Written by: Rich on January 20, 2025

Over the past 30 years, I have developed a specialty in tubular design. No, I’m not a surfer or valley girl asserting that my designs are cool. ‘Tubular’ is short for tubular goods, the pipes used to contain pressurized fluids in the upstream sector of the oil and gas industry. The industry has tens of thousands of people who use tubular goods, but less than 20 current practitioners who have devoted a career to understand all aspects of design, manufacturing, and use of oil country tubular goods. When your company spends hundreds of millions of dollars each year, you can call pipe whatever you like.

I have a great amount of comfort and pride with my role as an expert. For example, an engineering team was franticly trying to reach me last week to clarify whether they could pressurize their surface casing beyond the performance rating cited in the global industry standard. It turns out, they were asking the guy who wrote that portion of the industry standard. I pulled up my figure used to define the standard and could definitively give them the answer they sought.[1] At that moment, being the expert felt tubular, dude. The moment, as always, was short-lived. How many people truly care about the impact of cold-expansion on collapse of seam-welded pipe?

Nobody is born an expert. Malcolm Gladwell asserts that practice is what you do to become good, and it takes 10,000 hours to master a field.[2] In “Overcoming Barriers to Student Understanding,”[3] Meyer and Land introduce the term threshold concept to describe opening a way of thinking that was previously inaccessible. It takes time and effort to discover and work through these concepts. Their first example presented heat transfer as a threshold concept for cooking. Never did I imagine seeing thermal gradients described in a DLGP required reading![4]

Meyer and Land recognize that the threshold concept can be troublesome, “Knowledge that is ‘alien’, or counter-intuitive or even intellectually absurd.”[5]  Furthermore, they describe the transitional period—liminality—when the individual is within the threshold itself.  If the transformation is protracted, there can be oscillation and even regression in progress. This is a key for the journey to mastery. In a companion book, Gina Wisker’s chapter quotes M. Kiley’s study of doctoral candidates stuck in their progress, “If only I’d known that I was just in a stuck place it would have made it so much easier.”[6]

Getting Unstuck

I enrolled in the DLGP as a demarcation between my professional career and whatever comes next. I am trading mastery for the unknown. It is learning the first thing about new topics rather than the 132^nd nuance of the same old thing. Though the program provides a forum for discovery, my journey is not limited to the curriculum.

For example, I heard a fascinating interview of Joshua Swamidass on the Bible Project several years ago.[7] Professor Swamidass is a computer scientist who works on modelling the human genome. He is also a follower of Christ who is deeply interested in whether the Bible and science are conflicting or complementary. In his book,[8] he provides a hypothesis for how the biblical Adam and Eve can be genealogical parents to mankind without contradicting the genetic diversity research which requires a source much broader than two. That’s a mouthful. I made it to chapter four before getting in that stuck place of liminality. Mitochondrial Eve was driving me back to the comfortable place of ignorance.

And then Adler showed up.[9] I was given permission to skip the part I don’t understand and read the parts I do. I found Swamidass where I left him near the bottom of a basket. I switched from Analytical Reading to Inspectional of another book co-authored by Michaela’s Biblical Studies professor.[10] I cannot fully judge either book because I have not worked through all the arguments. I don’t need to own Swamidass’s Figure 3.2 on an equal footing with my Figure 3. But I’m back in liminality and it is no longer frustrating.

[1] Rich Miller et al. “Collapse Ratings of Cold Expanded Line Pipe Used as Casing.” In SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition, D011S001R003. Calgary, Alberta, Canada: SPE, 2019. https://doi.org/10.2118/195971-MS.

[2] Malcom Gladwell. Outliers: The Story of Success. 1st ed. New York: Little, Brown and Co, 2008.

[3] Jan H.F. Meyer and Ray Land, eds. Overcoming Barriers to Student Understanding: Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge. London: Routledge, 2006.

[4] Heat transfer is also a threshold concept for understanding how application of internal coatings changes the collapse resistance of cold-expanded line pipe. This knowledge changed my life but not yours, which is why you can skip reading the footnotes.

[5] Meyer and Land, 4.

[6] Ray Land, Jan H. F. Meyer, and Michael T. Flanagan, eds. Threshold Concepts in Practice. Educational Futures, v. 68. Leiden Boston: Brill | Sense, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6300-512-8.

[7] “The Genealogical Adam and Eve.” Accessed January 20, 2025. https://bibleproject.com/podcast/genealogical-adam-and-eve/.

[8] S. Joshua Swamidass. The Genealogical Adam & Eve: The Surprising Science of Universal Ancestry. Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Acdemic, 2019.

[9] Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren. How to Read a Book. Rev. and Updated ed. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972.

[10] Dennis R. Venema and Scot McKnight. Adam and the Genome: Reading Scripture after Genetic Science. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2017.

About the Author

Rich