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Practical wisdom

By Steven Schwartz - posted Wednesday, 5 January 2022


Julie Lloyd, 59 years old, was flying to Canada from London. With her grey hair and warm smile, she looked like a kindly grandmother. But looks, as they say, can be deceiving. To the ever-alert security staff at London's Gatwick airport, Julie was a potential terrorist who brazenly tried to smuggle a gun aboard a flight to Toronto.

Perhaps "smuggle" is not quite the right word. Julie didn't conceal the weapon; it was in the handbag she submitted for airport scanning. "Gun" is also not entirely accurate. The firearm in question was 6 centimetres long; it was held in the hands of a small plastic soldier. The toy was a present for Julie's husband, a former army signaller. She remonstrated with the security agent: "The gun is made of resin; it has no moving parts. There is no hole in the barrel; there isn't even a trigger."

Of course, the security officer could see all this for himself. Nevertheless, he insisted the tiny toy was a "firearm" and prevented Julie from taking it aboard the plane. In response to a journalist's question, a spokesperson for Gatwick airport admitted the story sounds "incredibly stupid" but explained that "rules are rules, and we must obey."

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I had a brush with "rules are rules" thinking when I visited the Sydney office of Medibank Private Health Insurance after an extended stay abroad. I explained that I had been living in another country but had returned home and wanted to re-activate my health insurance.

"No problem," said the clerk behind the desk. "All we need is proof that you have returned to Australia."

"Well," I replied, "This office is in Sydney, and Sydney is in Australia. I am sitting right in front of you. Isn't that sufficient evidence that I am in Australia?"

"Not really," she said, "we need documentary proof."

To prove that I was not an apparition, I offered to let the clerk pinch me. Alas, the lady was not for turning. Until she saw an arrival stamp in my passport, a luggage tag, or a boarding pass, there would be no health insurance for me.

You may think these are minor irritants, risible stories that cause little harm. But sometimes, blind rule-following can lead to severe consequences. A teenage boy on a hike became lost in remote bushland west of Sydney. Exhausted and dehydrated, he made multiple calls to the emergency service from his mobile phone. The boy pleaded with the operator to send someone to rescue him, but no help was dispatched. The emergency service's rules specified a particular requirement: the caller had to provide an address or at least the name of the nearest cross street. The boy was lost in the bush well off the beaten track. There were no cross-streets; there were no roads of any kind. Eventually, the boy's phone battery died. By the time he was located, it was too late. He was dead. The boy may have died anyway, but hidebound adherence to a work protocol turned a dangerous situation into a deadly one.

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At the subsequent inquest, the emergency service manager agreed that his operators had been "fixated" with obtaining a street address but explained that this was required by their training. The supervisor may not have realised it, but he had put his finger on one of the oldest controversies in teaching-the difference between training and education, between acquiring technical skills and becoming wise.

The airport security officer who refused to distinguish a toy gun from a real one, the health insurance clerk who would not accept my corporeal presence as evidence that I was in Australia, and the emergency call operators who delayed help to a lost boy were all carefully trained. They knew the protocols; understood the systems, and stuck to the rules-whether they applied or not.

Thanks to Covid-19, blind adherence to rules has become commonplace over the past two years. Governments have issued numerous health orders to mitigate the spread of the virus. Because the health restrictions left little room for judgement, children could not visit their dying parents, police meted out fines for infractions such as sitting alone on a park bench eating a kebab, and a child died because state borders were closed even for those in desperate need of medical care.

We often hear about a national "skills" shortage: too few plumbers, computer scientists, or doctors. We must increase the skill level of our working population so that we can compete in the "knowledge economy." (Is there somewhere an economy based on ignorance?) To alleviate skill shortages, we have significantly increased expenditure on schools and expanded universities. These initiatives are well-intentioned, but it is not sufficient to train people in a narrow set of skills. Real-world problems are rarely cut and dry; they are often ambiguous and ill-defined. It is impossible to have a rule for every contingency. A wise person knows how and when to improvise and when to make an exception to the rules.

Wisdom is not something you can learn from a book or a lecture; it takes experience, reflection, and self-knowledge. Still, even brilliant people will appear hopelessly stupid if rigid work rules keep them from using their judgement. We need workers who can discern the right thing to do in different situations, and we need workplaces that encourage employees to use their judgement when exceptional circumstances arise.

A psychologist called Barry Schwartz (a great speaker and extremely smart, but no relation) says that workers require "practical wisdom." He illustrates this idea with an example. It involves a group of hospital janitors whose job descriptions list their duties as mopping floors, cleaning up, dumping the rubbish, and the like. Sounds reasonable; these are the tasks janitors are employed to do. Notice, however, that not once is human interaction mentioned. Their job description could just as easily apply to robots.

But janitors are not robots. They have frequent contact with the sick and the dying and their visitors. To do their jobs well, they must go beyond standard work protocols. For example, clinic work rules required janitors to vacuum the waiting room carpet every afternoon. However, one afternoon, a janitor noticed that a husband, who had been waiting anxiously all night for news of his sick wife, had fallen asleep. Rather than switch on the vacuum cleaner and wake the husband, the janitor decided to skip this part of his routine and come back later.

Here's another example. A janitor assigned to mop the floor of a hospital corridor stopped because a patient was out of her bed, getting a little exercise, trying to build up her strength, walking slowly down the hall.

These acts may seem minor, but kindness, care, and empathy make patients feel better and help hospitals achieve their aims. It is worth repeating; janitors are not robots skilled at cleaning up. They have the practical wisdom to vary work routines to accommodate exceptional circumstances. They have what Aristotle called moral will (wanting to do the right thing) and moral skill (knowing how and when to do it).

The emergency operators who kept asking the boy lost in the blue mountains for the cross street may have had the moral will to do the right thing, but they lacked moral skill, or, more accurately, their rigid work rules did not allow them to use the moral skill they possessed.

Neither moral will nor moral skill has much to do with education. Janitors with minimal schooling can have both, while highly educated people may have neither.

Consider, for example, the demoralising scandals surrounding the politicians and health bureaucrats who blithely ignored the severe Covid-19 restrictions they imposed on others. These elites enjoyed parties, travel, and opportunities for intimacy while ordinary people were forced to stay home, often alone, for weeks or even months.

Curiously, no one seems surprised that these scandals involved people who attended prestigious universities. Similarly, the financiers who precipitate financial crises with their shabby schemes are often graduates of leading business schools. They have the practical skills needed to do their jobs, but many are deficient in moral will and moral skill.

Moral will and moral skill are as important as specific job-related knowledge. As the great Victorian-era author and artist John Ruskin said - "the highest reward for people's toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it."

How can universities help students gain moral will and moral skill? Universities are not churches; they are not in the business of saving souls. But, universities can still help students learn about ethics by creating an ethical community that provides a solid ethical role model for students. A university that minimises conflicts of interest, supports open inquiry and encourages constructive dissent can profoundly affect students' moral development.

In his discussion of moral will, Barry Schwartz quotes President Barack Obama's first inaugural address in which he appealed to the American people to show virtue.

Virtue is a lovely old-fashioned word. President Obama essentially asked his countrymen to be good people. But, asking people to be good is not enough. We also need to make it possible for them to act wisely.

Employers need to empower all workers, whatever their job, to use their moral wisdom to benefit their clients, colleagues, and communities. And society at large must reward people who use good judgement. We need to make them heroes and tell their stories to anyone who will listen.

Of course, workers must be highly trained; we all benefit from having a skilled workforce. Still, it is worth remembering that no matter how much money and effort we invest in training, practical wisdom will remain the rarest and most important skill of all.

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This article was first published on Wiser Every Day.



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About the Author

Emeritus Professor Steven Schwartz AM is the former vice-chancellor of Macquarie University (Sydney), Murdoch University (Perth), and Brunel University (London).

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