hand, thus making everything super-efficient and effortless by eliminating all internal conflict. The way we have “numbed up” as a society on drugs and other distractions is evidence of the repressed inner conflict that assembly-line living creates. In a Captain Kirk moment, the argument for maintaining assembly line processes, i.e., that they are the way to achieve the greatest efficiency . . . is falling apart. It only applies to machines.
Your customers do not wish to be treated as machines or as an item on a conveyor belt. They want to be recognized and treated as unique individuals. Thinking of your workforce (or yourself) as a machine-like entity is going against satisfying the greatest demand of your customers.
The trick to management and leadership these days is no longer to make people work faster, harder, or more efficiently. To think we can be (or exceed) machines is a fool’s errand. Instead, the ability to be calm, perceptive (of the self and others), and imaginative, that is where the future market value of human beings lies. It lies in unique individual mastery, not in efficient mimicry of a list of instructions, as any machine can do that so much better.
But one must be aware that the world is not of one mind here; like east and west, these are two very different ideologies in place, and the assembly line culture is constantly marketing itself as a superior alternative in all things.
Whenever I coach people in anything that’s really important to them, without exception, the thing that needs fixing is not technique, it is the machine-age hurry-up-and-conform trauma that took them away from their true selves. It is that legacy of assembly-line culture that prevents them from being better bass players, better dancers, better managers, better leaders, and happier people. The mere idea of having permission to do this, or that it is even possible, is foreign to people immersed in assembly-line culture.
© Justin Locke
