Well not really.  I am just in a limbo as to what I want to do next.  Since I started about a year or so ago I had envisioned making in a “business only” site, then it became a “personal development” site.  After that well… it was sort of about problem solving.   Since then I haven’t really followed the golden rule of blogging… stay within the lines of your niche… don’t stray to the left or right… stay still don’t move.  The problem?  I can’t just write about one thing… I am a generalist not a specialist!  I am impressed with the way things of gone and I am happy enough with it.  However, something is missing.  There is no emotional engagement on this website as such and I think the posts have become mechanical.

I had thought of closing down or starting over but I just don’t want to!  The thing is, when you build something up from scratch or start a big project from beginning to end, you really have a hard time leaving it all behind.  So I have been pondering… what do I do?  So I decided to renovate.  I started this site as an experiment and I am going to continue it as an experiment.

So while I decide what I am going to do I will continue to post my usual random trains of thought … or find a ‘niche’.  Perhaps finding a niche works when you can create a very straightforward plan on how to write about what you love… me however… well I like so many different things.  I find it hard to simply ‘build a niche’ and ‘thrash it out’.

Some ideas I have are:

1. Getting a swish template

2. Writing shorter posts more often

3. Integrating a forum (time is a real bastard here… I’ll be honest.  If you want to make a forum that does well… you will have to find time and energy to build it)

4. Integrating more web 2.0 stuffs

5. Adding everything I do (i.e. short stories/fiction, hackademic stuff etc)

If you have any suggestions on renovating this site I would love to hear it.   Anyway I am going to brainstorm ways to improve this site… though I am happy with my progress so far.  Would love any kind of guidance… oh I said that already .

Recently I bought a game for my daughter which is all about managing a wildlife park.  I made her promise to me that she would take the time to learn how to play before asking any more questions.  After playing it for a while she has given up because she couldn’t work it out.  Now, she is only little but I must admit I have seen this trend in people much older than her.

Here is another example.  Recently I told a group of my students about the final exam for a subject I am running.  I gave four very obvious hints as to what I was expecting in the exam only to be shocked and dismayed when I marked them over the last couple of days.  They didn’t get the hint.  Now, maybe I am being a little too blind to what an obvious hint is … but when you say, “This is a really obvious hint,” followed by, “you can find the answer on this page,” you begin to see my frustration.  The generation that has come after me are a special case and I have written about them before.  What I have noticed however, more and more, is that context gets lost in massive amounts of information.  So what has that to do with learning?

Learning takes place in a context

If you have ever attempt to learn a language you will know of the problem of immersion.  This is when you are placed in unfamiliar surroundings and forced to make sense of the language in order to communicate what you mean properly.   If you are learning French for example, the French in Action series forces you to study the whole damn course… in French!  They immerse you in the language so that learning is faster, richer and more contextual.  What happens though when you take large amounts of information, displayed in a shallow context across a wideband?  INFORMATION OVERLOAD!  You have lots of information, plenty of facts but very little perspective or context.

Add to that the problem facing our children.  They have unprecendented access to information in massive amounts but only know small portions of it.  That is, courtesy of a massive exposure to information from the point of education until now, we have a generation of people who are very capable at collecting large amounts of information in shallow context situations.  Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink calls a more positive version of this (based on research) “thin slicing”.

Thin Slicing and Generation Y

Thin slicing is making extremely fast decisions with a small amount of information (A good introduction to the topic can be found here).  What happens when we are forced to make fast decisions about things as a matter of practice and have only limited amounts of information?  We end up slicing that information into smaller “thinner” parts and based on our previous expertise are able to make snap judgments in a moments time.  If you think of a leg ham as a piece of knowledge… taking some of the bone should be enough for the expert to make a judgment that is probably going to be true as it is logical.  For example, if you are a mechanic and you want to diagnose a problem with a car.  You can hear a rattle and know instantly what the problem is and what the likely solution will be.   If you are an expert! Now, let’s reverse that situation for a moment and take a slightly different look at it.

When you are exposed to massive amounts of information and you are forced to make sense of it, your brain is likely (I am conjecturing here… is there a neuroscientist in the house?) to build models of the information that it thinks you want.  That is, as you are exposed to massive dispersed amounts of information, you have to compartmentalise it in order to be able to store it.  When you have too much information to choose from you build models that are shallow because you can’t actually contextualise the information as much as you should be because you have, “too much information”. In Gladwell’s book he speaks of ‘experts’ being able to glance at a problem and make snap judgments.  In some cases, this is quite profound because it enables the expert to see the connections faster than others.  In the case of Generation Y, they are building models of information this way… all the time.  They are creating shallow pools of information by thin slicing everything.  They are learning ‘enough’ of everything at a shallow level of context and then applying this knowledge to the way in which they solve their problems.

We are now starting to see the effects of this kind of thing at Griffith University.  People that have been exposed to the massive amounts of information seem to be to part of a the new learning plague… to coin a phrase.

The new learning plague

You may call this an attention problem.  We can’t hold the attention of people because they are used to having concurrent information streams available.  However, I think what’s happening is that our education system and the society we live in has created an “information monster”!  We have so much information now that in order to filter it, you need to slice it into smaller portions and be happy with the lack of depth OR become very good at one thing at the expense of having a collection of shallow knowledge OR a variety of either.   This has, in my mind at least, created a plague.  We have a generation of people who are happy to keep things at the surface level where information is linear, causally efficacious and makes perfect sense.  Don’t believe me… watch a morning show about budgeting and you get simple advice that is repeated ad nausem.

I recently tested this out at a course I went to for work about Occupational Health and Safetly.   I was sitting next to an early to mid twenties manager who was exteremly intelligent.  Throughout the course, he kept texting, talking and not really taking notes.  It really pissed me off when he got better marks than me on the test because I had my phone switched off.  When I got over myself, I noticed something I hadn’t seen before.  He was extremly good at filtering.  He could hear what the trainer was saying and filter that on a surface level whilst focusing on his text messaging at the same time.  People of my ilk will focus on one thing at a time.  Generation Y people tend to be able to move between different information mediums shallowly and filter out what they need and then move on to the next thing.   To watch this filtering process in action was something to behold.   I couldn’t believe after teaching 17 and 18 year olds for a few years that I had missed this.

Whilst having a developed skill set of dealing with information overload through thin slicing and filtering is wonderful, it can’t replace deep learning.  Deep learning challenges context, ideas, notions and themes.  I remember having to defend the way I teach a few years ago for a performance review and I picked on Mizerow who argued that in order for learning to occur, you need your subjects to be able to challenge how and what they learned by getting them to critically reflect on it.  I still believe that.  You can’t be an expert in something if you have filtered it out to a logical sequence.  Neither can you find perspective, depth or multiple streams of meaning if you are simply looking for the straightforward answer all the time.  By the way, life is pretty far from straightforward!

At the time of this writing I have move beyond frustration with people who don’t want to learn the deep way.  Instead I have developed coping strategies to help me understand why people want to learn in shallow streams of information.  It’s this… nobody is really as interested as I am! I am not even saying that this is a new phenomenon… it isn’t.  What I am saying is that we have generations of people exposed to large amounts of ‘wikipedia’ style information without bearing down a context for them to challenge these core assumptions.   People who filter out important information to get a logical core fail to realise one important point: Facts are socially constructed.

To finish up this post I thought a video would be nice… see you next time.

A key insight I have gained from spending a long time studying problem solving is this: it’s not always about just one point of reference.  We have all heard the terms ad-nausem about “thinking outside the box”.  Instead of reiterating that here I want to present five ways to gain new insights in sticky situations.

Technique # 1: Go ask someone outside the situation

Russell Ackoff says that in messy problems most of the answers come from outside the situation.   The situation often limits our ability to perceive new information about where we are at and where we are going.   If you are really stuck I would recommend going to talk to someone else outside the situation who doesn’t have an emotional investment.  They will show you some key things you may have missed.

Technique #2: Deliberately argue with yourself and others

Okay, so this won’t exactly present you with a trophy on “how to win friends and influence people.”  But what it will do is give you the ability to see the issue from multiple angles.  You know, life is not a novel, movie or play.  There are no narratives in life so to speak.  When you are faced with a mess you need to synthesise the available perspectives you have and understand their viewpoints.  There is no better way to do this than to debate and argue about them.  It should be noted here that I do not mean fight or squabble.  Wasting time on that kind of thing is just plain stupid.  I mean by reasoning through the alternatives through common sense talking.

Technique #3: Find the idea and present it’s enemy

C. West Churchman spoke about the “systems” approach and it’s enemies in the 1970’s.  Now, I don’t wish to give you an academic treatise on that, but consider what an enemy of a theory would be?  It’s the opposite idea.  Every idea you have is only as good as it is defended.  That is, evolutions’ enemy is creationism for example.  What’s your idea?  Create it’s enemy and that will soon show you new perspectives that will help you gain insights.

Technique #4: Make an intuitive leap

Horst Rittell said that a plan is only as good as the variables around it.  As soon as you try something, you change the environment and you change the variables.  So why not make an intuitive leap and try something.  You’re stuck on a problem?  Act!  Don’t get stuck in the paralysis of analysis.  It will create a platform for failure.  Try something and see what happens.  Only failure awaits and given where you are now… surely it can’t be all that bad?

Technique #5: Lateral Thinking

A well established method for seeing new patterns in messy situations is to invoke lateral thinking.  This is moving sideways within established thought patterns by introducing new ideas.  You can learn the basics of it by attempting it.  In my way of thinking Lateral thinking takes a core idea and adds another idea to that core idea creating a synthesis.   I have seen things like people making a new chocolate bar and thinking about how a tyre might relate to it.  From that we think black, chocolate… licorice… chocolate covered licorice!  De Bono himself says that lateral thinking in “systems” terms requires a sideways shift in our thinking.  So we stop picking the problem apart, we start using different ideas in conjunction with the problem to give ourselves a new insights.  At first it seems illogical.  However, after a while of doing it you will find your mind will automatically create the bridge between the core idea and the lateral idea.

Bonus Technique: Synthesis (concept shifting) – the act of creating new ideas

Okay, so I have sort of made the bonus point here swallow all the others.  It is the most powerful of all of them and for this reason I would recommend it.   I refer to synthesis as concept shifting.  It’s differs from lateral thinking in that causes us to create a series of new ideas to engage into the problem situation.  It abandons the idea that anything other than facts about a perception can be gained from analysis and instead creates new ideas out of the inherent tension in the situation and routinely shifts between them.  Sounds very academic doesn’t it?  It isn’t.  It’s simply the decision to follow ideas as they flow out of tension and shed light on new situations.  Don’t worry I am writing a book on it .

If I was to say that blogging was the best way to communicate deep information then I would be a liar on two counts.  Firstly, the count that blogging communicates shallow layers of information and secondly it does so in small parts.  What I want you to take out of this post is the idea that there are more than what I have said above… these however have served me well.  Try them out!

A while back I used to teach statistics… then I was asked not to return (but that is another story).  One of the key things we used to teach the students was that you should rely on correlation as a measure of real world relationships beyond the simple fact that it describes the possibility of a relationship.   What the hell… I hear you say… this is the problem solving blog.  Well, allow me to retort!

Causal flaws

Whenever you hear people talking about we know from research that standing in the sun too long causes skin cancer you can be certain that there is probably (and I say probably with a capital P) a very good chance that the two are related.  Here’s the difference… there is a high PROBABILITY that they are related.  They may not actually be related.  Although I am not going to get sunburnt for science to find out!  I believe there is a link, and herein lies the problem.  I believe it. It’s effective for me to believe that because he helps me to not get sunburnt.  As I live in Brisbane, this is a good thing.

However, when you take this same valid logic and begin to apply it to social problems you have a whole new issue.  Let’s take my wife’s favourite hobby horse: the housing crisis.  We have so far, had endless amounts of predictions on what was likely to happen based on research.  We have heard dropping rents, falling prices, rising rents, rising prices.  Every week some moron gets on television and tells us some new misinformation about the pricing of houses in Australia.  Here’s the catch, they are all based on statistics and they are all based on the idea that someone thinks it relevant to spew them out as if they were the truth.

The problem with stats

Now statistics can show us interesting things.  I will be the first to admit that but I would like to point out a very obvious if not overlooked fact: they are created by people who see relationships in the world.  No people, no relationships.  That data, in any case, comes from the human collective that imposes it’s thinking on top of it.   We collect the data, we analyse it, we find the patterns, we report on them.  These patterns are not real they are the interpretations of a scientific process… something the media in this country doesn’t tell us.  So when we hear statistics we say “reality”.  So here is a thought experiment I used to run for my ill-fated statistics students.

Cows and Gun Usage

Let’s say for argument sake that I wandered into a rural university (hey I am up for it) and measured the amount of cows in relationship to the amount of gun usage.  I took my measurement stick (instrument) and postulated a theory.  The increase in gun ownership can be linked to the increasing cow population.   So I measured it and found a relationship that shows an 89% connection.  Or in other words, I am 89% sure that the increase in gun ownership can be proven by the increasing cow population.   Most people in the class say, “well that’s stupid!” and they are right.  Because my pre-existing understandings of what cows are stops me from making the connections to gun usage.  However, the data tells me there is a relationship.  It is however spurious. It really doesn’t matter because it’s stupid.

What are they saying… not the data… the media

So now, we move back to my rant.  The media.  They collect all kinds of dodgy data and present them to the general populace as being facts.  In the world of statistics we base our assumptions on the fact there could be at some stage a population big enough that would describe the relationship perfectly.  But since, we can’t survey every cow, or every gun owner we take a best guess and base our assumptions on a sample.  That sample then becomes very important.

Samples…

If I was trying to find the people who didn’t have a home, I would sample renters, the homeless, caravan park dwellers and the like.  I wouldn’t go to the mansions in the inner city.  I very much doubt John H. Fancypants would give me the data I was looking for.   I would find those people who didn’t have a home and survey them.    Or in my example above I would look for gun owning cow farmers.  Hence, I have identified my sample group and predetermined my results to a large extent.  And it’s this predetermined results set that interests me.   It’s precisely that, a sample based upon an assumption I have made as a researcher.  The measurement of my assumption can help me learn, there is no doubt, but all it does is prove that my assumption is wrong, or right.  It does not prove the reality of anything.  It merely gives me an insight into a possible relationship.

Rant OVER!

So what the hell am I saying?  This, statistics is simply the science of finding out things we are interested in.  It’s not a truth finder.  It can never widely represent the whole picture, it is limited to it’s hypothesis, it’s testing mechanism and all of the other bits and pieces.  It’s about drilling down from a theoretical assumption.  So next time you hear a news presenter ramble on about “facts” ask yourself this: Who did they survey, what questions did they ask, where are they from?  What you usually get is something like: 1000 shoppers were interviewed in Brisbane and 90% said they had plenty of money and aren’t worried about the economic crisis.  The question is: who responded, what was there socio-economic background and what shop where they found in?   If it’s somewhere ritzy… the data is crap.   It’s lacks that fundamental element of any good piece of research… perspective. So remember… think for yourself and don’t believe the hype!