Cognitive Edge News
Cognitive Edge Guest Blog
Our guest blogger for the next two weeks is Marietjie Vosloo. Marietjie has grappled with how people can make good decisions her entire life, immersing herself in all manner of decision approaches, supporting from research to strategy. Today she is the programme director of the Sasol Inzalo Foundation, working in the field of education reform in South Africa.
11 March 2010
The vexed issue of language
In our work at the Foundation, we have developed a language of our own with phrases like “speaking Greek to the Italians”, “polishing shoes” and others. The phrases function like metaphors and are short-hand for ideas we have discussed at length previously – the one about speaking Greek to the Italians refers to using Cynefin language when speaking to people who are not part of our team and therefore are unlikely to understand what we are talking about. Most families develop private languages like these; they play an important role in establishing membership and identity.
The same applies to fields of knowledge, of course. The discipline-specific discourse provides more precise language tools than the language in common use. Effective use of the discipline discourse is a crucial element of what students must learn in order to acquire an identity, first in the academic world and later as a professional in their chosen field. As an internal consultant, I learnt early on that the skill to rapidly acquire a new discourse is vital in getting access to any new community you want to work with. The downside, as Dave pointed out in his blog earlier this week, is that the use of language can also be used to exclude people from a community.
9 March 2010
What do you mean, evidence?
When I was a statistician, I had almost complete professional freedom, as the people I worked for or with did not consider themselves qualified to judge whether the approaches I took were the right ones. In the world of education, the opposite happens – as everyone has gone to school for more than a decade, everyone considers him- or herself an expert on how it should be done, and therein lies the rub. Many an intervention is tried, and even implemented on large scale, because it sounds like a good idea, with very little evidence as to its suitability for the particular context.
So the Foundation I work for set out to generate evidence to support solutions in all our programmes. That turned out to be easier said than done in something like a bursary programme. The sample sizes required to achieve acceptable power and discrimination using traditional statistical methods were simply prohibitive in terms of cost. All the ethical issues familiar in social research presented themselves; for example, how can we not provide the support we believe can make a difference to the bursars’ success just for the sake of having a control group in the experiment? And if we see something is not working, how can we not intervene just to get good data?
8 March 2010
Bed-time ritual
When my daughter was two or three years old, she asked for a story one night, and of course, being a devoted mother, I obliged. But the next night she asked for another story, and the next night, and the night after that…. Soon it started to feel like hard work to come up with a new story each night, so I developed a story-generating algorithm, which went something like this:
* Think of something that happened that day
* Start with “One day, a long, long time ago there was a …”
* Personalize the thing or animal you thought of into a character she could sympathize with
* Create a problem for the character and explore the consequences
* Find a way to solve the problem
* End with a description of how the thing or animal lived after the problem was solved.
This made it much easier to construct an impromptu story. One evening I even ended up with a pink flannel sheep social network. It started with the pink sheep on her green flannel pyjama suit. Of course the sheep was lonely; he had no other sheep within reach to talk to. Until one day (a key phrase when constructing the story), when he realized that where the pyjama top covers the pants, he could get close enough to another sheep on the pant half, and they had a lovely gossip. Then they both found other sheep they could reach across a fold of the fabric, or where the sleeve rests on the pants, and soon all the pink sheep were sharing news by passing messages up and down the pyjama suit, telephone-style.
4 March 2010
Reflections from a statistician
Well, I suppose a lapsed statistician is a more accurate description of my current status in the field of statistics – I haven’t proven a theorem in a quarter of a century, the last time I tested a hypothesis was two decades ago and as for data-analysis, well for that I now have SenseMaker Explorer!
When I started out as a statistician, there were no personal computers; we made very strong assumptions just to be able to calculate the results; non-parametric methods with fewer assumptions took all-night runs on the university mainframe for a simple hypothesis test. Then came the PC; suddenly exploratory statistics became possible – not that it was considered rigorous enough to be proper statistics back then. But I loved it – it was like being a detective, looking for structure in a mass of data, using dimension-reduction techniques to squash the information down into two or three dimensions that could be visualized and interpreted, looking for patterns in graphs and finally, when the data set gave up its secrets, finding out what the patterns I saw could actually correspond to in the real world! Unfortunately, in the first stage of analysis, the pattern often corresponded to a management decision nobody bothered to tell the poor statistician about, but that’s another story.
Sounds familiar? When I first saw the scatter plot matrix in Explorer, I felt like I’d come home – even better, I could now do the same kind of analysis on “soft” data too!
I think Hugh must be living a parallel life at the moment! This was today's Gaping Void cartoon and it represents one of those interesting questions on engagement with others. Now to make it clear, the fact that a criticism or disagreement appears stupid, may just mean that I (or you) have failed to understand it. However there have to be limits, and I think the disengagement point is where this cartoon represents your state of feeling about the other party. Fortunately its rare!
An interesting day yesterday in New York. I was part of a small but select group discussing the information ecology of crisis management. I knew two of the participants (
Hugh of Gaping Void has his dark side, but that is a part of the attraction. This particular cartoon suits my mood at the moment and picks up on some of the themes of my last blog. Once an idea starts to take off many good things happen, but also some bad things. I have experienced
As ever Gaping Void gets to the heart of a dilemma. When to compromise and when to stand firm. It has been much on my mind lately in relation to a whole variety of issues, including the Cynefin model itself. The pragmatist in me (and I don't mean philosophical pragmatism) realises that ideas and concepts are never one's private property, they have a life of their own in the evolutionary maelstrom of human thought. The title of this blog references Mary Douglas's seminal 1966 work. She examines the way in which ideas of pollution and taboo are used to create boundaries and to define identity.