> Maybe the problem will go away on its own. How many younger people read the manual for their cell phones, or a video game? And yet they figure it out anyway,

> Maybe the problem will go away on its own. How many younger people read the manual for their cell phones, or a video game? And yet they figure it out anyway, by exploring. I agree, this seems to be a problem I notice far more intrinsic to older generations. I'm going to give another anecdote (I'm full of them today, see my other post in this subject): I once worked a very interesting job where we staffed people who traveled with an extremely sophisticated technology package into a workspace, and literally "embedded" as a super-user of the package, who acted as the user-lead for the package, and got the rest of the users up to speed by solving real world problems. There were literally dozens of components, pieces of software, data sources, etc. The data flow graph of the system covered a wall when printed out on a plotter. Between cycles acting as a super user, we'd rotate on a cycle of training new hires (about an 8 week training cycle) to do this job. Intrinsically it was a problem solving job. You'd go to a site with the package, and when the users had problems, you'd craft a solution. Over time, you'd more or less build a work book of solutions to most of the common issues that particular user team would see. From time to time we'd end up with an "older" person filling that position and going through training. I ended up on a couple of the training rotations with these folks, all great guys, but simply unable to put together a solution to very simple problems. To the person, every one of them asked us to build out a procedure manual covering all these various problem solving exercises. Let me repeat that, they wanted to field novel problem solving questions by looking them up in a procedure manual for the appropriate solution. We're talking about a system with dozens of components, each of which with an operating manual the size of a phone book, and an 8 week training course covering thousands of slides, dozens of exercises, review, scoring, scenarios, private discussion etc. If a procedure manual could have existed for every conceivable problem scenario, it would have been tens upon tens of thousands of pages. They simply couldn't fathom not having a procedure manual. And to the man, they left shortly after ending up in their field assignments because they "couldn't solve any problems and didn't have a procedure manual". Other than being a terrible waste of everybody's time, it was a repeatable pattern time and time again. Whenever we hired somebody over about 50, they always seemed to fall back in the need for procedures. And as you've said, that's a terribly brittle kind of knowledge.