Bramstrup Performing Arts 2007

Masterclass - The revival of apprenticeship in building up leadership

Acquiring Mastery

“Mastery,” this year’s theme at Bramstrup, invokes a collection of principles, processes, and practices

that can be learned. A person might become a “master” though it won’t be easy. The path to mastery is clear, at least in its broadest outlines: training, practice, experience. Mastery has little to do with mystical powers, miraculous transformations, or romantic illusions. For one thing, the work’s to hard, too centered in the practical world, too dependent on focused devotion.

To become a master, one must first apprentice, must learn by following the example of a master. While the appearances of any work process are available to all, deeply knowledgeable understanding, mastery, comes only to those steeped in the lore and wisdom of the craft, who have derived principles, not from precepts, but from practice, under the patiently relentless guidance of a master. In such learning, there’s no step-by-step template, no quantifiable developments of isolated skills or learning of facts. The deep learning of apprenticeship is almost all non-verbal: in fact, it’s not discursive at all. It exists in doing, not in language about doing.

In modern societies, we’ve seen a gradual decline in this kind of learning, and a development of distance between doing and thinking. The intellectual lure of abstraction and the constant commercial pressure towards economies of scale have led our culture first to separate thinking about how to do work from the actual doing of it. This separation, at first metaphysical, became actual as control over work processes moved from the factory floor to the design center in another building. From that other building, it’s easy value a white collar over a blue one. However, as we strive in business contexts to create the new and valuable, the wisdom of doing and doing again re-surfaces as a way of achieving the “un-word-able” process of mastery.

Bramstrup Performing Arts is being produced and oganized by Exart Performances.

Further information about Bramstrup Performing Arts, please contact Peter Hanke 39761108 – exart@exart.dk and www.exart.org