thinkfetti

This week, I am delighted to report that I am no longer the chair of the Humanities Department. At the end-of-year department party, I borrowed the key to the building directory from the department secretary and gleefully moved the letters C-H-A-I-R from beside my name to the name above mine.

In the process, the H split in two, but I managed to prop the pieces next to each other in the board when I set them back in. Friends of mine had suggested a chair breaking ceremony as part of the transfer of power, so I guess this H incident will fill in for that on a somewhat more abstract level.

I feel invigorated by the negative reinforcement, and I’m very much looking forward to getting to work (and to play) now that I have the time and mental space to do so.

I was teaching a music appreciation course this morning, and we found ourselves talking about syncopation. Syncopation in music is a delightful, playful rhythmic effect where a note is emphasized by being played “off the beat.” It’s kind of a springboard effect: the diving board went down “on the beat” and now bounds up after the beat. The note that gets its pizzazz launching from the rebounding board is described as “syncopated.”

But just being “off the beat” doesn’t itself make a note syncopated; there has to be some emphasis on the note that is caused by its spring-like relationship to the beat. There are plenty of ways to play notes between beats so that they aren’t syncopated.

One interesting aspect of syncopation is that the effect requires a beat in order to exist, even though the syncopated note is necessarily not sounding together with the beat. No beat, no syncopation. Now the beat can be overt, as with an accompanying drumset, or it can be implied, something constructed real-time in the mind of the listener by imagining what beat could be present, given all the other notes. But if there is only rhythmic mush, with no beat either overt or implied, then there is no possibility for syncopation. There may be emphasis, accent, but it would not be the special kind of emphasis that draws its power from the surrounding structure by being playfully off.

And this brought me to consider adapting these concepts to management, specifically to a couple types of problematic management:

If there is a structure but no room for difference then syncopation will be absent. Having everything happening on the same beat removes the opportunity for the special enhancement of an idea that bounces up off the beat.

But equally stifling is management without a structuring beat, either an overt one with clear and consistent stated policies and procedures, or an implied structure that organizational members can construct and understand themselves by observing all the notes. Without any beat, there is no way to syncopate, to express the positive and playful energy that can be generated by being off the beat.

Recently I was a guest lecturer in a Philosophy of Science course, an occasional offering at our university taught by an extremely well-read senior professor. I focused on a book chapter that called into question “external” factors influencing scientific theory-making, from quantum mechanics in the early part of the 20th century to more contemporary chaos, complexity, and superstring theories.

The most interesting “external” factor the author considered was beauty; he asserted that the quest for this elusive (and difficult, if not impossible, to define) factor called beauty was undermining the exercise of the scientific method and corrupting scientists, who ended up formulating misanthropic theories. The author considered chaos and complexity theories to be misanthropic, because they removed humans from the top of the evolutionary ladder, suggesting that humans might be examples of larger trends, rather than the ones in control. The idea that chaos and complexity theory amounted to a collective throwing up of the hands, insofar as they would represent an admission that a comprehensive, precise “theory of everything” would be a misguided goal, stood as a betrayal of the birthright of human reason to the author.

In one portion of the guest lecture, I asked students to discuss in groups the following four questions:

1. When is science used?
2. When is the scientific method used?
3. When not?
4. What does beauty have to do with it?

Admittedly, this was a lot for 10 minutes, especially in a group. But afterwards, when I asked each group to write on the board one of their findings, the answers surprised me.

One group wrote that science dealt with quantitative questions only; qualitative questions were outside its purview.

Another wrote that people generally employ the scientific method in their daily lives, even if they don’t refer to it as such. For example, we avoid hitting our heads into walls, because of informal experimentation we’ve done and observation. (This, of course, is rather contradictory to the previous statement.)

A third group wrote that “everything is subjective. I think.” Part of this response was motivated by the fact that the small group couldn’t agree on any answers to the questions I posed (or on approaches to the questions). Still, I found this quite a surprising response, coming from undergraduates at a science and engineering university…

I think the reluctance or inexperience of the students to analyze an argument rhetorically (be it the author’s argument, or just the way I led the discussion) left them in a bit of a bind, when it came to moving ahead confidently in their thoughts.

So much of my reading is “constellation-ally” self-organizing: I have at any one time some well-defined themes of interest and some fuzzy themes just below my conscious awareness, and in my reading I pick up books in different disciplines without staying in any one discipline or genre.

The “sense” in my variety of reading selections comes - emerges - later. It’s an experience of definite, luminous (illuminating) connections arising between areas that seemed related before, where the relationships before were vague and incapable of generating new ideas.

Some of my reading now is in areas of leadership, problem-solving, intelligence vs. mindfulness, and fertile connections between Eastern and Western thought. I was reading in several of these areas in 2000 when I first started exploring ways to model creativity, and I have experienced a lot to enrich my thinking in this constellation of ideas and themes since then, particularly through failures and successes in teaching and leading.

It looks as though I may have some opportunities to reflect on these connections in the coming months, especially in the context of a new problem-solving course I’ll be developing (more on that later). One thing that I anticipate and hope will allow time and some mental headroom for this reflection is the end of the semester next week!

This past week, D. Eric Smith, a resident researcher at the Santa Fe Institute, spoke at my university about the beginning of life on Earth. His talk was compelling, and although his talk was directed at a scientifically-literate general audience including undergraduates and faculty, his background and work betray extensive breadth and depth of thought.

I had an opportunity to talk with Eric earlier in the day about my potential interest in developing an introductory undergraduate course on complexity theory or self-organization. He suggested Jaynes’ book on probability theory as a good starting point for the course, a way to efficiently clear up some misconceptions about design, causality, reductionist approaches in science, and statistical mechanics. It’s been awhile since I have really done math; my undergraduate physics degree from Harvey Mudd and my graduate physics coursework at UC Berkeley were relatively math-intensive, but since 1993 my work has been primarily in qualitative-study-leaning subjects such as music (the quadrivium notwithstanding). So I knew I was going to be in for a challenge.

I checked out Jaynes’ book from our library, and it remains to be seen how far I will be able to work my way through it, but to this point, the effort required is certainly worth it. (I’ll probably end up buying my own copy, so I can write in it…)

The book explores logic and probability theory and connects them (or will connect them) to how we as people work with plausibility. In other words, this book seems to be a bridge between core aspects of science and several important pieces of philosophy and psychology.

The text also is already helping me refine and expand my thinking in other areas, such as in the course I’m teaching on TRIZ, a problem-solving methodology. For example, in formal logic, if A is a proposition, the consequences of the mutual exclusivity of A and not-A are the starting point for a vast exposition and development of powerful tools. In TRIZ by contrast, one of the methods for catalyzing problem solutions is to formulate a so-called “physical contradiction.” Here is an example of a physical contradiction: an object in a particular design situation must be heavy and it must not be heavy. Or a chemical in a particular context must be soluble and it must not be soluble. In other words, the categorical avoidance of contradiction is a starting point for formal logic, but the focusing of a conflict into a contradiction is a starting point for the problem solving heuristics of TRIZ. In Taoism, the idea of contradiction may also be seen to be generative, this time in still another way.