Here’s an idea.  In a recent conversation on this blog I have noticed that I hold a particular view about the emergence of strategic direction.  For example, when I started this blog I had no particular direction in mind and I had no real niche to draw from.   However, I noticed that most of the major direction in my life emerges.  Yes there have been times when I intentionally set out to do something and it worked, but the direction it was leading me to wasn’t obvious.  Take for example my recent doctorate.

I was told early on that you got a doctorate to become an academic.  I have since found that I enjoyed the practical application of ideas so much that I am wondering if I will continue as an academic in the next year.  That said, this emerged from the terrible experience of doing a Ph.D. so perhaps I am speaking out of exhaustion, terror and the thought of becoming a lifelong nerd.  Nevertheless, I learned through the process that I love applying ideas.  I love seeing them at work and I love putting them to use.  This emerged through the process.

When I started this blog it was more for personal development.  But, I have learned that I like speaking more about general ideas and concepts rather than simply specifically personal development.   So I followed the path I was leading myself in.  In this sense I wonder if in a lot of real world problem solving endeavours and strategic applications we actually find ourselves following what emerges or if we are trying to make things happen.  Emergence means following patterns as we notice them.  Is this even possible?

There are clearly times when we plan in advance and it helps us.  On the other hand there are times when a direction emerges outside of normal planning and following it seems logical.  Now I haven’t adapted these or even thought about them before writing this post.   Perhaps I need to put these down into a forum or something… who knows.  All I really know is sometimes there is a framework that emerges out of a situation and we should follow it… it wasn’t planned and/or thought out. As a matter of fact this requires an intuitive leap.

In reality most of the things we do require this kind of leap and yet I don’t remember once being told by my lecturers that AT LEAST HALF of my life decisions would require an intuitive leap.  We are taught about ambiguity, strategy and so on without ever being told that strategy sometimes emerges out of the muck.   I remember once I was looking to buy a new dog.  I analysed, thought out the plans and considered the alternatives.  One day I woke up and thought I am just going to buy the dog.  So I packed up the kids and hammered it down to the Animal Welfare League of QLD to get a dog we had picked off a website.

When we got there, the dog we picked wasn’t suitable.  He wouldn’t negotiate the children or even come out of his little house to say hello.  I was devastated having driven all the way from Brisbane to the Gold Coast to get a dog!  I knew however that the timing was right and I knew intuitively that a dog was there for me.  We hassled the volunteer in charge of dog dispersion and after a time she brought out an old dog that loved the kids and was 100% suitable.  I can’t say what really made me think that the dog was there… God or perhaps advanced precognition?  I just knew that I had to take an intuitive leap.  I knew it!  As I know now with things in my life… it’s time to take another leap to find the answer to my present problems… but that is a whole other post for another day.

I want to leave you today with this thought… don’t try and make things happen sometimes… just sit back and see if you can see where the pattern (hello FRINGE) is leading you.  There is something that you need to do and if you think about it, perhaps with some wise counsel, it will become obvious.  It is becoming obvious… though it isn’t quite yet.   The thing is as patterns emerge and you follow them without much thought … you find out new and interesting realities that you never knew existed!  Happy hunting!

I have had my fair share of back stabbings in my short life… more than I would want to count.  Given that I am typing… I can’t count and I too overweight to see my toes.  It has been my experience that the road to hell is not paved with good intentions… it’s paved with people trying to steal my stuff.  People trying to take my job… (get off it’s mine!) and people undermining me at every turn.  People murdering other people and so on and so on. Where is the good intention in that I tell you!  Sure, this saying has merit.  Many a good deed does actually backfire and create hell for the intended.  But most of the time my dear friends you find people are, as the great Nick Cave postulates, just no good.  The good intentions people may have had usually end up in something that has small consequences even though sometimes it does not.

We live in a world where ambition rules over love, good taste is blinded by mass appeal and people like Ghandi are shot in the street.  This world leaves a taste so foul in your mouth at times that you want to surgically remove your tongue so at least it can be clean.  Sure, I am ranting and sure it’s late.  But you know what I find myself shortchanged more often by people who mean me harm as opposed to people who’s heart is in the right place. I could labour this but you know what I think I made my point.

The answer to this question may seem very simple. University lecturers (like me) should not be responsible for teaching students how to manage real problems. However, I disagree. Why?

High school does not teaching practical skills as such

While I admit there are a lot of useful ideas for reaching teenagers and getting them to cope with real life issues and problems, there is still a long way to go.  What happens is that students leave high school and then go into university then go into the workforce. Some, do trades or just get a job. Yet the process of learning is exactly the same. They go from high school to the outside world and then that’s it.

University courses are not that practical in general they are specific

Most university courses I have taught will not teach you how build great responses to problems. One of the reasons I started this blog was because I noticed people who were coming through university courses with no life skills. Yes, they could read and write (and do maths) but where were their problem solving skills? What about creative thinking skills? What about learning how to cope with relationships? If life is all about work then what do we do the rest of our time?

90% of what you do at work is NOT academic

This is hard to admit but how often do you reach for your economics book? Or wonder what Maslow would have thought about your jerky boss. It’s time for bone dry honesty… how useful is the information you get at university, high school or college (TAFE included)? Theories are wonderful… I have a lot of them. But unless something helps me to solve a problem I throw it away. What good is knowledge that doesn’t work? It’s like having a Porsche with no motor OR a Monet with a hole in the centre of it.

Once upon a time university was a place where people expanded their minds. Now, I think it’s a sausage factory. People go out to work after studying and I wonder all the time just how useful this knowledge is?  I have written papers in the past and then thought… is this even meaningful… I mean is this ever going to change our lives? I doubt it. We should be teaching people at University, high school and other places of education how to manage and cope with life. Why? I think there is a responsibility here for educators to realise that a portion of what we teach should be how to manage real life problems. If it isn’t then we are not preparing people for a life in the business world where learning curves are steep and lessons are harshly learned.

A genuine shortage of low-cost rentals has seen a spike in the rental market. This is a phenomenon that is not just located here in Brisbane it is an Australia wide crisis. One only has to conduct a google search to see what kind of issues we are facing at the moment. I wonder though if this is a legitimate crisis or weather we are making this up in our heads. This article explains some of the thinking I am getting at. So what are we to do?

In this case I would call this ‘the model’s broken’ type of problem much like the broken record industry or the broken publishing industry… it’s just plain old broken. The core of the model relies on rent covering the investment but if what I earn goes nowhere how in the name of all things sacred can I afford it? It seems to me that people like Terry Burke are not really saying anything that’s radical at all. It’s common sense that economic folk have simply skipped over. How can I pay more money for rent when I don’t earn anymore than I did one year ago… despite my landlord needing me to. I can’t. The model that rental markets are built on are simply broken… there is no easy solution to a broken model. Here’s where perspective shifting comes into it.

This is the practice of changing of changing the model (the perspective) so that the problem can’t exist anymore. It’s also the process of dissolving problems as introduced to me by way of Russell Ackoff. This process involves changing the systemic conditions that cause the problem to exist by re framing the cause. So what would be a better way of organising housing other than renting? I can’t actually think of any at this point!

What we really need is a brand new way of renting that means people can live and investors make their money. What would actually work? We have created this mess where people can’t find a rental for a decent price and now investors are screaming because they are running out of money! Community housing could work but ultimately this creates other problems which are beyond this post. How about each bank takes 1% of it’s profit and build a random house for a random customer? Even if the National Australia Bank took 10% of it’s profit and gave it back into housing projects it would ease the burden. Maybe the problem isn’t a lack of houses perhaps it’s materialistic concepts we use to determine what wealth is? Why do you need an investment property… to give renters a place to live? I think not… if you could put robots in there to make you money you would do it.

Consider how much money was poured into the Tsunami or Hurricane Katrina. What if a common housing fund could be established where people who can’t get housing finance got government supervised permission to have a house built out of this fund and then agreed to make payments according to a percentage until they paid back the principal… i.e. a no interest loan? They had something like that here in Australia for a while but now they don’t. There are housing commission places but in my area you have to wait 9 years to get in and it’s like ‘renting for life’ with no hope of getting a place of your own. Recently I saw that same department advertising in the paper for cheaper ways to accommodate the growing list of ‘at risk’ families. This is a serious matter indeed.

To finish this article I would like to point out that the real victims of the rental market are not the investors … it’s the people who have no choice but to rent. You can whine on about putting money into specialized funds, community housing and the like but the bigger picture problem is there are families who are finding it harder and harder to survive. The investors are finding it harder to support the model and the people that make it work (renters) are struggling to pay the rent. If you are in the position to invest your money then the majority of financial advice (most of which is sheer crap) applies to you. For the rest of us we are stuck with the decisions you make and are forced to move from place to place waiting for something to change. Disagree with me? Then tell me why.

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