Why learn theory

Why learn theory? We were bringing our daughter back from an arts camp in northern Michigan. As we talked about music, her lessons and teachers, pieces, performances, and ensembles, we also talked about her music practice (music theory and music history) class. And as a musician, while music practice was a welcome and sometimes entertaining break, she asked why we learn theory.

All practical domains have an underlying theory. Theory is how a domain understands its environment and how practitioners and researchers interact with its environment. For example, knowing the fire triangle (oxygen, fuel, heat) enables firefighters approaching a scene to assess how best to control and contain a fire while ensuring the safety of people in the area. Planning looks a capability and capacity and how to employ these to turn strategic and operational goals into resource allocation and actions over time.

What does theory give you? First, it helps explain why things work or do not work. Theory provides the basis to understand success and learn from failures. So that each observation is not simply a succeed/fail assessment, but you learn lessons on what made it work and how it can be done better. And each event/observation is also an opportunity to examine the theory and make it more detailed (with experience and wisdom comes a more nuanced and detailed theory. e.g. physics)

What are alternatives to theory (always know the alternative to any concept)? The most common is 'how we have always done it" or "this is our experience". Next is "loudest person in the room" and its relative "highest paid person in the room". But experience is highly situational, and without theory you do not know what is the key detail that made the experience what it was. The appeal to authority and judgement is also highly situational - people's expertise is in large part based on the experiences they have had (one reason that best practices for developing executives and general/flag officers is to give them experiences in a wide range of setting over the course of their early careers). Theory creates a framework to have conversations and identify what the questions that need answering and how to create and evaluate alternative solutions.

In my own area of operations research, which has led me to artificial intelligence and it generative AI form, theory is what I use to evaluate alternative approaches to addressing a problem. I like to say I know how to break every tool I've ever used. In this new era of Generative AI, I start projects with new business partners and domains by figuring out what about the problem domain generative AI gets wrong. (my business partners say that I am secretly happy when they find mistakes or cause problems with generative AI tools. They are wrong. I'm openly happy) And theory helps look at those problems and work out ways to modify those tools and make them work in the setting at hand.