Archive for life problems

Your idea is good but…

October 2, 2011 / Luke / 2 comments

…have you put the blowtorch to it.

Every now and again I am reminded of the reasons why I am where I am.  The title of this post should give you a clue.   It’s called your idea is good but…

Being a business lecturer, I have the opportunity to meet all kinds of people.  A lot of them have good ideas.  Here’s the critical thing:

Who else thinks your idea is good? 

Take for example the amount of people who come up with a ‘great idea for a movie’ or ‘the next big thing.’  The thing is you may be right.  It could be the greatest thing in the entire history of things.  A burning question then is: why?

The world is a big place.  There are lots of people in the world… therefore: How do you know that other people will find your idea as appealing as you do?  Think for a moment why we have people in the world that deliberately make movies that follow the same formula.  Sure, there are great movies like Inland Empire that break the mould.  However, the modern narrative form is what people want, by and large, when they go to the movies.  We can argue as long as there is wind, that it’s wrong, right, indifferent.  But, it remains.  The same goes for your idea.  How do you know others think it will be equally as awesome?

 

The key to learning that is to find ways that you can get closer to realising that.  Market research, talking to people, walking outside… you name it.

So next time you have the big idea, find a soundboard, a critical friend or some way of putting to the blowtorch to it.  Not only will this process tell you how good the idea is, it will save you the humiliation of finding out that you where the only person who thought winged shoes where a great idea.

Category: creativity, ideas, life problems /

People don’t solve problems: They create them

September 1, 2011 / Luke / No comments

Well after a year of incredible dissonance I have returned, like I promised in April.  Yes, I am that busy.  What I am saying is probably bullshit.

Here goes:

People don’t solve problems they create them

Radical idea.  Not really.  When a problem forms people don’t actually ‘solve’ it.  They invent another problem in it’s place to solve it.  See, it’s all about learning to live with what we can and ignoring what we can’t.
Welcome to the hall of awesomeness.

Category: creativity, ideas, life problems, making decisions /

Unstructure: What’s missing from most textbooks about management problems…

April 11, 2011 / Luke / No comments

This came through my twitter feed this morning.   The schema is a helpful one for examining the world of problems and how we solve them.  Sure, it’s a little managementy but it makes some excellent points.  I like the use of ‘class 4′ to talk about how we handle management problems, that’s clever.   What’s wrong is the assumption that an ill-defined problem is as tangible as another kind of problem. What do I mean?

In life problems occur because we find them.  The less well-defined they are, the harder they are to articulate so they more difficult it is to contextually organise our response.  A problem that’s well defined has no need of any kind of problem finding.  It’s simple.  The lightbulb is broken and needs to be changed.  A class 4 problem is one that lacks shape, has no structure and is open to many different possible interpretations.  The question I am currently exploring in my research is twofold:

1. Does that mean that problems are only ‘interpretations’ when they are complex?

2. If 1. can be explained as having some significance, demonstrably, does that hold then that different interpretations of a problem provide different representations.

3. If these representations are different… could it be that complex problems are malleable? They have a lack of definitiveness? For example, if I deliberately change the way I interpret a problem, do I so by changing the solution first?  If I navigate a new pathway to a solution FIRST, when I enrich the manifestation of issues I currently perceive.  Even further, if I change my perceptions by thinking about solutions will I by some force, accidental or serendipitous, reveal a new layer of the complexity I am entangled in.   That’s a big question with lots of little questions nested in it.  Yet, this is knowledge in the raw form.

These are the things that I think about when I come to class 4 problems.  We note and see the manifestation of them but lack the appropriate tools to interpret them cleverly enough to say we have any knowledge of them.  Perhaps these schema needs ‘Class 5′ to represent problems that are manifesting but have no clear explanation or yet lack a clear framework.  So class 5 could be: Creative Solutions.  Why?  Well if there isn’t a problem but a manifestation of one then a solution is required from a different starting point

A solution is better than a problem in so many ways.  It automatically suggests a problem because it’s a solution.  In fact, by agreeing to finish a problem (hat tip to Professor Colin Eden’s work) and instead looking at a solution, key ideas of what the problem is could actually emerge.  I have seen two cases in recent memory when external crisis events created a solution to a problem that didn’t exist.   Once the solution (twitter) presented itself, the problem (communication during emergencies) presented itself and had to be managed.   You can’t manage unstructuredness.  As a matter of fact if you try to manage the unstructured it will produce variability which itself can’t be managed only adapted to.  Enough truisms!

Get to the bloody point

So what’s missing from most management textbooks?  A chapter on creativity and management.  Structured problems versus unstructured problems and wicked versus tame problems.  Managers are not ready for variability and unstructure.  Unstructure is the stuff life is made of.  Unstructure does not lend itself to concepts of yes and of no.    We need management textbooks with ‘unstructure’ in their chapter lists.

The unstructure manifesto

Here’s what we need to do next.  Remove the word problem from our vocabularies when we are talking about complexity.  You don’t have a problem you have a manifestation of unstructure.   The next few steps are critical.  But, I don’t know what they are yet.  Sponsor my research someone please.

Begging aside… we need to move on from the language of stale problems to focus more on solutions and problem finding.  When we hit ill-defined problems we don’t YET have a problem.  What we have is a set of undesirable circumstances that have no clear pathway.   Think about it.  If you have a problem you can define it.  If you can’t then as Jonathon Rosenhead says, ‘What’s the problem?’

I am sure I will die frustrated, I was born that way.   Yet before I take my last breath I would like to add something to the set of ideas surrounding complex problems.  I am committed, in for the long haul, down to the last nail in my coffin, ready to use more commas when appropriate metaphors burst through the sun of my dark days (oops there I go again).  So this is me, reframing, framing and entangling the mess of structure with my clouded view of the world.  Peace and I will see you at the next post if not in the reality we call life at some point in the near or distant future.

Adios until next time.

 

 

Category: creativity, life problems, making decisions /

Take my survey!

April 5, 2011 / Luke / No comments

I am a person who likes to learn new things.  I decided to try my first EVER complex survey research project.  I suspect nobody reading this blog will be BUT:

If you have a business OR are involved in one please consider taking the business development survey.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/6HRQL2S

Category: life problems /

Approach Your Career Plan Like a Project

November 5, 2010 / Luke / No comments

*Special Thanks to Ellen Berry for this guest post.

“What we think or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only thing of consequence is what we do.” – John Ruskin

I’ve always had a plan for my career, but after getting laid off recently, I decided it wasn’t working for me. I was frustrated with how long it was taking to reach my goals, and I felt destined to be stuck taking detours just to pay the bills. I felt overwhelmed about how to approach my career.

Then I shook myself awake and came to my own rescue. It dawned on me that my career was simply a project in my life, and I’m trained in my work to handle projects a certain way. So I applied my knowledge of project management to my career, and came up with a career project plan.

Necessary Ingredients of a Career Project Plan

Needs

My dream career has always been to have my own business that is successful enough to allow me to live the lifestyle I want, that’s flexible enough to allow me to travel extensively, that’s interesting enough that I look forward to work every day, and that runs well enough that I don’t have to work insane hours to make it happen. So my goal has always been to earn enough money so that I can save up a chunk of cash, say good riddance to working just so that other people can profit, and start being my own boss, making my own ideas happen.

However, because I don’t have any formal knowledge of running a business, I was concerned that I wouldn’t be able to handle all of the operational stuff – stuff like accounting and HR and legal issues that come up. Not to mention I don’t have any leadership experience. So I realized I need a real-world education as well as formal training in business before my dream is going to become a reality.

Goals

This time around, for my career project, I decided to break down my grand vision into smaller goals. I wanted to be able to see progress sooner. If my goal was to be an engineer or a physical therapist – a career with a well-defined path to follow – I could have looked up a career profile and used it as a guide to establish my goals. But entrepreneurship is one of those careers that can take shape in many ways, so I had to get creative in my goal-setting.

I took my “happy ending” big picture dream and spent some time really imagining what it would be like to live the dream. Then imagined I was being interviewed about my journey to success. I told the imaginary reporter that “it all changed when I decided to go back to school to get my MBA”. Goal #1.

When the reporter asked me what prompted me to get my MBA, I said, “I met someone who showed me why it was important. He had started his own business, and it had been very successful. I asked him if he would let me volunteer at his company a few hours here and there in exchange for learning the ropes, and he agreed.” Goal #2.

“Once I started really focusing on learning about business,” I said to the reporter, “I started generating momentum and things started happening. My boss at my job left, and the person that took her place asked me to start attending meetings with higher ups and taking on more responsibility. I got a promotion, and qualified for tuition reimbursement so I could start taking night courses in business.” Goal #3.

For more articles on developing career goals and career exploration, career planning, and specific careers, check out BrainTrack’s Career Planning Guide.

Objectives and Timeline

Pleased with these three goals, which would lead me along a path to my ultimate career vision, I then put them into a logical timeline and broke them down further into simple objectives.

Goal #1: Find a role model in business who is successful and is willing to teach me how to be successful

  • Go to the career development centers at local colleges to check out internships and volunteer opportunities.
  • Talk to professors and students in business schools about the best strategy for getting started.
  • Search online for advice on how to choose a mentor.
  • Subscribe to Entrepreneur Magazine to read about successful entrepreneurs.
  • Go to lectures given by successful entrepreneurs about how they got started. Attend workshops and conferences.
  • Ask friends and family what entrepreneurs they know who are successful and who might be willing to let someone mentor with them.

Goal #2: Find a way to pay for taking extended education business courses online or after work

  • Look into tuition reimbursement options at work and what is required to become eligible.
  • Compare going to school full time against taking night courses or online courses while continuing to work.
  • Go to local colleges to check out upcoming extended education courses. Ask about financial aid options.

Goal #3: Get my MBA

  • Research good business schools that are known for their entrepreneurship programs.
  • Develop a strategy for getting into my ideal schools, and then start working on it as early as possible.
  • Apply for financial aid.
  • Apply for admission into my top 5 business school choices.
  • Start thinking like an entrepreneurship student now, and begin looking for business ideas that I know suit me well and that I can grow into a successful business.

Resources

Making this checklist of things I could do to generate momentum towards my dream career also helped me get a sense of what resources I have to work with right now – and what resources I need to get. I’m hungry now to learn as much as I can about having my own business, begin tapping the brains and just spending time with other people who are active or aspiring entrepreneurs, and coming up with creative ways of financing my future schooling and business ideas.

Making a Career Project Plan Work

I have to admit, I wish I’d starting thinking in these bite-sized, manageable tasks towards larger goals a long time ago. I could have accomplished so much more if I had just started somewhere, beginning with what I had to work with, instead of thinking of my dream as a far off goal that would happen someday when I was ready for a big life change.

Now that I’ve officially hired myself as my own career project manager, it’s up to me to keep moving forward no matter what… but not like a bulldozer. More like a boxer who stays light on his feet and adapts to what comes at him. I will look for the best opportunities to have the most impact, and make the most of my strengths and overcoming my weaknesses.

Having this sense of control over my career gives me a lot of confidence that I will be able to accomplish my dream. In fact, it’s not a dream anymore. It’s the next level up.

Ellen Berry is a member of BrainTrack’s writing staff. She writes articles about a variety of education and career topics, and has contributed to BrainTrack’s Career Planning Guide.

Category: creativity, life problems, personal development, strategy /

If we get this house… it will be a miracle

September 26, 2010 / Luke / No comments

And I will write about it on my blog and say it was a miracle.  Words.  The containers that fly out of our mouths faster than we can catch them.  So I experienced a miracle and we got a good house and a very good price.  So here goes:

“I got a house and it was a miracle.”

Remember eating words is a lot like eating paper.  I wish I knew what I meant by that.

Category: life problems /

The Failing Academic Enterprise?

July 13, 2010 / Luke / 3 comments

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?

Category: life problems, rants / Tags: ,

The future of business informatics

May 29, 2010 / Luke / No comments

Well it’s happened.  My university has taken the information systems lectures and given them to accounting and the other to ICT.  As a parting shot I offer the following:

The future of business informatics

This lecture is one of the best I have had the pleasure to give.  It came mainly from Alison Ruth. In a really neat way it emphasises how technology has become a part of our culture to the extent where disciplines like Informatics/Information Systems have gradually faded out of thought.  I really like how it shows us the growing themes of technology and how new trends are emerging.   But by the time you read this paragraph this will be out of date!

The thing I love so much about this lecture is that you really shows you how much technology has impacted and indeed become embedded in our lives.  You can’t even say, ‘Change Management’ without thinking about it.  It’s amazing to me that Business Schools all over Australia are leaving their IT up to ICT departments without at least thinking about the role IT plays in governance, policy and management.  Why is this?  It’s puzzling.

The final analysis though can be found from the Kodak video.  Look at the things they have done to transform their brand and how did they do it?  Through social media of course.  I will leave whoever of you read this to ponder the meanings of these things while I scramble around to reinvent my career.   What will happen in the future?  More stuff no doubt.  This time next year who knows where I will be… probably here typing another blog post for y’all.   I like what is on the final part of the prezi:

What will we be teaching in 5 years?

Well it won’t be business informatics to postgraduate students at Griffith University anymore… which is a shame.

Enjoy… I did.  R.I.P. Business Informatics.

Category: life problems /

Why Do We Stay on in Unhealthy Relationships?

April 14, 2010 / Luke / No comments

Relationships are the keystone of every human being; we form them from birth and foster and maintain them as we grow older. Some are blood ties while others are the kind we get into serendipitously or seek out explicitly. Some last a lifetime while others fall by the wayside even as new ones take their place. And some are good for our soul while others are doomed to failure right from the word GO.

The thing about relationships is that they’re tricky and are not always the same. They may start out one way and either deteriorate or become better as time goes by. And since it takes two people to make a relationship, you can never predict how the one you’re in is going to turn out. Human beings are fickle creatures and prone to mental and psychological changes depending on their experiences, so you can never be sure how relationships will turn out.

In general, both people in a relationship must work towards making it work, and when makes no effort and the other gives their all, then we have an unhealthy relationship, one that will definitely go down the drain in time. Some of us stay on in such relationships even though we know they’re not good for us, mostly because:

  • We’re scared of change: We don’t have the courage to be proactive and break off the relationship because it would mean effecting and coping with a great deal of change in our lives.
  • We pretend that things will get better: There are times when we’re so addicted to certain people even though we know that they’re not good for us and that we would be better off without them in the long run. And so we pretend that things will get better if we just hang in there and continue to please the other person and do whatever they want. But 99 percent of the time, adopting a doormat attitude only makes people actually treat you like one.
  • We are truly in a bind: Some people are caught in abusive or otherwise unhealthy relationships because they have no other alternative – they may have other factors to consider besides their own unhappiness, like children or the fact that they are not financially independent.

No matter why you stay in unhealthy relationships, the fact remains that they are not good for you in any way. So the sooner you break away from them, the better off you’ll be in the long run. You may even be tempted to take back your significant other when they come back and promise to treat you better, but more often than not, they don’t change. So it’s best you make a clean break when you know and acknowledge to yourself that the relationship is unhealthy and that you must be strong enough to turn your back firmly on it.

By-line:

This guest post is contributed by Shannon Wills, she writes on the topic of Top Online Engineering Degree . She welcomes your comments at her email id: shannonwills23@gmail.com.

Category: life problems, personal development, the heart / Tags: , ,

New Century New Jobs Example #1: Life Coaches on Twitter

March 27, 2010 / Luke / No comments

In this new era of jobs it’s not surprise that careers are based entirely on the internet.  This was emailed to me this week and I found it very interesting:

50 Life Coaches on Twitter.

This seems like a natural use of the service and it’s really interesting to see this field branching out in this way.  Leave a comment if you have seen others like these examples above.

Category: life problems / Tags: , ,
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