On the planned death of innovation

I’ve had many arguments regarding the evaluative benchmark: “demonstration of ability to be innovative.” In support of my claims [and just sheer snarkiness] I supplied the following definition to provide a framework or context for my claims :

Assuming the Oxford English Dictionary definition is accepted for our purposes, I repeat the definition here for clarification: “[t]o change (a thing) into something new; to alter; to renew” and innovative as “[h]aving the character or quality of innovating.”

Unfortunately, this did not move my case forward and when I asked for their definition of innovation, one was not supplied. Thus the argument stalled.

I was quite pleased when I read a section of Crawford’s book Shop Class for Soulcraft on tacit knowledge and expertise. It seemed to explicate the idea of innovation within the context of work, and not theoretical work but through exposure to real things. “The expert is not expert because he has a better memory in general, but because the patterns of chess [the example he used] are the patterns of his experience (170).” Intuitive judgements are the “experienced mind…integrating an extraordinarily large number of variables and detecting a coherent pattern. It is the pattern attended to, not the individual variables. Our ability to make good judgements is holistic in character, and arises from repeated confrontations with real things: …in a manner that may be incapable of articulation (168-169).”

It is in the recognition of patterns one creates the foundation for innovation and creativity, in my opinion. Based on experience, one may recognize patterns be they complete or incomplete, and with this comes a consideration of new ways to deconstruct, reconstruct and even construct new approaches to old problems or newly discovered issues.

Crawford talks innovation better than I do, and in doing so states that tacit knowledge can not be reduced to simple rules that anyone may follow. The desire for rules, when faced with tacit knowledge, results in the development of placeholders representing the complexity of the thing without the essence. Thus competencies have become an attempt to encompass and ultimately control tacit knowledge as, upon investigation (paper under review), competencies are commonly reduced to a prescriptive list of activities or skills bypassing the tacit knowledge implicit in the operational (behaviour/attitude) and conceptual (meta-competence) dimensions of competency. Unfortunately the image or perception of control is becoming more important than the actual grasp offered by tacit knowledge. Thus competency is being reduced to dimensions that may be quantified and controlled. 

And this drive to quantify competencies is ultimately engendered by a neoliberal desire to reduce expenditures related to tacit knowledge. If a job may be reduced to a set of rules (or appearance of a set of rules) anyone can do it, which reduces/negates the cost related to expertise and introduces more bodies in competition for that job, driving the expense down. 

What is truly scary about this approach? Remember the “when is google good enough” and "when is good good enough" discussions? It has become, for example, when is some software good enough, such that the internal costs related to expertise and continuing expertise may be reduced or eliminated internally, reduced and transferred to a company that will manage your systems for you? When is the appearance/placeholder of expertise enough, even though the software doesn’t actually do what you need it to do/want it to do/desire to build it to do, such that social and professional responsibility for tacit knowledge in your field may be ignored in favour of dollars saved or resources allocated to other projects (likely ones not requiring tacit knowledge)? Yes, management gets to determine priorities and allocate resources but we get to ask: what is driving that activity and is it complementary or in line with our professional responsibilities/values and ethics? Under this reign, can innovation and tacit knowledge thrive? I think not. Especially as in parallel, library administrations continue to absorb any opportunities to flex tacit knowledge muscles into their ranks.