The Art and Science of Science and Art
Over the weekend, an acquaintance recounted how one of her graduate courses got derailed on the delineation between science and art. I didn’t think a whole lot of it at the time — other than “ah, this is a common thing for professors when they’re just not up to giving the lecture they’d planned” — and then it came up in a meeting today. And when I say “came up,” I mean that we had 50ish people from at least four states attending this meeting… and it came up in reference to it being a major discussion point at a leadership conference most all of our senior management, all the way up to our (fabulous, as in “I am honestly glad to be in her organization”) CIO had gone to back in January.
At this point, as a shareholder in the corporation known as My Employer, I am a bit concerned. The spectrum of not-hard-science to not-high-art does not seem a difficult thing to understand*:
- Science is following the rules that you don’t know how to appropriately bend or break and
- Art is the manipulation of the rules that you do know how to appropriately bend or break.
From this it necessarily follows that
- Stagnation comes from treating Art as Science and
- Screwing Up is treating Science as Art.
Referencing back to the anecdote from the weekend, given a wall and a can of whitewash, would whitewashing the wall count as art? Usually not. Whitewashing walls is usually a matter of following basic rules of manual labor to achieve a tangible result rather than manipulating rules or constraints to alter the expected outcome of the task. It is the science of whitewashing a wall and the art of adding a jaunty green stripe in the lower left corner (but don’t do it now that I’ve mentioned exactly what to do because it doesn’t count anymore). Now some whitewashers who are particularly good (or maybe just overpaid; see also Chasing Amy’s opening discussion on inking versus tracing for the hyperbolic form of this) might contend that their intentional strict adherence to rules should qualify their work as art, but I would disagree — their work, so long as it intentionally maintains predetermined boundaries, is high craft, not art. I don’t think there’s any shame in that — I prefer it when the code I write comes out as being well crafted rather than being pure art because I never have to regret being a good craftsman. It’s the artistic stuff I occasionally go back to a month later and wonder “WTF was I thinking?” (It’s rare, but I’d be lying if I claimed it didn’t happen.)
But I know what I was thinking, really. I was thinking that there has to be a more-clever way. And that, more than just pressing luck, is a very human sort of instinct. It doesn’t matter whether you’re thinking about Danny Boyle’s assertion that films shouldn’t be too perfect, or just recalling almost the first thing that the Bible teaches about humans: if there’s a rule to break — even just one! — we’ll break it. But there’s a chance that I, or Danny Boyle, or whoever, did get the more-clever way they were looking for and did achieve a kind of art in the process. More likely Mr. Boyle than I, but that’s not the point. The point is that the potential for the not-high-art is in the twisting of what other people believe to be rules in ways that almost certainly creates flaws — there are, of course, varying degrees of consequences for not following rules — which are entirely acceptable in the service of achieving the outcome you desire. Whether it’s Art or Screwing Up is entirely dependent on how successful you were at predicting the consequences of the rules you bent or broke in the process.
So when asked whether whatever abstract whatnot — say, “leadership” — is a science or an art, the answer is clearly “all of the above.” The goal is to grow out from treating it as a science so you and those dependent on you don’t stagnate, but not push it so hard as an art that you’re actively screwing up. And even with this advice, you will not only screw up on some days, but people will get bored and wander off to avoid stagnation on others. It happens to everybody which is how you know that whatever abstract concept you have to ask about is neither science nor art exclusively. As a for-example, just ask Mr. Lopp about the art and science of hiring Jesse. Or read his book which makes him come across as like a disciple of DeMarco with ADD — though, to be clear, as a fan of both DeMarco and Lopp, I mean it in the geekiest possible way.
So it’s only appropriate that I also conclude this post in the geekiest possible way with thinking about the reality we inhabit and the rules of science as we know them, and the 1999 movie The Matrix which posited that “Some of their rules can be bent, others can be broken.” To wit: Mr. Anderson was about the science of living while Neo was about the art of it.
* – That is, for those not actively afflicted with the Curse of Greyface.