practice

PRACTICE

Today, a propeller beanie tip to Dingo for this article idea.  Taught skills are usually overrated in effectiveness and only practice really teaches you anything.  We can all relate to this.  The military is especially bad in this aspect.  You go through months of training, get to your duty station and you are immediately met with one of three situations.  They want you to do something you weren’t trained in.  They completely retrain you to do it their own special way.  Or, you were expected to retain teaching that was incomplete and far too brief ( they expect photographic memory, in perpetuity ).

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To counter this, to a very large degree, you are simply not entrusted with any responsibility and treated as someone dumber than dirt unable to pour piss out of a boot ( remember the second part I usually don’t repeat, “if the instructions were on the bottom” ).  You are in a chain of command and what did all of those people do differently to make them trained?  Certainly not training-they were more likely just better practiced.  That is one of the problems with corporations.  They rely completely on training and disallow practice.  It shows.

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If you go to college, you are taught by a teacher that lives in an ivory tower of teachers, a land of glittery unicorns.  Very few writers of the teachers books ever had practice, because teachers only learn from teachers.  Practitioners don’t have the time to read about teaching, since all their time is spent practicing.  This is where the saying comes from, “those that can’t, teach”.  Do you think Stephen King was a good writer because he went to college?  Or because he practiced?  Granted, he had a rare mutated mind that helped, but he certainly needed practice to perfect.

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Most jobs you get nowadays, even in respected fields requiring years of college, are dumbed down to entry level On The Job Training tasks.  This has nothing to do with performance but rather saving money.  It is a perfect example of how to cut off your nose to spite your face, of how to be penny wise and Pound foolish.  But nobody cares if the corporation is around in ten years, they only care about this quarters profits ( how are holding stocks working out for you, dumb ass? ).  They want Drop In Replacements to cut costs.

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The military does this not to save money but to allow quick turnover.  Much has been made of the Soviets lack of performance in the Finnish Winter War and the Second World War, as Stalin decimated the Officer Corps in political purges.  But this ignores how most officers lack experience and instead rely on training.  Who got purged?  If they had any experience it was from the First World War, and we saw how well that went for them ( the eastern front retained more mobility and lacked the complete static trench warfare ). 

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How well did the retained, experienced American officers from WWII do in the Korean War?  Mostly, poorly.  They were trained in administration, and they even screwed that up.  When a war goes well, the officers are given credit regardless.  When it goes bad they are scapegoats.  But they themselves rarely make a huge difference.  The structures in place already have more influence.  They might all aspire to be Napoleon, but the Little Corporal didn’t win on the battlefield but rather the drawing board ( innovation in organization ).  Not to discount officers roles completely, but rather to question assumptions. 

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Almost all positions in the military are designed to be disposable, even the Generals.  Training suffers from this, as ability and talent would be a limiting factor.  It suffers from being taught by teachers.  It suffers when practice can become a casualty of a bullet.  BUT.  That is also the militaries strength.  The infrastructure is there to rapidly change to current conditions.  Really, experience could be a hindrance past the very short term.  And training is absolutely worthless.  If anything, it merely gives one enough confidence to perform on the battlefield.  It is a false confidence, but that is enough.  It opens the door to practice.

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A company teaches you just enough to be a round shape they hammer into a square hole.  In today’s economy, a company has to be run as a military.  Every day, with nothing stable, the company can be killed.  It does not need trained employees.  The training is worthless, merely a gatekeeper to keep out the riffraff.  And experience through practice is penalized ( you might get paid too much ).  They need that fluid adaptation necessary to not be killed when a new weapon or tactic is tried on the corporate battlefield.  And you need instant replacement of casualties.

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In a corporation, practice is also a hindrance, as it is in the military.  The enemy is always adapting.  Experience is only good for the current war, to pass on the new learned lessons.  Anything past that is dangerous.  At best, you get put into a Fake Teacher mode, to pass on worthless training that is merely a fake confidence builder.  You don’t just grab someone off the street for a task.  They must believe they can perform to training and excel.  Out of all that, there might be an accidental new action that succeeds against the “enemy” ( the competition ).

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You are rewarded, not with profit sharing, but by being “promoted” into a new training position.  It is much cheaper for the company that way.  You teach your charges an already obsolete strategy.  Those workers are eventually fired because their training was in now money losing strategy. Until one accidentally discovers a new winning idea, only because of desperation and fear of being fired.  Then, that new lottery winner is promoted to the new teacher and the old one fired.  This is how the systems survive.

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That is why today our Army still fights a Second Generation warfare.  At the heart of it, counter-insurgency is barely worth the resources.  Those GOOD at it don’t last long.  Because the military’s role is not to win guerrilla wars.  It is to police the current geopolitical and economic paradigm.  When winning at counter-insurgency, either in Vietnam or Afghanistan, intrudes into controlling the oil ( or denying it to others ) or the global currency ( or the global drug flow ), you are actually losing the real war.  You become a de facto institutional casualty.  That is also why advocates of “changing the system from within” also become casualties.

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They are fighting the wrong war.  I haven’t even gotten into preppers and training/practice.  Continued tomorrow.

( .Y. )

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