Mastery
Mastery/Competence is the means to life and the chief capital of the human being that is always by their side. Through mastery we learn and change the world, one’s whole life depends on mastery. The mastery baggage (experience/collection) allows the professional to notice a good opportunity, while a person with less mastery baggage might overlook it. Life mastery allows one to depend less on chance, instead it opens the door to infinite development: the master/competent person enjoys life by doing their own thing. Constantly having an ongoing project is an important part of an interesting life.
Masons were the first representatives of the intellectual aristocracy. Their mastery traveled freely with them throughout Europe because discipline (theory, knowledge) was in their heads, and in their hands was the ability to wield a set of light tools (techniques) in the form of a compass, angle piece, caliper, and plumb line.
Mastery brings to life a person’s interests, ideas, and thoughts. Each person has mastery in a different kind of activity: some specialize in art, others in finance or medicine. Mastery in the physical world results in certain work products — a dance or a painting, a balance sheet or a financial statement, a cured tooth, or an injection given.
We mean mastery, or competence, more broadly than a body of knowledge, skills, and abilities. When we talk about knowledge-skills-abilities, we do not emphasize the context in which these abilities are demonstrated. Speaking of mastery, we want to emphasize that the application of knowledge-skills-abilities does not take place in ideal situations. For example, an employee has knowledge, skills, and abilities, but finds it difficult to do the job without external supervision from his or her superiors. Or an actor plays a role in the theater, in complete silence, but the slightest sound throws them off the role. Another good example is when artists during the Great Patriotic War performed at the front, they performed despite the far from ideal conditions and the threat to their lives.
Mastery appears when we practice first on training tasks, but it is necessary to test the skills in real projects. Without real projects, it is possible to gain knowledge and skills, but in order to gain mastery/competence it is crucial to be putting your “skin in the game”. That’s why it is challenging to obtain mastery in higher education.
Mastery also requires a systematic investment of time. In order to master a skill, it is necessary to invest time and retain attention for a sufficiently long period of time until it becomes automatic (habit). Sometimes it takes a few weeks and sometimes years to form a habit and skill.
Without establishing a habit, it is difficult to apply the scientific knowledge gained because it requires a lot of energy, and the result is not always satisfying. Think back to learning how to drive a car. Until the skill became automatic, each trip was probably accompanied by stress and energy expenditure. Mastery is the intuitive and unconscious application of knowledge-skills-abilities in non-ideal conditions.
Human knowledge
Human knowledge is the “pictures of the world” (world views, perspectives on reality) downloaded into our heads or, in the case of “scientific pictures of the world” we could say that those are learned theories, models, disciplines, and transdisciplines.
Human knowledge is knowledge about the world. They shape a person’s interests, needs, desires, or dissatisfactions. To satisfy interests, a person takes action and uses technology to do so. Knowledge determines the scale or caliber of one’s personality. It can be defined by the breadth and complexity of a person’s interests (example — T-shaped people). A person’s environment and intrinsic motivation to learn about the world affects the breadth of interests, and learning the frontier of science and transdisciplines affects the complexity of interests.
One example of large-scale personalities in history is Friedrich Zander, a Russian scientist, and inventor, one of the pioneers of rocket technology. His interest was the flight to the Red Planet. The slogan “Forward to Mars!” even became his personal motto. It is not known when the inventor came up with this slogan, but he died in 1933, long before flights to Mars were seriously discussed. The caliber of Friedrich Zander’s personality is demonstrated by the fact that he worked on ideas of flying to Mars at a time when the country was in shambles, famine, disease, and other terrible living conditions.
Of all human knowledge here in the “Systems Management School” we rely on knowledge that is part of the thinking mastery/competence: knowledge of methodological transdisciplines and activity-oriented outlook.
By understanding how our interests are shaped, we can make a significant difference in our lives. What information we consume determines our outlook, interests, and dissatisfactions. The more we know about the world, the more different interests a person may have. For example, a curiosity about swimming is awakened by learning that it is a great sport where we use all of our muscles. Seeing the underwater world or exotic animals, learning about distant islands and cultures creates an interest in traveling or exploring wildlife. The information obtained determines a person’s interests. The satisfaction of interests or desires occurs when a person demonstrates applied skill, that is when the person becomes a master of their craft. By learning to swim well, a person realizes their original desire to swim, and perhaps would not be able to live without swimming anymore.
The broader and more complex a person’s interests, the more interesting their life is. Of course, provided that a person is constantly developing and changing the world, that is, in action. Expanding one’s horizons by means of qualitative and complex information is a constant activity of a person throughout his life, which affects the endless development of personality. Consciously forming one’s interests, translating them into ideas, and then understanding how these ideas can be implemented in life is the sign of an intellectually developed person (master and doer). The breadth of interests and the scope of ideas is an opportunity for the application and realization of a person’s natural potential.
Activity-oriented horizons are part of role acting mastery/competence (diagram above). For example, systems entrepreneurship, systems engineering, and systems management are all part of the activity-oriented outlook. But separately there are applied entrepreneurial, engineering, and management disciplines, such as lean startup, customer journey, theory of inventive problem solving (TRIZ), use case 2.0, P2M, Goldratt’s theory of constraint, kanban, and many others.
An activity-based outlook helps to understand how human activity works. One of the resources related to The Systems Management School provided us with an example of identified 15 types of human activity: politics, religion, philosophy, art, science, education, health care, physical education and sports, technology, engineering, commerce, finance, law, the army, and material production.
Understanding how each of these activities is structured helps to connect with and dive into working with the teams that implement projects in their respective activities. Everyday life experience is enough not to confuse a pediatrician and a general practitioner, but building an IT system in a medical facility will require subject matter expertise.
Knowledge of methodological transdisciplines (including systems thinking) and an activity-oriented outlook will allow us to find the common components of any project in different types of activity. The project distinguishes roles and their interests, different kinds of systems, areas of interest, and system levels. For example, in the hair salon we will call the engineer a hairdresser. We can distinguish the system-of-interest— the haircut.
A person without knowledge of transdisciplines and activity-oriented outlook might have a chance to sort out a new applied activity, but such sorting out is done without the formal method of transdiscipline, rather by trial and error or on intuition, which can fail in an unfamiliar situation. The transdiscipline and the activity-oriented outlook provide a method for quickly learning a new activity, and further, the mastery/competence is shaped by the implementation of concrete work projects.
Thus, human knowledge as a whole shapes one’s interests. Methodological transdisciplines and activity-oriented outlook are responsible for solving new complex problems and allow one to fit into unfamiliar projects. A person’s knowledge is formed by the social environment and conscious consumption of information. The caliber of the individual is influenced by the study of knowledge on the frontier of science. Mastery is the primary measure of a person as a world changer. Mastery includes knowledge and mastery of technology; ability and skill are considered stages of mastery. Mastery gives a person real weight in the social environment and helps him to meet his needs.