Knowledge became free
Why operational capability became the scarce resource of technical work, at the exact moment it became invisible to every existing instrument.
For seventy years, the scarce resource in technical work was knowledge. The entire competence industry — training, degrees, certifications, technical interviews — rests on one assumption: knowledge is scarce, therefore measuring it measures capability.
That assumption is dead.
What did not become abundant
The ability to act correctly inside a real, unfamiliar, partly broken system, under uncertainty and time pressure. Deciding when the documentation is wrong. When the error message lies. When two things are broken and the second one hides the first.
Call it operational capability.
Three propositions
- Capability is not knowledge you transmit. It is a trace you leave by acting.
- The real cannot be simulated. A simulation is a claim about what might go wrong; reality is what does go wrong.
- Every proxy measure is eventually optimised against.
Only one measure resists: the one where the instrument and the work are the same object. You cannot game "is the service back up". To pass the measure, you must do the work.
We stop asking people what they know. We hand them a real, broken system, and we record what they do with it.