The Professionals

 I discussed at length last time the writings of Ivan Illich and his critique of the professions; and it occurred to me afterward that—particularly in light of the fact that he was specifically discussing the health care sector—this might seem like poor timing. After all, nurses, doctors, and other medical professionals around the world have spent the last year and a half putting themselves at heightened risk—and, in many cases, dying—in order to save lives during the pandemic. By what remote logic do they merit anyone's criticism? 

This is why it is important to add at this point that the widely-felt human suspicion of professionals does not rest on the assumption that any particular person is bad at their job or insufficiently committed to their calling. Rather, it has to do with the simple fact that, even with the best of intentions, the outcome of a particular case will always matter somewhat less to the professional than to the client who engages their services. (Just to show I am casting no stones, I will observe that this same objection is frequently raised against people who work at advocacy NGOs, and with equal justice, as we'll see below.)

The point is underlined by the fact that, conversely, the most reassuring thing a professional can do is to show how—in a particular circumstance—their direct interests are just as tied up in the outcome of a case (whether legal, medical, or otherwise) as the person they are serving. I recall an international flight, for instance, in which my family, me, and the other passengers were forced to get off the plane due to a mechanical error. After it was fixed, and they invited us back inside, one passenger did not want to return. "Are you sure it's really safe?" she asked the flight attendant. 

The attendant, in turn, said something very smart. "I have to be on the same plane," she said. "I wouldn't want to get on board either if it wasn't safe." The passenger seemed considerably mollified. 

Of course, that is a relatively rare instance; in most situations where clients interact with a professional, the latter does not have as much to lose. A person who's sick, a person facing a potential prison term, a person whose future hinges on the outcome of a particular policy struggle, no doubt have good cause to suspect that their doctor, lawyer, or advocate does not attach precisely the same urgency they do to the verdict. The latter professionals may sincerely care. They may have genuine altruistic feelings. They may not approximate the caricature of bureaucratic indifference with which George Crabbe paints the doctor so memorably in his narrative poem, "The Village"...

But they do not have, as a friend once put it, as much "skin in the game" as their clients. This may make it harder for the client to relate to them in their moment of peril. But far more importantly, it makes the professional less competent at what they have been asked to do, than the client might be if they were equipped with the same knowledge. It makes the professional less creative and willing to innovate strategy in order to address and overcome the unexpected barriers that emerge in the course of litigating the case. 

A few illustrations would be helpful here. In his excellent book on the history of the United Farm Workers, Why David Sometimes Wins, the organizer Marshall Ganz lists three key components of what it takes to build strategic capacity for people engaged in a social struggle; but the first of these is arguably the most important, and the key to all the others. Ganz labels it: motivation. 

Now, that may seem like a given. Everyone engaged in a contest or struggle ipso facto has a desire to win, and so we can take it for granted that whoever we are up against has as much motivation as we do, right? 

No; Ganz's point is that not everyone on the field has the same motivation specifically to innovate new strategies or to be as creative in the tactics they develop. In the story of the early organizing efforts of the United Farm Workers that he unfolds, he shows how the smaller upstart union was able to outcompete larger efforts by the Teamsters and others, even as these more established outfits had greater resources, a larger staff, and more power, especially since they were often operating with the support of many farm sector employers. 

Ganz argues that the Teamsters and others, despite their apparent advantages, lacked strategic capacity. In part, this was due to the fact that they did not have as much motivation to win. 

The Teamsters, after all, were staffed by professionals, selected for success in the bureaucratic organization they served. They might prefer to win and organize more farm workers, for purposes of burnishing their resumé* or whatever else. But their personal and familial fate did not depend on the outcome of the labor struggle in the fields of California; at least not to the same extent as the early United Farm Workers, whose membership and leadership were (at the time) drawn from the ranks of the same people they were trying to organize. 

Moreover, the additional resources at the Teamsters' command bred overconfidence. They were used to winning, and felt assured of their greater strength, and so did not feel the same need to innovate strategies that had never been tried before. The UFW, by contrast, knew that they had to come up with creative ideas in order to survive. 

The analogy Ganz uses here (as in the title of his book) is to the story of David and Goliath. Goliath did not think he needed to invent or prepare for tactics outside of the standard sword-and-shield combat, because he was confident in his victory by those means, and they had served him well in the past. David, by contrast, knew he would be killed immediately were he to face his opponent in this style of combat. He therefore had motivation to invent a new approach to the contest that had not previously been tried: the use of the slingshot. 

All else being equal, human beings prefer not to have to do what David did. It is easier to rely on what they have done before—and they will feel all the more justified in doing so if those same tactics have worked in the past. Goliath had no reason to think he wouldn't prevail against David simply by using his sword and armor, just as he had beaten every other contestant. When confronted with David, therefore, he defaulted to seeing him as just another instance of a familiar pattern; and he adopted a readymade set of tactics for addressing it that had served him in the past. He thus failed to perceive or grasp the importance of what was essentially new in the situation: the slingshot in David's hand. 

This defaulting to familiar habits—this tendency to search, when confronted with a new situation, for a means to slot it into a familiar rule that prompts a single, stereotyped response—is, according to the British psychologist James Reason (in his book, Human Error) the way human cognition always prefers to handle new situations. In most cases, moreover, as Reason argues, this is an adaptive and sensible course of action. Human cognition, that is to say, takes this approach due to a legitimate sense of parsimony. Reality is too complex to be assessed entirely anew at every juncture. Developing a repertoire of rule-based responses to recurring situations is therefore essential if we are to navigate the world. 

The upshot, however, is that it is very difficult to get us to engage in the more energy-intensive higher-order forms of cognition that involve assessing a novel situation without immediate resort to familiar "schemata" (this is Reason's preferred term for the individual's bank of stereotyped responses, but words like "scripts," "frames," etc. have also been used in the literature to describe similar phenomena). As Reason summarizes, quoting the words of another student of cognition (Rouse): "humans, if given a choice, would prefer to act as context-specific pattern recognizers rather than attempting to calculate or optimize." 

One finds a similar point made in Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. The great organizer tells a story about ordering food from a restaurant menu, in which each item was labeled with both a name and a number. Speaking to the waiter, he named a particular dish by number, but then asked for two of the ingredients in the item to be separated out on the plate. This caused great confusion, as Alinsky foresaw, and resulted in two separate dishes being brought to the table. His point? "[W]hen you go outside anyone's experience not only do you not communicate, you cause confusion," as Alinsky puts it. One imagines he would have no trouble agreeing with Reason's thesis: "the cognitive system tends to 'default' to contextually appropriate, high-frequency responses." 

To force us out of this default pattern-recognition mode and into a higher, more energy-intensive, but more creative kind of thinking (what Reason calls "knowledge-based" as opposed to "rules-based" cognition), takes an unusually salient motivator. And what more pressing motivator could there be than to realize that one's own wellbeing and survival and future—not merely those of a stranger or a client—are tied up in the outcome of the matter at hand. This is the motivator the Teamsters lacked, in their confrontation with the United Farm Workers, and which the latter possessed in abundance. 

This is the reason why professionals, talented and smart and well-educated though they may often be, will frequently not be the most creative people in the face of pressing challenges. Instead, they will default to what they have done before. And because they are experts and well-trained, they will have a wide library of such schemata to choose from, which in itself makes them an asset to have around. But they may not have the will to make the jump to the higher-order levels of cognition, if their fates are not personally invested in the outcome. 

Instead, they will tell David to use sword and armor, because that's what others have done. And, if he replies that he will lose the battle and be killed if he fights with these tools, they will tell him this is an unavoidable tragedy. He was guaranteed to lose all along. There's no way to beat Goliath. And they will have no personal motivation to look further than that for a solution. 

Such, at any rate, would be my contribution to Illich's critique of the growing professionalization of tasks in our society, and to Ganz' analysis of what it takes to maintain strategic capacity in any organized endeavor. Drawing on Reason's insights—which he traces all the way back to the Gestalt psychologists of the early twentieth century, who first realized that most human perception and memory is not a direct transcription of external sensory inputs, but rather an organization of data in conformity with larger (and in part pre-established) forms—we can say that responding in novel ways to novel situations requires an energy-intensive level of cognition that most people will want to avoid, to the extent possible. 

This fact constitutes a human weakness; but knowledge of it also confers inestimable strength on those with the motivation (often as a direct consequence of their life circumstances and their direct interest in the outcome of the case) to engage in prolonged higher-order cognition. It means that their more powerful adversaries will almost certainly not be thinking in this way, will not be acting creatively, but rather are relying on pre-established schemata that have served them in the past. They therefore are vulnerable to being surprised and overtaken by tactics that defy their familiar scripts. 

Such, surely, is the psychological basis for the emphasis placed on the element of surprise in Sun Tzu's The Art of War and other manuals of strategy. "If we do not wish to fight, we can prevent the enemy from engaging us," writes the master tactician: "All we need do is to throw something odd and unaccountable in his way." (Giles trans.) In essence, what Sun Tzu is recommending here is that one confront one's opponent with an occurrence that does not lend itself to any of their pre-established "If this, then that" rules. One therefore forces them to engage in higher-order problem-solving on the fly, which, as Reason points out, is much more difficult—if not impossible—to sustain under high-stress conditions. 

Goliath or any other opponent is likely to defeat you if you enter the field of battle on their terms, and fight according to their recognized rules. But if you throw something unexpected into the mix—like David's slingshot—they will not be able to adjust their strategies quickly enough in real time to respond. Goliath, therefore, can be overcome even by a weaker opponent. 

All of which is a bit chastening in its implications for my own professional life. For all that I work as a human rights advocate for a relatively small organization, after all, I feel at times more like a Goliath than a David; more like the Teamsters than the UFW. I am one of the "professionals," in most situations, rather than the people forced to make frontline decisions. With regard to most of the issues I work on, that is to say, I am not among those most directly affected by the outcome. 

I therefore may lack the motivation that is truly needed to overcome the mental inertia that forbids higher-order creative reasoning; I may be able to sustain myself perfectly well through relying on established courses of action; and I may accept what appear to me like inevitable defeats and insurmountable obstacles (we'll never get Congress to pass that bill; we'll never convince them to abandon the filibuster; that reform package has always failed when it's been tried in the past; you can't beat Goliath because he's too strong), because I am not among those who quite literally cannot afford to take no for an answer. 

Even with the best of intentions, therefore, I may never be the one who is going to innovate the best strategy. 

But I can try to do what, as we have seen already, professionals are actually good for. I can try to compile as large a mental library of established patterns, schemata, and scripts as possible, for use in the widest set of different circumstances, so that a vast array of novel situations will yield an appropriate rule-based response. Indeed, this kind of compiling of analogies and patterns is—perhaps—what I am most uniquely suited for in life, by virtue of temperament and otherwise. I frequently feel this blog, after all, is nothing other than a repository of analogies and resemblances between disparate items I have noticed through the course of reading and living. 

Having such a library available for use is surely a helpful and necessary task. It's just that the person who possesses such a repertoire must not presume on this basis that they have exhausted the range of available options, or that they "know better" than the people on the front lines—the clients, to use our opening terminology. The professionals must recognize their limits and not arrogate to themselves the entire domain of knowledge and strategy, nor make the fatal error of assuming there is nothing new under the sun. 

A doctor may be worth consulting for a list of available treatments that have worked in the past; so too, a well-paid staff labor organizer or human rights advocate or attorney may provide a useful roster of strategies that have proved successful previously. 

But they must not, for this reason, be allowed to stand in the way of the client's own ultimate decision about their course of action; because it is quite possible the client—due to their necessarily higher degree of motivation—is thinking at a much higher order of cognition than we are. That they are seeing things, like the stones in David's slingshot, that we would never have noticed. Know our place, follow their lead, and let them surprise the adversary.

---

* It is worth noting here that purely reputational motivators of this sort may not only prove weaker than the life-or-death interest that clients may have in the outcome of a struggle—they may actually conflict with winning the case on behalf of their client. As Sun Tzu was perhaps the first person ever to point out, winning often requires things that run counter to a reputation for bravery and wisdom on the part of the contracted specialist, because winning in a given circumstance may require a temporary retreat, "winning with ease," (Giles trans.) or arranging matters so that one does not have to fight at all.