A Releasing Your Unlimited Creativity discussion topic

Copyright 2008 by K. Ferlic,   All Rights Reserved

The need for technical competency can be summarized in the statement, "We don’t know what is wrong unless we know what is right." Technical competency allows us to know what needs to be done and what should be happening in any situation related to that competency.

From a creativity perspective technical competency is about having a passion and desire to move into the unknown to learn and understand. It is about learning what needs to be understood about a situation to create what we desire. This passion for learning is a byproduct when we align with the flow of our creative life energy.

What needs to be understood is that when we align with the flow of our creative life energy, we the move closer and closer to that realm of spontaneous and innocent childlike play of discovery and exploration of the universe. In fact, we moves into a state of being that is characterized by learning much the way a child undergoes phenomenal learning early in life. That same learning process is available to us whatever we aligned with the flow of our creative life energy and free to live the expression of that passionate energy.

The technical competence discussed here is not so much about knowing the technical aspects of an areas such that we are qualified technical person in a given technology although that is an aspect. Rather, technical competence, as discussed here. is more about knowing and understanding what we need to know and understand to know what is wrong in whatever ever area we work. Alternatively said, ""We don’t know what is wrong unless we know what is right" and being technically competent is knowing what is right in all appropriate aspects and areas to know what is wrong when we see it relative to the work we do.

The issue here is having an adequate technical competence of competing and/or complementary technologies. Technical competency is about marring the competing/complementary technologies of the workplace to bring life to ourselves and the organization and then nourishing and sustaining that life based on the situation at hand. For example, one may be trained as a personnel specialist. In becoming the supervisor of support services which include they personnel department, they may also inherent supervising one or more engineers as part of the maintenance support staff for the facilities. Technical competency on the part of the supervisor would require them to go out and see and understand what they maintenance engineers and staff need to do and why. The supervisor must begin to understand the true needs of the engineering and maintenance staff relative to the jog they have to perform. If they don’t, they will never be able to properly supervise them. In regard to looking to understand and nurture true needs, technical competency is also about making life worth living. When our true needs are nourished we have an experience to be had that serves both the individual and the organization that allows us to continually grow into the depth and breath of who and what we are.

In nourishing true needs, there is an abundance of energy within oneself that is capable of creating almost anything one sets their mind to create. In achieving this within the individual, that abundance is then available to the organization to expand its life. The type of learning that needs to occur to marry competing technologies tends to be drawn from the inside oneself and/or directs one to explore the needs of the situation and not necessarily focus on what we think we need to know. In fact, often trying to maintain certification type skills for a particular profession will often take us away from what we really need to learn to address the unique situation at hand.

If we are a practicing engineer, doctor, accountant or the like, we will need to have an adequate technical competence in the technical field of the actual technology we are applying. We will also most probably have to maintain certain types and kinds of credentials for the particular type of practice we have. For example, there are many different kinds of engineers and doctors. Each type requires a different type and kind of knowledge. Many of these specialties have their own unique qualification standards that we will need to meet to practice that form of engineering or medicine.

However, if we are managing and/or supervising the work of a doctor, engineer and accountant simultaneously we most probably will not be what would be called a technical competent individual in any one of the specialties we oversee. Our responsibility in a managerial role and the technical competence we need will be different. Here, as said above, our job would be to understand what each of these specialties do, how they do it and why they do it the way they do. In particular, our job would be to create the space for these individuals to be successful at what they do. If we do not understand what they do, how they do it and why they need to do what they do we cannot create the space for them to be successful. We will not be able to understand the needs of their technology nor their individual needs to apply the technology. The greater our understanding of what is done, how it is done and why it is done the way it is, the greater will be our ability to see what needs to be done and what is not working.

In this regard, each job will have it own technical requirements that often do not reflect something which can be learned in a classroom. Unless we are being trained specifically for a particular job similar to the way a control room operator is trained for a specific control board or a pilot is trained for the specific cockpit to fly a specific aircraft, most training will only give you the generic understanding for the job we face. We will have to learn the specific technical details of the job we face when we are in the job. If we don’t have some level of self mastery and knowing how to learn and how to teach ourselves, we will have difficult performing in a optimum fashion in that job. If we do not know how to teach ourselves, we may think we have the job well in hand but there will be parts that we will miss. Additionally we will miss the little details that begin to surface when things are not quite going correctly and only become aware of problems when they become significant enough to interfere with the work itself. Since things are always changing in one way or another, we will find that the technical competence we need will change with the job and will change with life itself for most situation slowly if not quickly evolve over time.

Part of the technical competence is to understand how our role fits within the whole and what happen if we do not adequately fulfill our job and what we need to do for the job may go well beyond what we think our job is. For example a very common problem is an engineer who works for a government organization. To think solely in engineering terms and not give consideration to the political concerns and influence of the government organization as to how and why decisions are made the way they are made, the engineer will not be successful in the long run for often the engineering issues are not the primary interest. To get the correct engineering solution to a situation, the engineer will have to become aware of the political influences and deal with them just an any engineer issue they face. To build a bridge, we have to build the bridge appropriate to the environment. We can’t just build any bridge. So too an engineering solution in a governmental organization. We can’t just give a solution that deals with the engineering details. We have to create a solution that fits the unique situation and environment such that we must include the politics if we are going to get a solution that is acceptable. Many technically adequate engineer solutions have been held up for decades because the engineering solution failed to consider the politics of the situation.

Similarly if we are a political appointee and enter a government organization that has a specific technical function whether it be to administer a specific program such as issuing license plates or oversee the water quality of the public water resources, we cannot make decisions directly to the political considerations discarding the technical facts. We have to consider the technical facets that have to be addressed. Unless the technical facets are somehow adequately addressed in the final solution they will come back and haunt us again and again such that our problem never seems to go away no matter how adequate the political aspects are satisfied.

But what is discussed here is true for any organization. Most people are educated in isolation from the real world such that what we learn in the classroom does not always quite work the way we expect in the real world for a variety of reason. In many cases it is simply because the environment of the real world causes us to face one or more equally competing technologies that deal with different sets of issues. The most obvious competing technologies in the commercial world is the technology for how money is made based on economic theories and actual technical details of whatever produce or service we are producing.

Related topics
The issue of identifying and meeting true organizational needs

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