Pride In Workmanship

Maitland Rotary Club Annual Pride In Workmanship Awards 15 May 2006

Speech by Kellie Tranter

One cannot speak of Pride In Workmanship without speaking about the most articulated value in Greek culture, that being arete. Translated as "virtue", the word actually means something closer to "being the best you can be," or "reaching your highest human potential." The term is not gender specific.  Arete is frequently associated with bravery, but more often, with effectiveness; a person with it uses all their faculties -- strength, bravery, wit and so on -- to achieve real results.  It involves all of a human's abilities and all of a human's potentials.  It is explicitly linked with human knowledge: the highest human potential is knowledge and all other human abilities are derived from this central capacity.  And all of these characteristics need to be focused on an outcome to yield pride in workmanship.

I came across a very good illustration of this in Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance, a book I strongly recommend to anyone interested in exploring the idea of Quality.  The author is trying to understand an appalling service his motorcycle received at the hands of a group of mechanics:

The question why comes back again and again.  Why did they butcher it so?  The radio was a clue.  You can't really think hard about what you're doing and listen to the radio at the same time.  Maybe they didn't see the job as having anything to do with hard thought, just wrench twiddling.  If you can twiddle wrenches while listening to the radio that's more enjoyable.

Their speed was another clue.  They were really slopping things around in a hurry and not looking where they slopped them.  More money that way - if you don't stop to think that it usually takes longer or comes out worse.

But the biggest clue seemed to be their expressions.  They were hard to explain.  Good-natured, friendly, easygoing-and uninvolved.  They were like spectators.  There was no identification with the job.  No saying, "I am a mechanic." At 5pm or whenever their eight hours were in, you knew they would cut it off and not have another thought about their work.

They were already trying not to have any thoughts about their work on the job....their own selves were outside of it, detached, removed.  They were involved in it but not in such a way as to care......

Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.

....in that strange separation of what man is from what man does we may have some clues as to what the hell has gone wrong...When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it.....

You see through the comforts of our daily activities, the security of familiarity and in the tranquility of repetition, something has gone horribly wrong with this world and humanity.  People who don't have pride in workmanship live in disharmony because they either don't want to, or are just too lazy to, put the effort into understanding how things work.  They thereby exclude themselves from a real interaction with a part of their own reality -- that is, part of the world they live in -- and when something goes wrong in that excluded sector it is unintelligible to them, completely out of their control and so a source of immense frustration and anger.

To them, things have become emotionally hollow, aesthetically meaningless and spiritually empty.

To have pride in workmanship you need to understand what you are doing and what you are trying to achieve.  You need to have the skill to achieve it, or the enthusiasm and dedication to develop the skill, and you must be focussed on the outcome that you are trying to achieve, rather than on the quickest or easiest or cheapest way of achieving an outcome.

To have pride in workmanship you must communicate with the dead.  The ghost of reason; the ghost of rationality; and the ghost of common sense.

The good news is that this is achievable because most things in life can be understood with a little effort and by applying the process of reason.  If you don't, most of the troubles are caused by what old time radio men called a "short between the earphones": failure to use the head properly.

Digressing for a moment, one reason that people who are remotely interested in trying to understand, fail to do so, is because of generalisation.  Generalisation is a process that can detract from understanding because it involves unstated assumptions and tends not to reveal any logical basis upon which the outcome--the generalisation--is constructed.  Unfortunately for us, the most common example of generalisation is in the way politicians speak: wide ranging general assertions, pregnant with opinions and value judgments, but seldom based on stated factual foundations and seldom disclosing any logical process through which they have been derived.  If you are faced with someone who generalises the only way you can see whether they are really saying something that has a real meaning is to listen critically to what is said and, by asking searching questions, to mine your way down to the heart of what they are saying.

To return to Pride in Workmanship: really, the state of mind which enables a person to do work with this kind of pride is akin to that of the religious worshipper or lover.  The daily effort comes from no deliberate intention or program, but straight from the heart.  Pride of workmanship engenders an attitude, a way of thinking that spills over to all aspects of a person's daily life, and which can give real quality to a life, affecting everything from small things on an individual basis, to the person's wider view of things and other people, and to their interaction with society and the world as a whole.