Learning to build

Two schools of thought

When I first started work, I was confident in my own abilities. I’d done well at university and I knew I could think, draw and solve problems. What I was equally aware of was how little experience I had of actually designing and making buildings.

I assumed the solution was fairly straightforward. I needed to acquire more knowledge and develop an understanding of how things were done. Projects would provide the experience and the senior people around me would help fill in the gaps. I would stay close to those who knew more than I did, watch what they did and ask them an annoying number of questions. Eventually, I imagined, I would become something like them.

It wasn’t a bad plan. In fact, it is more or less what I did. But it didn’t take long to discover that learning in practice wasn’t going to be quite as simple as I had imagined.

Take an ordinary design office task. Someone more senior gives you a hard-copy markup and asks you to update a drawing. You find the CAD file, make the changes, save it and let them know you’ve finished. There doesn’t appear to be much to learn. You just need to do what you’ve been asked to do.

Except it never quite works like that.

Some of the annotations are illegible. A dimension doesn’t add up. One of the changes appears to contradict something elsewhere on the drawing. You discover another drawing that probably needs changing as well. Something in the markup doesn’t look right, but you don’t know whether you’ve spotted a mistake or simply failed to understand what was intended. Meanwhile, the person who gave you the task has disappeared to a conference for the rest of the day.

None of this is especially dramatic. But you still have to decide what to do.

Do you wait? Ask somebody else? Make the changes you understand and leave the others? Try to work out what was intended? And if you think you’ve found a mistake, how certain do you need to be before you challenge someone who knows considerably more than you do?

I don’t remember anybody explaining to me that this was how work would be. I thought of these things mainly as complications that got in the way of completing the task. Looking back, I think they were a fundamental part of the job. They were also where much of the learning happened.

What I was learning in those moments was not simply how to complete the task. I was learning how to decide what to do when the instructions stopped being sufficient.

At first, those decisions were tiny. Should I wait? Ask somebody else? Make a reasonable assumption and carry on? The more experienced people around me could usually help, but they couldn’t make every decision for me. Nor, eventually, would I want them to.

Gradually, the nature of the decisions changed. Instead of being told exactly what to do, I was given a little more room to work things out for myself. Then somebody would give me a problem rather than a task. Later they would ask what I thought should be done. The problems became less well defined and the consequences of getting them wrong became greater.

I used to think that this progression happened because I was accumulating answers. Every project taught me something new, so the store of things I knew grew larger. There is obviously some truth in that, but it doesn’t fully explain what I see when I look at people whose judgement I particularly admire. They don’t simply know more things. They are better at working out what matters when the answer isn’t obvious.

It’s hard to know where things changed in my own career. There were no great leaps from inexperience to experience. Mostly there were thousands of small things: a question somebody asked, something I got wrong, watching somebody else approach a problem differently, an explanation that suddenly made sense, or discovering much later what happened as a result of a decision we’d made.

Most of them seemed insignificant at the time. Collectively, they weren’t.

Over time, patterns begin to appear. You recognise things you’ve encountered before, but you also become more alert to the things that don’t fit. You learn which questions are worth asking, when something needs investigating and when it probably doesn’t. You become more comfortable acting with incomplete information, while also becoming more aware of the consequences of being wrong.

That, I think, is judgement.

More than forty years after I first started work, I have accumulated a great deal of knowledge and experience. But I haven’t arrived at the point I imagined as a young graduate, where the experienced person simply knows what to do. If anything, experience has made me more aware of how often there isn’t a straightforward answer.

What has changed is what I have available to draw on when that happens: things I have seen before, mistakes I remember making, conversations with other people, consequences I have witnessed and thousands of small experiences whose influence would be impossible to separate out.

When I started work, I thought learning to build meant acquiring the knowledge and experience necessary to know how things should be done. I still think that is part of it. But I now think there is something more fundamental going on.

We learn to build buildings by building our capacity to judge what to do next.