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?

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.

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.

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.

Mine doesn’t.

Often we say when we are making decisions that we need ‘more’ information.  As Clay Shirky said in something I watched once: it’s not about more information, it’s about better filtering.  I think it’s about better perspectives, ideas and concepts.  Yes that probably is more information but it’s filtered, tailored and well suited to your problem.  Sometimes more information leads to confusion and this isn’t helpful.

What then?

More perspectives?  How about better ideas?  Why keep digging the metaphorical hole in the same place… try something else.  Get somebody from outside the problem to come in and have a look.  Quite often they will frame it in way you don’t expect.  Sometimes we are coming from the completely wrong angle… this isn’t at all helpful either.

In the long run I suppose it would be easier to say that having more information would justify the amount of weight we put on the top of a organisation.  Ultimately though, most of the time, better ideas will do.  Wherever you can find them.

I was reading this Tumblr post someone sent me recently and there is an interesting reference to ‘fencing’ at the end of it. The idea that a debate or a metaphor can provide a fence around our ways of thinking is something I had written about ages ago.  In fact large portions of my PhD work had been involved around the ideas of conceptual framing, the idea that we create reference points to refer to things we experience.   I think the ‘idea fence’ concept is much more interesting and I want to write about it.  So I did!

Idea fences mean we create a way of seeing things that inhibits us from seeing another perspective.  Someone I know would say about a problem,’Well it’s either this or that.’  My response was, ‘why can’t it be something else?’.  The idea fences we build put the issues we want to discuss in a neat little basket.  We fence them off and say, ‘this is my position and you can only enter my idea house if you are willing to open the fence of my idea gate’.   Metaphors ahoy.

I am very good at making idea fences.  I often resist changing my ideas because I like them and have grown accustomed to having them in my mind’s garden.  Yet, I know I have to do it and I hate it.   I think I know something then I find an article or somebody says, ‘have you thought about this?’ Then I hop back on the merry go round again and wheeeeeee more ideas.   Ideas also mean power in my world, ‘Oh you are the guy who wrote that paper or you are an Information Systems person aren’t you?’   Then I am fenced in by others.  This kind of fencing reinforces the fence around me, which in essence has no place in any real terms outside of my own thoughts; and creates a comfortable seat for me to sit in and contemplate.   I am fenced and fencing.

In closing this ramble tamble, let me assure that ideas have a persistent quality.  The ingredient of persistence is ‘belief’.  That’s what makes them real.  We believe they are and so they are and we act on them and it is so.  Yet, this perspective is yet another example of a fence I have built around myself and ask me in five years, if I am still alive what I think and the chances are I will have changed my mind!

I have discovered something about my brain.  If I work too hard on mentally strenuous tasks for too long my head reaches a point where it will refuse to cooperate with me.  I will sit down to write and it will say back to me, ‘no asshole, put the pen down I have had enough.’  I have actually found myself more productive when I do mundane tasks during the down slopes, and the ‘heavy’ stuff during the upslopes.  One time I started doing odd things when I worked too hard.  For example, making a coffee and putting the sugar straight in the bin or drinking the milk before putting it in.   Or how about waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to go back to sleep, how about that one?

I had pushed through the burn as they say and found that at the end of the road, even if I wrote something, it was crap.  Yes, more crap than usual and I would have to write the whole damn thing again from scratch.

Take it from me… don’t overwork your brain.

Susan Boyle, RATM and other things have made me realise something this morning.  The internet is no longer the realm of backwater geeks or nerds, sure I knew that and so did you, it’s now influencing the mainstream by becoming the mainstream.  You can ignore things like piracy, file sharing, email forwards (well you can ignore those) and the like because we are now seeing it finally become a mainstream thing.  This is exciting and it means I should finally get my finger out and do something with some of my ideas.  It also means that the internet is now crowded with mobs.  Boo.

A final thought for today: Things are what we make them.  Susan Boyle, RATM, Radiohead, Nine inch nails, Corey Smith… it’s up to us.  We live in a unique time where you can reach an audience via electronic means.  Making money is the hard part but people are having a go and that’s great to see.

I am off to the Zoo… it’s my daughter’s birthday!

Here’s a short thought:

Problems can only be practically solved because of the things we take to practically restrict their solving them.  People often blame politics, the environment, marketing, accounting but the biggest issue is what’s feasible or practical to do, given the known constraints.  There is a big difference between assumption and actual barrier, yet the actual barriers can be nothing else but thought in the beginning even though it may actually be a real issue that would hinder the problem solving effort.   Thinking, as someone said (sorry), doesn’t make it so.   The truth may be what happens after we do something, not sure about that; yet there is a level of pragmatism that always drives decision making in business.  We can’t do this because of that and we can’t do that because of this.   We need to think through these barriers carefully to see if they are real or a matter of our discourse.

One example happened to me years ago when I tried my hand at business.  We kept making decisions because ‘we had to’ and over a period of time the direction I blissfully steered the business to failed.  Each decision was thought out, reasoned over, implemented with an eye to improvement.  Yet as complexity unfolded, new ideas emerged which reset my decision parameters and modified my heuristics, I realised I was playing a fools game.  There was no ‘right’ answer, only what was feasible and known to me at the time and with the resources that I had to use.    Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber talked about this years ago, yet in all the work I have done, I have seen little progress in this regard.  Complexity is a bitch. Scholars like the late Herbert Simon called it decision making under ambiguity, what decisions are made that don’t contain that?  Tell me if you know.

The hidden tiger of decision making and complex problem solving is complexity.  It laughs at us when we confront it with our ideas, and changes shape the minute we make a choice.  What’s known becomes unknown and what seemed ‘right’ becomes not right after the action has been taken.  Is the truth something that happens to an idea as William James said?  Maybe.  Perhaps the truth is not just what happens to the idea but the reasons why it didn’t work in the first place.  It is elusive, nevertheless.