The Ambiguity of Real Work
surfingcomplexity.blog
surfingcomplexity.blog
The other is a dual education system of apprenticeship for Craftsman/manual work. For three years You go to school two to three days a week and work at a real craft business. That way you get the theory and it's practical application. After your exam you are a certified handy man in your profession with the relevant skills to work professionally. This solves the mentioned ambiguity of real work.
University education was associated with staying in higher education or R&D. But the creation of vast PhD programs had created a wave of PhD that cannot be absorbed by the University and research institutions. So it bleeds into "normal" work life.
The software profession would benefit from a dual apprenticeship system. But company's are not willing to take on the responsibility and train their talent that way. At least not in Germany.
I would also add that we have the highly theoretical universities and the Universities of Applied Sciences. Later ones are more practically oriented.
Having studied at a "regular" university and watched people study at an Applied Sciences University, I believe that the later is better grounded in reality.
In practice many smart people would have gone to work in manufacturing doing the mundane work, hone their "practice" and eventually solve or at least work around the swampy problems inherent to the field. Eventually moving up into various lead positions with the firm.
Now we're left with credentialed experts produced by academic programs designing machines while never visiting a factory floor.
This is the pattern I see everywhere, from organizations and teams, Generational/Adversarial networks, and even my own internal thought processes. Effective communication by entities with different perspectives amplify reality, and dampen unfounded speculation, while exploring a broad solution space.
Presumably a leader of a large group should set very few and clear goals to align the group around. The tension then I would guess is that this might not best make use of the specific skills of the individuals present.
Ambiguity makes us as systems designers uncomfortable, for good reasons. But dispelling it requires a lot of work on legibility, often transforming the subjects of the system in order to make them more legible.