I was at a retreat the other day listening to the sea of voices from a variety of Artificial Intelligence scholars and I kept thinking how funny it is that we all want to be unique and how different we all are.  Just like the person sitting next to you on the bus, you are unique.   We are all different, unique and interesting just like everyone else.  My grandfather could build a house, was excellent at Maths, do pottery, take photos, make his own beer, make statues, garden, cook and fix cars.  He was a smart man… very unique, just like my aunt who teaches disabled children, my friend who designed his renovations and is a programmer and so on.

My point is we all have something to use, a talent that needs polishing, ideas that need explaining and a host of other things that constitute our uniqueness.  One guy I saw at this retreat/conference was making a robot fish to find pollutants in rivers where humans couldn’t go and of course for commercial reasons (SKYNET!).   How unique and interesting!  There was a man studying glycomics, another looking at the semantic web and me doing whatever I can to avoid work.

Why don’t you begin to be unique and special, just like everyone else.  Don’t stop doing something because it makes no money or because it’s going nowhere.  If you believe it’s you, you should want to do it just to be unique and different.  It’s the different things that make this world so interesting, at least to a boring academic like me!  There are no guarantees of success but at least you can be happy within yourself.  Don’t throw it all away, just spend one hour a week being unique, then build it up to 190,000 hours.  Before you know it you will as unique as everyone else!

Recently, Seth Godin posted about what he called the Ism schism:

Modernism, classicism, realism, impressionism–dividing things into schools of thought–or even warring camps–makes it easy to create tension and thus attention.

When I first tweeted about this my thoughts were wow, I have faced this problem my whole academic life.   Since 2002 I have been toying with this idea introduced by a former colleague about crossing paradigm boundaries.  The ism schism eh?

Here’s where the problem is for problem solvers.  There aren’t problems of information technology, information systems, management or operations research, there are just problems, we are people we frame them.  We have invented weasel words in academia and built our kingdoms on the back of dead philosophers and then wore a path to the goal of making knowledge for the masses.   So what’s the point?  I am reading a book about the social sciences at the moment and how case studies became popular, then declined, only to become popular again and yet in both falls there is a consistent thread bringing them together.  Pointless debates about methodology.  You’d think that by now given a couple of hundred years we would have solved some of our social problems, we aren’t even close.   Not even knocking on the door, while science and other areas are shooting ahead at a lightning pace.  Why?

Perhaps the answer lies in the question: Why can’t academics solve problems?  Well how long an explanation do you want me give?  Should academics solve problems or just catalog and file them?  In a recent conversation with a senior member of staff at Griffith, I was told that I need to find my ‘patch’ and become known for something.  This is very good advice.  Yet, I am reminded of my PhD literature review of the problem solving literature that covers six major discipline areas including: Education, Philosophy, Business, Humanities, Law and Science.  Why?  Because I was stupid enough to make a commitment to study the problem of the problem.  Problems are like people, they are everywhere… funny that!  The issue now for me, a somewhat backward less modern post-post modern academic is where do I fit?   Nowhere and everywhere.  Do we start micro-defining problems?  Or macro-defining meta-knowledge?  The whole wife and two kids issue fits into this somewhere as well… dammit.

So why is the academic enterprise failing?

It’s hard to say, but I wonder what John Dewey would say if he were alive.  He once argued that we can only think about life as a process if we understood problems from the point of view of the people who gave them meaning.  He wasn’t talking about individuals only but also groups.  People who give meaning to things as a byproduct of being human.  Academics have categorised a large percentage of problems into cubes such as ‘management’, ‘information systems’, ‘international business’ and so on.  These are disciplines that have their own frames of reference, literature and so forth, yet they all have the problem of a problem and this covers differing views of what concerns us and how we think about it.   To answer my own questions, knowledge has fragmented and studies now are micro, with a very small sphere of influence.  This is a shame because we could combine our various disciplinary smarts and solve REAL problems, not imaginary ‘methodology’ problems.  A philosophical problem has meaning, it surely does, yet the impact of the meaning is almost always meaningless unless the problem is non-trivial and not just philosophical.

I will finish with a thought first brought to my attention from a book about conflict resolution.  It’s easy to say I am right and you are wrong, but it’s much harder to say in which way are both of us right?