Slides from Neil Denny's after dinner keynote at LPI's Learning and development conference. Get Artisan provides a framework to help us to deal with the conflict between a desire to do excellent work versus an expectation of mediocrity, the conflict between the desire to live a fully realised life versus the half life and the conflict between merely doing a shift and making the shift. Neil Denny is an international speaker, mediator and trainer. You can contact him via www.neildenny.com/contact

1. @neildenny
#GetArtisan

2. What is
craftsmanship?
“The desire to do a job well for its own sake”
“To breathe life into noble or beautiful work that
inspires”

3. But why bother?
Barbie
vs
Pinocchio

4. Trying to work
without craft is
like working
with a shrug
Photo credit www.wikipedia.org/wiki/shrug

5. 3 Characteristics
of craftsmanship
1. Connection
2. Complexity
3. Autonomy

6. Connection on 3
levels
1. Self
2. Profession or trade
3. Tools and materials

7. Constellation of theories
Core values and
beliefs
Theories
Practice
Outcomes
From Lang and Taylor’s
The Making of a
Mediator

8. Connection with
profession?
Governance
Transfer
Excellence

9. The guilds’
hierarchy

10. “A federation of autonomous
workshops”
Informal and formal guilds.
If your guild
doesn’t serve
you,
build your own.

11. Guilds were
structures to hold a
state of not
knowing.

12. The delicious
discomfort in not
knowing; curiosity,
playfulness,
invention.

13. Within the dark soil of our
incompetence lies the seeds
of our excellence
The guilds served as nurseries in which
to nurture that potential

14. John
Ruskin
1819-1900

15. Imagine, for a moment

16. The artisan is connected
with tools and materials –
physically, intellectually and
subjectively.
How about us?

17. Complexity;
Because all of this
is really tough.
@PhilWIlcox’s blog post “Its time to choose”?
Heifetz – “Above and below the neck line”

18. Pursue complexity.
Challenge it and yourself.
Grow.

19. Complexity is found
vertically and horizontally –
the next adjacent possibility
(Steven Johnson Where Good Ideas Come
From)

20. Coping with resistance
“Imagine a successful
outcome at same time as
temporarily suspending
the need for one.” Richard Sennett The
Craftsman

21. Identify and work
with the
resistance…

22. Be the gopher
“I have to think like an animal and whenever possible, look like one”

23. Autonomy
The artisan defines their role and method through
connection to their core values and principles and in
relation to the profession.
Critically they take responsibility and are accountable
to self and to peers.

24. Autonomy
The product, the work or service
becomes its own thing
“to do a job well for its own sake”
It is brought to life

25. Autonomy
The VALUE of the work defines
itself…

26. Autonomy
The VALUE of the work defines
itself…

27. All old work has been hard work. It
may be the hard work of children,
of barbarians, of rustics; but it is
always their utmost.
Ours has as constantly the look of
money’s worth, of a stopping short
wherever and whenever we can, of
a lazy compliance with low
conditions; never of a fair putting
forth of our strength.

28. Let us have done with this kind of work
at once: cast off every temptation to do
it: do not let us degrade ourselves
voluntarily, and then mutter and mourn
over our short comings; let us confess
our poverty and our parsimony, but not
belie our human intellect.
It is not even a question of
how much we are to do, but of how it is
to be done; it is not a question of doing
more, but of doing better.

29. Excellence vs Mediocrity
Fulfilled life vs half life
Doing a shift vs Making the shift

30. neil@neildenny.com