Practitioner thinking is tacit; it needs to be explicit in order to help people view their careers differently

In most systems people take a “skill” and at the most an “attitude” view of things. This is what the current notion of competence is. The most common model in use is K-S-A (Knowledge-Skill-Attitude).

However, human systems really succeed when they have outstanding “practitioners”. This is what is called “professionals”; i.e., someone who has learnt a “practice” and is working on that practice.

A great lawyer, for example, is a practitioner of law; some of the good engineers are practitioners of engineering. This need not necessarily be a degree. However our educational system is way out of real “engineering practitioners”. It is actually producing either skills or some knowledge, and sometimes only knowledge (not even skills). There is a big difference between this and practitioners.

Practitioners become the real “experts” – not experts in the narrow sense of having a high position, but experts who really solve problems and do things.

It is possible to model their expertise and share it with people when it is seen from the point of view of  classes of solutions that they are solving, classes of challenges, classes of issues, and so on – which can be modeled out if done carefully. These are tacit models not explicit models.