The Earn-out

Imagine an infantry battalion where the soldiers were each missing a leg. Sure, they’d do their best to compensate with technology, training, and attitude, but still, but still…

It just doesn’t work, does it?

The simple truth is that in general, soldiers need two legs. For certain professions, you need particular personal attributes. Pilots, for example, require excellent vision. Dentists and surgeons need superior manual steadiness and dexterity. Golf professionals need– well, I’m not sure, but I do know I don’t have it.

But notwithstanding the obvious proposition that every profession calls for skill sets as well as knowledge, many professions credential their members entirely, or almost entirely, on subject matter knowledge. In other words, to become a lawyer or a patent agent, you sit exams in which your success depends mostly on how well you have memorized specialized content and memorized past exams.

To put it another way, there’s every likelihood that an average laptop with the right data could pass the Bar Exams. Certainly artificial intelligence could, especially now that it has become cunning. And as we have recently seen, a whole class of accounting students had to re-write their take-home Ethics exam because a significant number of them had passed around the answer set. Hmmmmm…..

The problem with a subject-matter-expertise-centric approach to training and qualifying professionals is twofold. First, we end up with professionals who know all the answers, but can’t match them with real questions. Second, if mere subject matter knowledge is the best we can do, we can (and should) be replaced by artificial intelligence.

The secret key to professional excellence is unique, individual, personal skill. Jascha Heifetz was not the greatest violinist of all time because he knew about violins or music theory– he was the greatest violinist because of his innate ability to play the violin, an inborn skill shaped by experience, and perfected by training- his Gifting.

But as for me, if I were to have had Heifetz’ experience and training, I would at best a mediocre fiddler. Why? Because I don’t have even a shred of inborn ability to play a violin, or for that matter, any other instrument.

We let anybody with strong academics, no criminal record, and a good LSAT score get into law school, and if they can remember enough about trusts and some Law Latin, they can sit the Bar Exam and join the profession. To some degree, this is true of most other professions.

That the new lawyer would lose an argument with a cat, won’t shut up long enough to hear what the client is trying to say, or couldn’t draft a restaurant menu without using boilerplate, is of no consequence to the Law Society.

“But,” you say, “the Articling Experience takes care of that!” Well, perhaps it does, but it’s a damned shame it comes after six years of university and hundreds of thousands of dollars of student debt. And to be honest, not all articling experiences are created equal. Some students are lucky and find mentors who unpack the skills and aptitudes that will be needed in real life. More often than not, though, the articling experience is an unstructured, haphazard, and random meandering during which it is hoped that osmosis will instill a handful of survival skills. Go in a caterpillar, come forth a butterfly, one prays.

If the best we can do is absorb and process subject matter, we will and should be supplanted by artificial intelligence. But if we are canny, and curious, analyzers and questioners, problem solvers and trouble-shooters, AI will be our tool and our servant, just as iPads and laptops and mainframes and databases and dictaphones and carbon paper have been our servants.

We need to be intuitive analyzers and fixers. Subject matter knowledge is the tool we use, not the skill we apply.