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.

I was poking around Technorati, searching at entries with education and design as tags, and I found this interesting blog describing “Web 2.0″ tools that could be useful to students and faculty at various level institutions. I looked at a few of the collaborative tools…somewhat promising.

But then I found a link to a course being offered this semester by Harvard Law School in conjunction with Harvard University Extension. As far as I can tell, this is a class about argumentation, particularly in relatively new venues such as blogs, wikis, and the like. That’s interesting enough in its own right. But then…much of the class is being taught within SecondLife, even the office hours of one of the faculty members are situated in the virtual world. Could “distance education” be about to experience a paradigm shift?

In addition to my other job duties, including teaching and coordinating a music program, I am the chairman of the humanities department at my university. Under the previous chairs, the department usually tried to use some form of voting when it came to making important decisions. Some of the results were satisfactory, but some unhelpful power relationships perpetuated themselves due to the numbers of faculty in specific subdisciplines, and several people lost out routinely.

When I was starting out as chairman, I told the department that I was more interested in building consensus. I’m not far into my tenure as chairman, and I still value consensus highly. But here we are in late October, talking about what positions to request as replacements for departed and retired faculty, and my, are we far away from consensus. And, hold your breath…. voting looks like it’s not going to come close to solving anything either. The votes we’ve had when this issue has come up before, and the inclination to vote now - all of the voting sessions lead to winners and losers, with no one willing to put in the serious effort it takes to build consensus (or, what may be the same thing, to look at all of the various angles of opportunity and liability that the department faces).

I’d like to keep the faculty to the task of forging consensus considering the interests of the department as a whole. But I don’t think I - as a peer leader with some informal authority and a bit of formal authority, but no extensive power - can make them do the work they need to do. I also cannot do the work by myself.

So I may be forced to make the best decision I can, submitting a couple of job descriptions to the vice president after getting input from the department faculty, but without either consensus or a vote. And then inviting the department and/or vice president to ask me to quit the chairmanship if they really want that. Someone else in the position would certainly work differently, but I’m not too sure that the results would be better.

From Mark Oakley’s Managing Product Design, John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1984:

“The role of the design manager is clearly a crucial one in promoting successful results. In many respects the qualities required in order to be effective in this job are substantially different from those traditionally exhibited by managers. The main emphasis must be on the design manager’s ability to deal with change and ambiguity.” (p. 56)

In teaching humanities in a science and engineering university, I have noticed that some engineering faculty find it odd that we humanities faculty members want to limit our class sizes. Teaching “soft skills” such as effective communication and tolerance of ambiguity, or skills that are elusive in both teaching and evaluation, such as critical thinking, requires (in my experience) much more time to be spent in evaluating and responding to student work. In teaching physics courses, I found evaluation of student performance to be more straightforward in most cases. There, I could maximize efficiency in grading and evaluating without sacrificing accuracy and helpfulness of response. Occasionally, I would incorporate error trends in assignment answers into my teaching; this feedback loop could help improve student performance, even in large classes. But where the “right” answer is not so well defined, and the process is being emphasized, there is simply more work to be done in evaluating student effort.

Ethics is not simply a trainable ability to select a “right” answer. Design is not simply choosing what is inevitable, profitable, or aesthetically appealing. Critical thinking is not simply a matter of following an algorithm. And because these activities are non-trivial, evaluating students as they develop their skills in them is time-consuming, and classes taught by a single professor probably cannot be scaled up in size without losing effectiveness.

Ambiguity provides opportunity (and risk), but to tolerate or embrace ambiguity requires time.