28.1. Introduction

The principle of work-linked training is brilliant, in the sense that it is exactly adjusted to the need for what is nowadays called “agility”. Here’s why.

As its name suggests, the principle of work-linked training consists of a regular round trip between theory, or learning on the school bench, and practice, or in concreto tests in a workshop, office, factory, etc. However, it is crucial for organizations to acquire the means to take a long-term perspective, that is, to take the necessary distance to consider strategic issues in a global context. No one can now navigate with a minimum of chances of working towards the sustainability of an organization without integrating the long term into managerial and operational arrangements. This in turn allows the integration of uncertainty, contradictions, possible emerging markets, competitors, customers, suppliers and new interlocutors – in short, the complexity of the current economic, social and political reality. And it is in such a context, that the same organizations are systematically taken up with the short term, or the need to deliver or perform in the immediate future, to such an extent that the spontaneous dynamics of organizations are even, however they exist and whatever discourse one may hold on the need for a long-term or exclusively short-term stance. That is, a results-oriented one, or one based on short-term production and meeting the requirements of all stakeholders. In private companies in particular – the demands of their owners – i.e. shareholders, and shareholders – want to maximize their profits hic et nunc, constantly, and not later and elsewhere.

How do “all apprentices” respond to the problem of short-term/long-term tension that we have just outlined?

To understand, it is necessary to go through a careful understanding of the notion of the learning curve.

28.2. The challenges of the learning curve: the structural ambivalence of competencies

The acquisition of skills can be approached from the example of learning to drive. As we all know, it is not enough to learn to drive, to know or to learn the theory, i.e. the Highway Code. However, it is still necessary to know how to drive a car, in other words, in practice. But how do we learn to drive a car, if not by practicing, that is, by trying to do so, under the attentive and instructive eye of an instructor? As the tests progress, if everything goes normally, the principles and rules set out at the theoretical level in the code gradually become part of our body as mechanisms, becoming reflexes. This means that the practice leads to an internalization of the rules that move from reflection to reflex, and this according to a well-known process in several stages. When you are indifferent to driving, you may not know how to drive, and you may not pay attention to it. In other words, you may not make it a “problem” that you cannot drive, to such an extent that you don’t even think about it, or you don’t know that you can’t drive. Not knowing how to drive (or not knowing anything) is at first sight totally ignored or a non-event.

Then we want to learn to drive when the time comes, and know that we can’t drive – it’s a first step towards the possibility of questioning and examining the project. And ignorance about the practice of driving continues while learning the theory if one has decided to take the driving test. As long as we only know the principles and rules in terms of conscious, voluntary, deliberate, explicit and rational reflection, and as long as we are in the learning phase, we know that we do not yet know how to drive. But we know, shall we say, more and more precisely, since we are integrating the theory that should make it possible, once practice has been tried, to drive a car or any vehicle (with the appropriate driving license).

When we begin to learn to apply theory in practice, there comes a time when we have sufficiently integrated the necessary reflexes into theory to know that we have succeeded in learning in practice to apply the principles and rules of conduct. Then you know that you can drive. However, ultimate learning leads systematically to a last step, which is that the principles and rules of conduct are applied so well that driving is eventually integrated as a “normal” reflex behavior, to the point of no longer having to think about it in order to carry it out. This is how we can consider that we have really learned to drive, that is, at the point that we no longer have to think about it to do so.

Before continuing the examination of apprenticeships and answering the question of why “all apprentices” are strategically, managerially and operationally brilliant, it is useful to make a brief analysis of what we have just approached, which concerns any apprenticeship, and, let us say, any human.

By saying that the apprentice learning to drive ends up having integrated as “normal” the practical operations of driving, we are saying something essential about humanity. The oldest philosophies, wherever they come from, as well as the most modern, affirm something decisive about human “nature”, which is precisely that there is no human “nature” given or accomplished from the outset. Without going into the details of millenary discussions and controversies, this can be summarily formulated by saying, as the Greek philosopher Aristotle does, that man is a “stupid” animal – stupid in the sense of weak. It can be formulated by saying otherwise, that man is spontaneously or naturally de-natured. To be denatured means not being spontaneously endowed with physical defenses on the one hand, which would allow man (obviously women and men, in the generic sense of the term) to ensure his survival on the material level (to defend himself, to be an effective predator, to protect himself from the bad weather, to protect his offspring from it, etc.), nor are there any “psychological” defenses, i.e. the instinct or memory necessary for effective evolution in one’s environment. We humans are born without the instinct to orient ourselves and the body is not physically capable of defense. We are born in the strong “naked” sense, i.e. vulnerable and without orientation. However, it is precisely this weakness that makes our potential infinite because, being nothing, we can become everything. And we become potentially everything possible, precisely because we are able to learn all that is possible to learn. In this sense, we have no limits. We do not evolve spontaneously – i.e. instinctively, and according to a body that is always already equipped with its means of life and survival – in a given environment. We are potentially capable of all environments, including extra-terrestrial environments, if we properly equip ourselves, with both the techniques and the culture necessary for their use.

The main point has just been made that allows us to clarify the relationship we have with what is “normal”. If we think about it carefully, returning to the example of learning to drive, we can observe that someone who knows how to drive – and to such an extent that he or she no longer needs to think about it to do so – is in the situation of having integrated the principles and rules of driving, to such an extent that not only has he or she integrated, through practice, the reflexes necessary for the real driving of real vehicles. But that this has become the set of rules and principles of driving, because the practical integration of theory amounts to an incorporation of the principles and rules of driving. Thus understood, learning is about becoming the rules and principles we learn, with any task, operation and behavior combined. This observation can be generalized by saying that our bodies are saturated with norms that we have learned since childhood, and that we continue to learn throughout our lives, as long as we remain “learners”. It can be said philosophically that human nudity is constantly being covered up, and we are constantly dressing ourselves with rules, principles and practices that give us the means to orient ourselves and to survive within our environment.

We can now continue our analysis of why “all apprentices” are great.

Of course, doing something without thinking about it is dangerous. It is through reflection, questioning, doubt and theories that we humans succeed in doing things right, and in doing the right thing – including, of course, if not par excellence, on an ethical or moral level. We see here the human reality “stretched” on all levels, including the level of the effectiveness of any action and operation, according to a “tension” that can be described as ontological. Because, at the same time, in order to master something (an operation, a language, professional relations, etc.), we need to have learned it so well in reality, in practice, that we do what we do without having to think about it in order to do it, and at the same time, if we do not think about what we do by doing it and just do it, there is a good chance that we will pass it on to something possibly essential, and we will fail. Road safety, to return to the example of driving, is well aware of this, which underlines that it is precisely when you are too sure of yourself when driving your vehicle that you run the greatest risk of having an accident.

We can say that the previous observation leads us to define man even more than on the basis of the simple “nudity” encountered earlier. We are born “naked” in every sense of the word, and we spend our lives – and certainly our childhood – learning, incorporating norms that become so deeply embedded that they are tacit evidence to us, that certain things “go without saying”, guide our behaviors, values, priorities, etc. On the other hand, we are regularly attacked, questioned and pushed – especially in our globalized world – by everything that is different from us and that “challenges” our evidence. The encounter of any difference, in the diversity of cultures, provokes a possible necessary questioning of our values, behaviors or evidence learned. This means that we are both “always having learned something” and in the process of learning something else. In any case, if I may say so, at best. That is to say, we are always already endowed with a certain “culture”, or certain practices and values or associated priorities on the one hand, and with potential questioning of the said practices and values on the other. We are in a permanent imbalance. Both based on evidence that has become unconscious and reflexes as a result of being repeated and experienced – put into practice and thus made “normal”, normative and incorporated as such, and cantilevered, with regard to everything we do not know “yet”.

This is humanity, not only “naked”, but at the same time initially naked, then saturated with norms and constantly learning new things. This is what the philosopher Rousseau had in mind when he spoke of man’s “infinite malleability” (in the generic sense of the term, of course). If we symbolize the culture we acquire in childhood as the solid ground on which we stand, we can say that we are always both stable and firmly standing on the solid ground of our certainties, and in imbalance, as if about to take a step forward or sideways towards other certainties, other behaviors, other priorities, other values. Walking, dancing or any other movement thus symbolizes man, or what makes mankind human. The paleoanthropologist Anne Dambricourt-Malasse points this out well in her understanding of the cerebellum as the central organ of anticipation that, located, in some way, “nowhere” or not on a solid foundation within our body, is paradoxically at the same time the organ of our definitive verticalization¹.

Let us now return to the “all apprentices” motto.

28.3. The vital nature of the integration by all of a learning position

As we mentioned at the beginning, organization is spontaneously carried out in the short term, if not in an exclusive short-termism. As the 2008 financial crisis shows, exclusive short-termism is more than dangerous and deleterious to the common life of women and men. However, to satisfy the requirements of the short term – i.e. to “deliver” – it is essential to secure the operations of which we are the author. In other words, when we are subject to the short-term injunctions of our interlocutors or partners, whoever they may be, the spontaneous tendency is to control what we do to ensure its most immediate, maximum, visible and constant effectiveness. However, the new one is not controlled. What we do not yet know is obviously never immediately given to us as certain evidence of which we would be sure of the maximum, immediate, constant and visible effectiveness. What we know best is what we know “already” or even “always already”. The operations we best master are those that we have internalized to the most intimate level as a matter of course, and ideally have been for a long time. Without going into the details of time limits, we can say that when we are subject to the short-term injunctions of our entourage – and this is increasingly the case in organizations in the globalized context of ours and that of companies and organizations – in order to meet these requirements, we spontaneously, and most often unconsciously, tend to do what we already know how to do. In other words, to react reflexively to injunctions without taking the necessary distance to a relevant reflection that would allow us to adjust the offer or the answers to be given to the requests made to us. When we want to satisfy the requirements of our interlocutors, whoever they may be, the spontaneous tendency is to reflexively repeat known operations (of any kind, including intellectual ones).

It goes without saying that this is potentially catastrophic at any level, be it organizational, individual, personal or professional, because it means that, contrary to what is required by necessary long-term attention, we then take refuge in what we already know – namely our past experiences, and become unable to open ourselves up to the present and to the present of what is happening now, and in the future, i.e. fundamentally to the unknown. Sticking to what we already know how to do is tantamount to paralyzing all life – and not just the economic life of companies. This is where an apprenticeship, and “all apprentices”, take on their full meaning. Because what does a work-linked training process involve? Specifically, training apprentices to move continuously from the potentially reflexive implementation of known operations (this is the practical part of any apprenticeship teaching) to a “theoretical” perspective that allows them to understand what they are doing, how they are doing it and the limits of the skills and operations they have learned. Work-linked training is the ideal way to learn about learning. For learning consists, if we take seriously what we have discovered above about the humanity of humans, not only of learning something to the point of making it part of our own body by internalizing the norms, rules and principles of given operations and actions but also of unlearning some of them, i.e. of questioning them in order to relearn others, still unknown and therefore new. It is not a question of undoing everything in order to do it all over again. It is a matter of undoing some things (just by re-naming them, when they had become “obvious” and “go without saying”), in order to do others. “We don’t do it all over again”, as the popular saying goes. Only if you “get rid of” can you specify to “get back on” (e.g. a health).

What we have just outlined suggests that language, when properly used, for example to describe skills, partially undoes what is taken tacitly or silently for granted, and de facto frees up a new learning opportunity. In this horizon, we can suggest the significant fertility of the simple question that everyone can ask around them about the skills of others: “What can you do?” In addition to the fact that this question presupposes that the other person knows how to do something in one way or another, and therefore recognizes him or her as competent, it frees up the place at the new cost of an awareness of what we can do, and by helping to identify the limit of what we can do, it finally frees up the possibility of learning something new that we cannot yet do.

28.4. Conclusion

Work-linked training, which leads apprentices to do something, then to take the necessary distance to “undo” what is not yet fully adjusted, in order to learn even better new aspects of the skills to be acquired, represents training – if not the ultimate learning of the tension – to be constantly replayed between reflexes that are by definition, spontaneous and unconscious, and deliberate, conscious and voluntary reflection. “All apprentices” means everyone becoming all learners, without ever subjecting oneself to the exclusive and paralyzing repetition of what one already knows. It is in this sense and in this fundamental sense that asking everyone to be apprentices is brilliant at all levels, managerial, operational, strategic – and ultimately as much at the personal as the professional level.

Chapter written by Laurent BIBARD.