Subject: Bored students: Another try at focusing the discussion

Posted by Jack Harich on 12/30/2010
In Reply To:Bored students: Another try at focusing the discussion Posted by Jay Forrester on 12/30/2010

Message:

Jay, I like what you've said.

I also like the reminder that this list needs to stay focused and not drift into idle chatter. That's what I've seen on most other lists and forums. That's why I'm not on them.

I don't think our slight meandering around is due to lack of focus on the part of the many brilliant posters to this list. Rather, it's due to lack of a productive approach to the problem of boredom. How does a list, or a team, or a person solve difficult problems like this one? Or how do we even engage in a productive, focused discussion that doesn't ramble around and around, in search of something that might lead to deep useful insights, which in turn might lead to solution?

At the great risk of raising a firestorm of consternation and disagreement, allow me to toss out a hypothesis.

After 20 years as a business consultant, I moved on to a more important problem. For the past 9 years I've been working full time on the environmental sustainability problem. Of interest to this thread is that I employ only two main tools for solving problems. One is the one I picked up in engineering school and perfected in consulting. It's a process that fits the problem. The other tool is the one Jay Forrester invented in the 1950s: system dynamics. For me that tool is essential for the insights necessary to solve difficult complex system social problems.

The hypothesis is that this discussion lacks the focusing mechanism of a process that fits the problem.

(Whoops, time to duck the arrows certain to be thrown at this proposition, because it runs so counter to conventional wisdom.)

From the hypothesis it follows that lack of focus is a symptom of lack of an inherently focused way to approach discussing problems like boredom in education.

For those not familiar with my work, here's the process I use:
www.thwink.org/sustain/glossary/SystemImprovementProcess.htm. This process has specific steps for modeling. The process leans toward system dynamics but does not require it, because SD is not the best fit for every problem. BTW, any process that fits the problem would do.

Most people are not convinced of the supreme importance of a process that fits the problem. The best evidence I know of to change this is to consider where science was before invention of the Scientific Method. It was pre-science. Alchemists wasted a lot of time trying to make progress on discovering new knowledge, because they were unable to prove that a discovery was (probably) true or not. Inventors were just as slow in making progress. But once they had a process that could prove that a cause and effect hypothesis was true or not, everything changed. Night became day. Alchemy became science. Invention became exponential. This allowed the Age of Reason, the Age of Enlightenment, and finally the Industrial Revolution.

Perhaps this suggestion, like Jay's, will help us to refocus the discussion.

Jack

Follow Ups:

Bored students: Another try at focusing the discussion - Louis Macovsky 12/31/2010 
Bored students: Another try at focusing the discussion - Armando Córdova Olivieri 12/30/2010 
Bored students: Another try at focusing the discussion - Pedro D. Almaguer Prado 12/31/2010
Bored students: Another try at focusing the discussion - Armando Córdova Olivieri 12/31/2010