Purposive Drift

It’s good to get a bit of unexpected cheer in these times when there is so much dreary news around. A few moments ago I had such a moment of unexpected joy. Almost by accident I came across Professor Richard Wagner’s statement about his teaching philosophy. For those of you in despair about what is happening in Higher Education go and read the whole thing here. As a taster here is his conclusion:
“Some of you might have seen the television show on Bravo, Inside the Actors Studio, hosted by James Lipton.  Toward the end of the show, Lipton asks each guest the same few questions.  One of the questions runs something like “what word or sound do you hate.”  Another question runs something like “what word or sound do you love.”  If I were asked what sound I hate, I would answer “the sound of a student asking ‘will this be on the exam?'”  If I were asked what sound I love, I would answer “the sound of a student asking ‘here’s an idea I think I might be able to do something with, what do you think?'””
Give this man a medal.

I really like Bryan Appleyard‘s blog and in the past have sampled some of his articles from the Sunday Times he features on his site. Today I looked at a few more and particularly enjoyed this one, “The Greedy Boomers”, that echoes many of my own sentiments. Here is his conclusion:
“The boomers have poisoned the wells and ploughed salt into the fields. Their post-war idyll is over; the world is returning to its default mode of confrontation and violence, now made more ominous by looming catastrophes like global warming. In the midst of their success and greed, the boomers forgot Edmund Burke’s most imperishable insight – that society is a contract with three interested parties: the dead, the living and the unborn. Their children are paying the price of their amnesia. For the moment, they seem resigned, but, soon enough, they’ll want their world back.”

A nice insight into innovation from Diego Rodriguez:
“I often relate “business by design” to “business as usual” by using a sporting analogy:  business as usual is about efficiency and accuracy, about swimming as fast a race as one can.  And there’s a time and a place for that.  Business by design, in contrast, would be a swim race where you where rewarded based on the number of laps you could get in within a certain amount of time.  You want to do lap after lap, because with each stroke through the water, you gain the opportunity to learn something new, to try a different approach.  The sum of all those small learnings and insights — together with the occasional big leap — is what ends up being called innovative behavior.”

I often go to Pat Kane’s site “The Play Ethic”, in part in the hope that he has posted something new, but more often to look at his Delicious entries, which invariably take me to some unexpected and interesting places. Today,I came across a real gem, a piece by Richard Sennett from the Times back in February. He’s talking about craftsmanship and how we teach skills in the UK. This extract seems to sum up the heart of the argument:
“Take the creation of the mobile phone. This essential bit of modern kit resulted from the joining of two technologies, the radio and the telephone, which in the 1980s were not easy to link up. The technical problem lay in the switching mechanisms between the two. One approach to crafting a better switch was pursued by Motorola and Nokia, which encouraged engineers, salesmen and designers to collaborate in an open, easy fashion. By contrast, Ericsson emphasised benchmarks and targets for its various offices working on the switch; each office tried to make its mark in a firm that was internally highly competitive.
The Motorola/Nokia way proved more productive, quicker if messier, people pooling their thoughts and doubts about how to fashion the switch without worrying so much about getting ahead or standing out personally. Cooperation improved the skills of the Motorola and Nokia groups; competition inside the firm slowed Ericsson down.
The creation of the mobile phone switch is a model for how skills develop best. There’s nothing new about this model; medieval craft guilds enshrined collaboration in their rules. Perhaps the more modern note here is the emphasis on open-ended experiment, which took flight in the scientific revolutions of the 17th century. Good scientific craft emphasises the virtue of curiosity, which now, as then, means curiosity about what others know, think or doubt.”
The whole article is well worth a read and I just hope, without much hope, that those running our education and training system, who have largely taken the Ericsson route, will take heed.

Back in June I was urging you to go to the ChangeThis site and download Russell Ackoff and Daniel Greenberg’s manifesto, “Turning Learning Right Side Up”. Now, some six months later, I say again, go and download this one. Just to wet your appetite, here is another snippet that I think throws some light on the difficulties we face today:
“Much of our formal education focuses on problems and problem solving. It fails to reveal that problems are abstractions extracted from experience by analysis. Reality consists of sets of interacting problems—messes. Students are seldom taught or learn how to deal with messes. Instead, they are given exercises to “solve.” Exercises are abstracted from problems, themselves an abstraction; they leave out the information required both to formulate the problem and to solve it. They are purposeless problems. Questions often leave out the information required to understand the context of the problems from which the questions are an ultimate abstraction. For example, the answer to the question: “How much is 2 + 3?” depends on the context of the question, “Two plus three of what?” The answer will differ depending on whether we have in mind degrees Fahrenheit or Celsius, logarithms, or books on a table. Worse, creativity is suppressed in schools in which students learn to provide teachers with the answers they expect.”

My friend Gill Wildman pointed me to a column by Howard Jacobson in the Independent, which in turn led me to the lyrics of Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem”. In an earlier post I asked, “Where is the light?” Well maybe Cohen’s lyrics points to the kind of places to look:
“Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.”
Which in turn reminded me of a quote from Theodore Zeldin I have used before:
“Nothing influences our ability to cope with the difficulty of existence so much as the context in which we view them; the more contexts we can choose between, the less do the difficulties appear to be inevitable and insurmountable. The fact that the world has become fuller than ever of complexity of every kind may suggest at first that it is harder to find a way out of our dilemmas, but in reality the more complexities, the more crevices there through which we can crawl.”
So cracks and crevices it is then.

Had the woman who put in an offer for our house just over a year ago gone through with it she would now be sitting on a large paper loss. Had we accepted the seemingly massive reduction her young brother, who worked in financial services, suggested we would be debt free and living somewhere smaller that we owned out right and she would be nursing a much smaller paper loss. In either case, I would probably have been feeling fairly smug right now at my foresight and financial acumen. As it is I feel, in John Brunner’s phrase, “Like a dead leaf in the gale.” Why then, in a peculiar way, do I, at this time in our history, feel that this might be a happier place to be?

You might find Typealyzer quite fun. You enter your url and it does a swift Myers-Briggs analysis. Here’s mine:
“The analysis indicates that the author of http://www.purposivedrift.net is of the type:
INTP – The Thinkers
The logical and analytical type. They are especialy attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.
They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.”
For what it’s worth when I did a quick test a few months ago I was a bit more touchy feely:
INFP (Introverted Intuitive Feeling Perceiving)

Over the past few weeks I have been submerged in the flow of bad economic news. The optimism of my posts like, “Was I wrong?” has become very subdued. Here are three good accounts of how we got into this mess to reinforce the gloom:
Jonathan Ford’s “A greedy giant out of control”
Michael Lewis’s “The End”
Karl Moore’s interview with Henry Mintzberg “A Crisis of Management not Economics”
And for UK readers Willem Buiter really puts the knife in:
“Could the UK face a sterling crisis, or are we in one already?”
However, despite the tsunami of gloom and some personal circumstances that ain’t that great I still wonder whether the gloom is being over done. I think back a few day to a piece wrote about Gillian Tett, “Listen for the silences”, where she says:
“… one of the things I learned as an anthropologist is that to understand how a society works you need to not just look at the areas of what we call ‘social noise’ – ie what everyone likes to talk about, so the equity markets and M&A and all the high-profile areas everyone can see. But you need to look at the social silences as well.”
May be now, more than ever, we ought to be looking for the light in the silences rather than being overwhelmed by the noise of the sky falling in.

“We should reject the idea that the mind is something inside of us that is basically matter of just a calculating machine. There are different reasons to reject this. But one is, simply put: there is nothing inside us that thinks and feels and is conscious. Consciousness is not something that happens in us. It is something we do.
A much better image is that of the dancer. A dancer is locked into an environment, responsive to music, responsive to a partner. The idea that the dance is a state of us, inside of us, or something that happens in us is crazy. Our ability to dance depends on all sorts of things going on inside of us, but that we are dancing is fundamentally an attunement to the world around us.”
From an excellent talk about consciousness by Alva Noë at Edge.org.