Learning to Build WIP

How experience becomes judgement

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. But I was equally aware of 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 me, 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 happened. But it didn’t take long to discover that learning in practice wasn’t going to be quite as simple as I thought.

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 do what you’ve been asked to do.

Except it never quite works like that.

Let’s say, some of the annotations are illegible. Dimensions don’t add up. One of the changes appears to contradict something else on the drawing. You discover another drawing that probably needs changing as well. Some of the markups don’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.

In these circumstances, you 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 real work would be. I thought of these things mainly as complications that got in the way of completing the task. Looking back, dealing with them was a fundamental part of the job, and also where much of the learning happened.

What I was learning in those moments was not simply how to complete the task. I was also learning how to proceed and make decisions when the instructions stopped being sufficient.

At first, those decisions were relatively small. 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, did I want them to. I wanted to figure things out for myself.

Gradually, the nature of the decisions changed. Instead of being told exactly what to do, I was given more room to work things out for myself. People would give me a problem rather than a task and ask what I thought should be done. Over time, 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 more knowledge. There is obviously some truth in that, but it doesn’t fully explain what was happening. People who are good at dealing with ill-defined problems don’t just know more things. They know how to work out what matters when the answer isn’t obvious.

Because the progression happens slowly, it’s difficult to see it. It’s the result of a thousand 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 later on site what happened as a result of a decision we’d made.

Most of these things seem insignificant at the time. Taken together, they aren’t.

Gradually, patterns begin to appear. You recognise situations you’ve encountered before and you notice when something doesn’t quite 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 at the same time becoming more aware of the consequences of being wrong.

What you are developing, I think, is judgement.

More than forty years after I first started work, I have accumulated a great deal of knowledge and experience. But that experience hasn’t brought me to a point where the answers are obvious. If anything, it has made me more aware of how often there isn’t a straightforward answer.

What I do have is a much larger library of experience to draw on: 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.