Theory, experience and thinking method

Wherever a fossilized life disclosed, there must be masses of rules.
---- Nietzsche

Life and the real world have infinite details and are impossible to be analyses completely, everyone hence can only digest a snapshot for his specific purpose. And the inevitable distortion during this process is the source of many errors and misunderstandings which are hard to find.

Theoretical frameworks are just one kind of these snapshots, the only difference between the frameworks and other snapshots is that they've been strictly organized to be self-completed in their own logic system and certified by the authorities.

Of course we can't deny the importance and usage of them, since these magnificent systems are built up by the former genius with great efforts to solve the complicated problems, and the power of these theories have been proved by the observed evidences.

But the problem is, nowadays, most people tend to believe these theories are the completed rules and truths, and they used to apply the conclusions of these theories without the understanding of the basic assumptions, of the main forces and limitations shaped the evolution of the thoughts, and of the occasions on which the nature born distortion in the theory would lead to errors.

I believe that is the reason why management veterans contempt for the theory gurus and consider the jungle experience the only source of skills. They don't trust any second-hand knowledge and think any digest and abstraction is a loss of the reality, and they even claim that the truth of management can't be retrieved without diving into the field.

Can the management insights be learned indirectly? In fact, I think most pragmatic and complicated knowledge in the real life management can divided into 2 realms which I call the "hardcore" knowledge and the "softcore" skills. I label the "hardcore" knowledge as the subjects which provide toolset, such as the economics, the mathematics and etc. And the "softcore" skills, are in fact the mindsets which is for setup new "theory"s in the short time, for instance, on how to solve the problem of performance deduce in my development team, we usually identify, learn, solve, and forget them in short time, and these activities include most of our daily works. And I think that there are 2 points when we improve our "softcore" skills.

Firstly, I think the blind abuse of the theory is stupid and it is vital to realize that anyone has to pay if they pay no effort on studying the context and the limitation of the framework they use. The way I prefer is to "re-find" the theory in the specific context, that is, try to solve the problem with the specific limitation in the context without the help of existed theory, and explored the solution with the comparison between the solution and the theory to combine the context and the existed wisdom together.

On the other hand, I can't accept the claim that the experience is some kind of myth and can't be learned indirectly. And I don't believe that the experienced people without thinking have any advantage above the green hand who are smart.

In my opinion, the experience in use is no more than the real life story plus reasonable thinking method. As to the real life story, I think it can be found and refined by the experienced masters in the areas; if these gurus who are familiar with most aspects of the realms couldn't retrieve the useful info from the real life, I can' t believe a common person with experience can do so.

So, I believe the most important factor whenever practicing and learning the management is the thinking method which is the meta skills for solving any problem. We should improve our thinking method continuously and utilize it to analyze the problems. And never believe the rules are rules.