Dear Chuck and Ken,
Peace.
It is difficult to get clarity in situations that 4H or higher (High complication, High value, High(ly) human, High risk...) because it is hard to think through the way things relate and cause outcomes. The problem is doubly difficult when combined with other activities. Looking at Research into IBM or Management of IBM at least doubles the difficulty.
An approach I've found helps is variety analysis. In this, variety is the sum total of every element and state that can be different. The level of analysis is unbelievably rough but the contribution of variety analysis to reasoning and the insights it provides are fast, effective and helpful.
An example: There is a level of variety associated with a single person. So the variety of two people is the sum of two varieties plus the variety they can generate as a pair over and above two separate individuals. The insight is that variety increase isn't just the sum of individuals.
The Law of Requisite Variety is that the amount of variety needed to manage or understand (research) a situation must be at least as big as the variety able to be generated by that situation.
For example, the richness of thinking of a manager must have a bigger amount of variety than the variety that can be generated in the situation being managed. If not, then the situation can generate events that are outside what the manager can manage.
In variety terms, Ken has pointed out that the sum total of variety of IBM is (in requisite variety terms) much larger than the variety available from a PhD student and supervisor. Hence, much of the variety of IBM and the activities associated with that variety will lie outside what can be addressed by the PhD student. Ken also pointed to the possibility of reducing the requisite variety gap by using multiple PhD students or a research program. This increases the control variety relative to the system variety.
Matching of requisite variety can, however, be managed in other ways. For example by attenuation. A practical example is that of a school classroom. The variety available to a teacher is much less than the variety that can be generated by 30 or so spontaneously uncontrolled children. The teacher ensures they have sufficiently requisite variety to manage the class by attenuating the variety from the students. This is done by insisting they sit at desks, only speak at certain times, all study the same material at the same time using similar methods, follow similar defined behaviours, etc. It’s a fine balance in which an experienced teacher has more than sufficient variety compared to a classful of students and have a well-managed classroom. In contrast a novice teacher may have less variety than the students can generate and things may get oput of control.
Parenting is similar as is managing a university, or managing a project and many other situations.
There is a downside (as Pink Floyd inferred) that attenuation of variety doesn't offer the same richness.
In some cases, however, the attenuation of variety can be helpful by itself. Having people drive on one side of the road reduces variety but is helpful in all sorts of other ways compared to alternatives (for some reason I'm reminded of rickshaw drivers in Pune).
As Chuck pointed out, one solution to the insufficiency of variety that can be provided by the PhD student compared to the variety of IBM is to attenuate the variety from IBM in the research context. Thios can be done in many ways.
Of course, too much attenuation or badly chosen attenuation can result in meaningless outcomes (e.g. Woody Allen on learning speed-reading and reading War and Peace concluded: 'It was about Russia').
The challenge is to find modes of attenuation of the variety of IBM that reduce it to the level of variety that can be provided by a PhD student AND can still offer useful research findings.
In fact the matching of requisite variety is the challenge of all research. It is never mentioned in research methodology classes, yet it is the most central issue in making a research project successful.
Attenuating variety of a researchable situation is also the reason for the use of the 'single research question'.
Understanding the requisite variety balance, however, also explains why in many research situations using a single research question is really unhelpful.
Resolving the variety issue ensures that scale, scope and skills issues in PhD research can be resolved also.
Best wishes,
Terence
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Dr Terence Love
Love Services Pty Ltd
PO Box 226, Quinns Rocks
Western Australia 6030
Tel: +61 (0)4 3497 5848
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www.loveservices.com.au
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-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Charles Burnette
Sent: Thursday, 19 November 2015 10:40 PM
To: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: [SPAM] Re: Scale, Scope, and Skills in PhD Research
Ken
We all make assumptions or misunderstand something when we read ones remarks. You are doing this even now. You attack the questions, despite my admonition to interpret it only as a way think about an alternative approach to gaining knowledge when considering the full implications of an effort is not feasible. I wrote " I pose these questions to you, not as an approach I recommend, but as an alternative way to think about how to gain and generate new knowledge. I certainly wasn’t suggesting that it was possible to address your presumptive interpretation of the problem in 6 months. Just that it makes sense to start somewhere with implications for a big picture yet to to come. ” I didn’t get anything back that offered a new direction, just a misinterpretation of what I tried to convey, and more detail about the status quo.
If you read Chatterjee and Coslett’s new book “The Roots of Cognitive Science” you will see how case histories in Clinical Neurology have produced major insights on how the mind works from study of as little as one patient. (Please try not to twist this around. I am just pointing to how a limited scope case can produce significant and useful information. I know it depends on the patient and the researcher and the institutions that enable the study, and the state of knowledge at the time. The book is also a condemnation of the big journals for no longer publishing case studies of merit.)
I’m asking you for a little creative thinking rather than a treatise on constraints or practices that exist.
Please have a good day. I’m retired.
Chuck
> On Nov 19, 2015, at 8:34 AM, Ken Friedman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> A six-month time frame makes sense by limiting the research problem. However, structuring time to make the project manageable reshapes the research problem. It is impossible to answer the original research question in a six-month window. The original question you asked about the IBM design thinking initiative is: “what worked and what didn’t?”
Charles Burnette
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