Pursuant to our last conversation, an observation: the rigors of nearly any multi-disciplinary role are such that the brain – a brain, really, the type inclined to excel in a job like this – cannot help but sift through the torrent of information these jobs entail and retain nearly anything that might be useful later. Construction and the trades probably see a ton of this, as well as any technical operation where a scarcity of staff prevents people from the sort of myopia that can develop in areas of intense specialization1. One is a natural consequence of the other; you can narrow your focus, but at the cost of losing the periphery. This is not Bad, it merely is.
Generally, technical jobs in production have close working conditions that are ripe for opportunities for cross-pollination of know-how. I specialize in lighting design, but through the years and the roles inhabited, other subjects at the outer rim of my knowledge orbit have wormed their way into my consciousness, either through a form of osmosis or because I deliberately sought this information out: lighting techniques for digital video, a fair chunk of live sound knowledge, how to do some basic entertainment rigging, where the best bathroom is in almost any church. These are only tangentially related to my Real Life job. As it is, I suspect, with many others in the business.
Acquisition of a broad breadth of general knowledge tends to happen organically over time, and is less often learned in a monolithic chunk from a classroom. This is, again, generally true in life: it’s much eaiser to teach specialized know-how, than to impart the generalized heuristics required to become an excellent problem-solver. The Wisdom, if you will, is accreted in layers of successive experience, failure, and training, facilitated by effective teachers. Being an effective teacher, and my choice of that word is deliberate, is the flip side of this whole history-sharing thing, equally important as attitude and opennesss to learning. Astride our collective industrial shoulders lies the yoke of responsibility to provide that sweet sustenance to the latest generation of techs and engineers and everyone else: sharing knowledge and history in ways that hopefully weasel into their heads, and then ultimately their hands.
Kindness
Kindness is a multi-hued bird that can move mountains. Truly incorrigible people exist – I’ve met them – and there exists frequent mismatches between, shall we say… will and means. These are inevitable, and a deep-seated human urge to reflect incorrigibility (or intellectual laziness) right back atcha contains within it a sweet and tender morsel, difficult to resist. To weaken the effectiveness of your message through rudeness or sarcasm seems, though the lens of these certain difficulties, absurdly self-defeating. My pre-professional career was spent, by and large, in the company of a misanthropic and sarcastic audio pro armed with a chip on his shoulder and a personal thesaurus of unkindness. I don’t really know what his dealio was; perhaps his “mentor” treated him likewise and he just figured that was the Way To Be, or whatever. Regardless of the reason, his behavior stood in stark contrast to the graphic designer who sat across from me in the same office space. He was still funny, still occasionally sarcastic, but rarely did he use others as the butt of a joke. To this day, if either one of them called me2, I know who I’d think twice about wanting to talk to.
Frequently encountered in discussions of this sort with the sort of misanthropes I’m referring are the rhetorical jangly keys of “that’s how I learned and I turned out fine” or “getting yelled at is how you learn”. Those who practice this game of misery frequently possess nearly absolute certitude regarding their own rightness, or perhaps the rough decades have secreted successive layers of disinterest in changing their ways into a carapace of apathy. Kind and stern can go together, as any public education worker who spends time with children can tell you, but sternness, boundaries, and demanding professional rigor are not the same as being a jerkass.Deliberate conflation of the two is common enough sophistry, but don’t fall for it; they are distinct things.
This isn’t the same as saying unkindness doesn’t work – it can, but not long-term. People can be made to listen and / or comply when threatened, but this can only be temporary, and engenders just resentments. What I ultimately took from my interactions with the aforementioned (air quotes) mentor was a severe allergy to talking to the guy ever again, which probably wasn’t the outcome he intended. Management positions of any sort will bring the importance of kindness into sharp focus: you only have so much power, and its most effective application is to produce an environment where everyone wants to thrive and wants to do their best. Sound easy? It’s not, and unkindness acts as a force multiplier against your own interests. If you manage through emotional incompetence or other unforced errors to allow your accumulated knowledge to slip backward into the mists of attrition and turnover, well then, you’ve failed the test of stewardship.
Stewardship
Stewardship is the concept that sails into the bourgeois cocktail party in elbow-patched tweed and carrying a copy of The Federalist Papers. Stewardship encourages the Long View of things; it encourages us to remember that all we know, with few exceptions, we owe to others. When in the course of a career we are tempted to succumb to the ever-present Fitzgeraldian psychic trap of relevance anxiety, stewardship stands before us, urging us to look to the horizon, not shield our keystrokes lest some whelp usurp us. Youth is energy, openness to new ideas, youth is – for the manipulative boss with few scruples – an opportunity to take advantage of a drive borne of naivete. The perverse incentives nearly write themselves: we grind the young to dust because they still find it tolerable, the experienced learn to hoard their knowledge and not train their replacements, grasping vainly at the slick rock of relevance with the poison of bitterness in their souls.
This is unfortunate, and one reason why I find myself to be such a strong supporter of unions generally, but that is beyond the scope of this article. Instead, the encouragement here is to reframe knowledge and its sequestration from an essentially individual, adversarial experience to something more akin to curators of a vast and international library of people. The knowledge game is not zero-sum. To the extent that you share knowledge and experience, you’re increasing the total amount of knowledge in the world, and this is good.
Beyond good, however, lies responsibility. Nobody’s learning all they know in some Hobbsian state of nature, unfettered by social contract. Someone taught it to you, you ought to teach it to others. And if my particular brand of moral reciprocity isn’t like, your jam, ask yourself: what sort of industry do you want to have and work in? You don’t own your knowledge and experience; it was necessarily a communal exercise because industries generally and productions specifically are – necessarily – communal experiences. We should aspire to be stewards, caretakers, custodians of this art, ensuring its continuation in its best form by bringing others in. Our art flourishes and evolves when its practitioners act an inter-generational way, accepting and welcoming new people into the fold by teaching and – gasp – letting them do things, even occasionally fail at them. Stewardship of The Knowledge is an act of radical maturity in the face of the corrosive pressure of “relevance”. Into the moist lobes of all who can bear this dichotomous existence let us shepherd the correct and good ways of being and doing things, for in so doing we pave the way for a more gentle and knowing industry. To practice, here is a concrete and practical example: stop password protecting your showfiles, you strutting fops.
Practically Speaking
Finally, some thoughts, more or less practical, re: how to do all that stuff I said.
As in all things music and sound and lighting-related, quality is highly correlated with a good sense of timing. There are better and worse times to launch into a treatise on how that’s actually a static profile and not a Leko, probably much less an ellipsoidal, an example I choose both for its evergreen relevance and the fact that it’s a terminology pet peeve of mine that I’m likely to correct people for at inappropriate times. Being technically correct is, as we all know, the best kind of correct there is, but surely this type of exactitude can be reserved for a podcast or a book or funny bantz in catering. One of my core theses is that there are often good historical reasons to do things the way we do things, and we should teach these things, but grandstanding to try and establish the superiority of the Elder Times will make you look doddering. There are ways that are newer which are also better, be familiar with them3. Relatedly, I know not what Dark Magicks elementary school teachers are in possession of, but to cultivate their spirit of bottomless patience seems, short of Faustian dealings, worth attempting in this as well as any other context, as well.
Effective teaching is often more subtle than overt. And it is, crucially, an ongoing practice; the boundaries between instruction and not-instruction are not as discrete as we might expect. Experience teaches us in ways words often can’t, and failure makes for an especially potent serum, though we often prefer this to be decoupled from the reputational danger that would exist trying this on an actual show instead of practicing in the shop or in a class. One can elucidate through words how to catch a fish or EQ a snare drum, or one can demonstrate using both word and deed, and this is better. Better still is to guide toward the correct answer, leaving some but not overly-much room for correctable error. Effective teachers will use all the methods available to them, including episodes of formalized classroom training, field training, giving instructions and letting them try their best, and everything in between. An entire field of academic research exists around pedagogy and what works best for every situation, but I submit that every situation is different and therefore our methods must be, too, but with a mind toward understanding that we’re always, in some way, demonstrating the Right Way To Do Things. Always be teaching – and when necessary, use words. Also, personally, I don’t normally advocate “reading the fine manual” as a first form of instruction because manuals are essentially equipment dictionaries and you don’t sit down to write an essay by plowing through the entirety of Webster’s – but hey, maybe it works for some people.
Conclusion
I’m attempting to speak here to two forces I see frequently at work in our industry: newer and younger people not quite finding their artistic or technical footing with the ease with which they hoped to, and the more seasoned among us often failing at being effective teachers. I believe a synergistic combination of two distinct but related frameworks: apprenticeship and stewardship – can help to define a more resilient and healthy industrial culture.
We need not shoehorn any sort of formality into these suggestions. This is not the Elder Horn sounding a clarion call to all and sundry: Do As I Say. I’m just a guy typing words, they are not The Truth carried down from high atop the thing. I find it difficult enough to follow my own advice, never mind an international community suddenly and completely agreeing with me. Maybe you don’t see the trends I do, or disagree about how to address them. Still, I hope something in all this resonates. Because the work we do matters, and the ways in which we pass it on might matter even more.
- Like, say, a production shop.
2. Hey Lance, hope you’re doing okay, buddy.
3. See: LED versus incandescent. I have thoughts.