Reflections

As referring back to my first post on this learning blog, you can notice that one thing that I was looking forward to gain through this course was “get crystal clear on my goals of a PhD thesis”. By finishing the course, I have learned a lot of things, by reading papers provided during the course, now I know better “how” to start my research, how to set up my research questions and my goals, how to find suitable means of data collection, how to reflect upon my activities, how to observe openly, how to make use of the techniques like “dialogue” instead of discussion, how to present my findings and a lot more. Furthermore, I would for sure take into account the phases of “Theory U” in the process of writing my dissertation, cause I found it very useful.

Creation of success requires a strong foundation in each individual pursuing it. For a person who is an extreme procrastinator like me, I’ve found that using great tools and methods, like creating observation weblogs or make use of sharing files tools for the group work, would be very effective for eliminating procrastination and keep me more connected with my project.

As a PhD student who is at the beginning of her way to write a dissertation I found this course very productive. In order to achieve specific goals or results it’s not useful just to know how much time you spent on doing things, but as well you need a tool to measure achievements as well. That was the first time I created a learning journal, but it is not going to be the only one, because it was a productive method that helped me a lot to keep track of my learning.


M.M

B9- Overspill, theoretical background & reflection

In the last part of the session on 21 of Jun, “Theory U” by Otto Scharmer has been presented and all the KCTs reflected upon their project according to the “Theory U” steps. As in my group, only I and one other group member were available and we made our reflections together.

Here I would like to write about my personal learning from the “Theory U”.

• Co-initiating:
Seeing with fresh eyes,
Suspending,
Listening to others.

• Co-sensing
Sensing from the field,
Redirecting and seeing from the whole.

• Presencing
Letting go, connecting to the source with open mind and heart.
Questions like: What is my work?

• Co-creating
Letting come, crystallizing visions and intentions,
Envisioning what seeks to emerge,
Prototyping.

• Co-evolving
Linking the head and the heart by embodying.

As my own interpretations during the whole process of the project, I have been able to learn to go through the process of listening and observing. It is important to consider the fact that people have different backgrounds and we as group members should learn how to give space to each other to exchange our ideas and how to listen to each other mutually.

According to Scharmer the “presencing” phase (at the bottom of the U), requires “the open mind, the open heart, and the open will”. During this course, we practiced this phase in our outing session, which was not very productive for me personally. Now when I review everything one more time and when deeply thinking about the aim of the theory u, I noticed that my problem was that, I have been a bit blind minded and was just thinking in a some kind of the closed-loop and did not really used all of my senses openly.

As in the phase of crystallizing, the group was much more successful than the other phases of the theory U, in a sense that we finally became capable of getting crystal clear in our intentions and prototyping.

In general the coherence between our project steps and the theory U increased by time. In other words, as we moved from the “presencing” phase to “co-creating”, the results were more in alignment with the theory U.

M.M
 

B8- Creating New Realities

That was basically the last session of this course and the groups were supposed to present their prototypes. The presentations were as follow:


KCT 1: Predicting Future
This group had three prototypes.

First Prototype: Simulation; Implement unexpected events in standard simulation.
They had made a simulation on pedestrians in the subway. A random place in the subway had been chosen and then the pedestrians' behaviour when some obstacles appeared through their way had been simulated. That was a simulation of how unexpected events could affect the whole situation.

Second Prototype: Short Movie
That was a short movie about a person that has a job interview and so many unexpected events happen through his way to the interview place. Unexpected events, as a bomb explosion, road construction, train delay and so on. The key point was "What happens if very improbable situation occur at the same time?"

Third prototype: Board game
Aim: Transport the injured people from the accident place to the hospital.

My interpretation: I liked the creativity of the group in terms of using different media for their prototypes, but in a way I did not find any good coherence between these all three prototypes. Furthermore, was it really creating a new knowledge? Didn’t they just get into the conclusion, that all of us knew before?

KCT 2: Environment
My group started to present the business plan as our first prototype and continued with the webpage and finally closed it up by our posters.

My interpretation: During the presentation, my group members received some interesting questions. Some students were totally disagreeing the idea of “Earth enterprise”. Their argument was that the company services are not tangible enough, so that the idea would not be appealing for the customers, which I do not agree with totally. In my mind the business plan that we have created is rich enough in this term. Furthermore, it is always a problem for companies who are offering services to people rather than products.

The other question that rose was about the fact that how the company would guarantee that the use of the” management tools” in order to provide environmental friendly services, would not damage the environment itself? And the solution is that we believe that it is not just the tools that help us to create something, but it is important how to use the tools.

KCT 3: Homoeconomicus
This group had created a "decision map", in order to visualize the decision making process. They made an interview with a guy and created a decision map out of his answers in the process of making a decision.

As their conclusions, they mentioned the following points:
• People maximize pleasure and minimize pains,
• Life values can be classified into long-term and short-term,
• Distinguish between goal-oriented and pleasure-oriented,
• Both of goal-oriented and pleasure-oriented goals can have negative impact on the decision making process,
• Keep the goals in the mind in the shortest way to achieve it,
• Ideally in order to maximize value, the decision maker should maximizes both goal-oriented and pleasure-oriented values,
• It can be done simultaneously.

My interpretation: The presentation was creative; the fact of interviewing someone over a webcam was kind of breaking the borders. In terms of the context of the project, again these questions are in my mind: “, was it really creating a new knowledge? Didn’t they just get into the conclusion, that all of us knew before?” Ignoring these questions, I really enjoyed the group effort and work and the fact that they were not as lost as my group, and they were on the right track from the beginning was interesting.

KCT 4: Hierarchy
This group had created a new organizational method. A method, in which there exists some hidden/unhidden ways of contacts between the employees that would let the top manager to get to know what is really happening on the down levels on the organizational chart.

My interpretation: The idea was creative. I personally can consider it as a “New Knowledge Creation”.

M.M

B7- Crystallizing, designing & prototyping / Part two

Phase C- Prototyping: Explore prototyping scenarios  

At this phase we put our ideas and plans into action and started prototyping. The process was going smooth and fine, as we all had a clear same understanding of the final goal. Just the idea about collages (comparing earth with other planets, in terms of marketing competitors) was changed more or less to advertisement posters. Why? What was wrong? As we tried one collage but it was not in coherence with other ideas, and also I personally check it with a friend in another KCT; in order to get some new inputs, so at the end we changed it more to "posters" than "collages".

My personal feedbacks from the prototyping process:

The business plan idea was going good; it was making sense for all of us. It was making the project look more feasible and real. Furthermore, it was in alignment with the webpage prototype, it was kind of providing us with the final ideas of how the final prototype must looks like.

Also I think that our three prototypes would enable better communication between the designers and final users. For examples the collages/advertisement posters are based on environmental issues and how management techniques that our company would offer (which are mentioned in the business plan) would deal with them.

Difficulties:

As it was the first time for all of the group members to make a prototype for not an automobile project for example, it was a bit different. It was so interesting to go through the process and see how as it was developing from the first abstract idea and getting more and more complete.

Furthermore, in terms of difficulties it is worth to mention that a degree of skill and experience was inevitably necessary to be able to use the prototype as an efficient tool. The other factor could be time limitations, a perfect prototype would come up when the appropriate amount of time is dedicated to it. In our case the group faced time pressures. But in general the group was satisfied with the ideas, process and the prototypes.  

To sum up this part I would like to say thanks for the useful prototypes ideas that were provided from the professors on the homepage.

M.M

B7- Crystallizing, designing & prototyping / Part one

Phase A- Individual crystallizing: let sink in the project idea from the previous phase of presencing and let it become more concrete.

It is a time for self-studying and co-operate within the group. I started to inform myself more about different types of prototypes. I searched around and found some interesting ideas, pictures and articles; I was talking to other KCTs as well. I learned more about storyboards, collages and different other techniques which would be appropriate for our project and finally I still thought that the best media for our prototypes could be collages and webpage.

By getting clear on my ideas for our prototypes, I tried to make contacts with my group, in order to share my two new ideas with them. But it was a little bit frustrating process, not because they disagreed, but mostly because they responded me so late. So I learned another issue here, the group members' responsibility would have a great impact on my level of motivation. But I always have this in my mind that... "creation of success requires a strong foundation in each individual pursuing it. The foundation consists of a healthy, positive mindset that believes in that improvement and change is possible" (This is based on the teachings of Anthony Robbins, David Deangelo and Napoleon Hill on personal development).

Phase B- Collective crystallizing: develop a concrete project and a joint vision in the KCTs.

Anyway, finally the group managed to meet.  Through sharing the ideas and experiences with each other we came up to the solution together. And finally all of us agreed upon the collage/advertisement and business plan and a webpage as prototypes. We made a to-do-list, split up the tasks and decided to get in touch through the email, because almost everybody was so busy with their personal life issues.

As my learning outcome from this phase, I would like to mention that, at this time I felt that the group has got finally the same joint vision. As we were discussing the things, I noticed that finally blurry questions are going to fade away and we are near to create the thing that was in our minds from the beginning. Finally our joint intent could show up in the prototypes.

M.M

Sharing expriences with other KCTs

After the outing session I met a friend from another KCT and through discussing with her about their prototypes and our prototypes and so on, I came up with two new ideas for our thematic field.

1- Comparing the Earth with two other planets that would offer living to human beings:

Imagine it is 2200 and the earth is about to explode and running out of any natural resources and human being life is threaten. There are some competitors to the earth, like other planets, that would offer some kind of possibility of living. Imagine what kind of life styles they can offer and then make a "business plan" or some kind of "scenario planning" for our company and compare it with these two other planets. Two planets that I thought we can consider could be "Saturn" and "Mars". As the Saturn is the second largest planet in the solar system and Mars’ rotational period and seasonal cycles are likewise similar to those of Earth.

And I thought as a prototype, we would present it in the format of a collage or advertisement posters.

I also started searching around for some pictures and I found a structure for the business plan.

2- What would the Earth itself do to get rid of us, as human beings?

(Considering the fact that humans are destroying the Earth).

I was thinking about something like that the earth would fine or punish us as human beings, when we do not care about our environment. Try to make a brainstorming on the factors that earth could do in order to decrease the population of the human beings gradually until it could get rid of us completely. For example through earthquakes, volcanoes, water explosions, sonami, ozone layer decreases, producing unhealthy ashes and so on. So the prototype could be a collage again, considering the brainstorming objects.

Well, I kind of liked the second idea, although it was not really related to what we have done up to now. So, I gonna discuss these ideas with my group and would make a new post regarding the feedbacks that I would get.

M.M

B5- Creating collective sense organs and collective sense making /B6-Presencing

In this session we went out with the whole group to the nature. The aim of the session was to share knowledge about the experiences in the process of observation. The “world café" and "dialogue" methods, which have been introduced to us before, were applied.

For me personally it was hard to kind of co-construct the observations, because in my group we did not have any specific observation and our process was a bit messed up. What I did was kind of reviewing our thematic field and sum up everything in my mind one more time. I also came up with the idea of representing the company as a NPO, considering the questions that we previously faced regarding the final goal of the company. Through making the "dialogue" within the group (only two other members of my group were available) we came up with some ideas, which could be highlighted as follow:

We decided upon a platform design for our enterprise, some kind of a social entrepreneurship and for the prototypes we came up for three ideas at the moment. The first idea was, to create a webpage for our Earth enterprise, the second one was to create a "folder" by the use of best used cases and the third idea was to create a role-play prototype.


M.M

B4- Deep observation and deep understanding

The goal of this phase is to totally immerse into the chosen thematic field by extensively exploring it with a wide variety of methods for deep observation. In order to do this, group decided to create a website to provide a conceptual model representing the thematic field and at the same time prototype of the joint project of the group.

At this phase, the group faced a lot of confusions again. Considering the feedbacks that we got from the professors, some changes in observation tactics occurred. Now the group decided just to focus on two of tactics among the list of primarily tactics that have been created before. Observation is based primarily on "brainstorming" and "simulation" and results in the description of the enterprise comprised of different typical elements (such as a product portfolio, organizational structure and similar). As for a real enterprise, this information provides a basis for different (mostly PR) materials, such as a stock market folder, web page or a business plan. A typical web page presenting an enterprise would thus be an appropriate structure to present the observation results.

The twofold structure of the model, being an observational device and a prototype for a possibly ‘real’ project, is at times very confusing, and one sometimes does not know which aspect one is currently working on.


M.M

B3- Negotiation observation strategy & observation design

Up to now, the mission of the project, observation strategy and some observation tactics have been discussed. On April 12th, we had a coaching session with our professors, in order to come up with a concrete observation design, which will be brought into practice in the next phases.

Here I would share the feedbacks that we got from the professors on the project up to now:

1. First of all, the professors liked the idea of using the "world as an enterprise" metaphor, However, they recommended us to narrow the definition of environment down to a specific topic (e.g. sustainability),

2. Try to focus on two central questions in our research,

3. Use the strategies of some other green companies and combined them with ours,

4. Try to get some inputs from creative industries for example, design and communication agencies,

5. Use photos and videos in order to document the observations,

6. Rather pick some interesting points and discuss them in detail than doing too much and get frustrated by the results.

I participated in a coaching session with a colleague of mine and my understanding of the project changed a bit after this session. I understood that there are still a lot of fuzzy issues going on in the phase of "observation strategy", which means we need to sit with the group more and more and continue our brainstorming.

It is always very useful to get feedbacks and comments, so I decided to make a very simple experiment, in order to get more feedbacks on our field of study. I described the theme of the project very shortly to a familiar person and asked him to tell me, what did he understood and did not understood about the project? As a result, I faced some questions like; (" what would be the final goal, make money or just increase the awareness"? what about animals? Who are the owners and who are the customers specifically? etc"). 

M.M

B2- Co-initiating KCTs, community-building, and observation strategy development

This is the phase, in which KCTs were supposed to meet and discuss their thematic fields. In my KCT, through discussing on the chosen topic (“Environment”), the group came up with the following idea:

How can we make people care about the environment? The group agreed upon the fact that most of us really do not think about environmental issues most of the time and usually tend to turn away from most issues. This question led us to something like developing a "marketing plan" for the planet earth. Some idea like, how the "care for the environment" can be best sold?

By doing a bit more discussion and elaborating on the topic, the group came up with the idea of “the earth as an enterprise” model – just thinking about (or looking at) our planet (or the natural and social resources) as a company which has product management, marketing, sales, organizational behaviour etc, in order to help “the Earth” (whatever that will turn to be) to survive and prosper.

Goal and key points

The goal would be: setting up "the earth" as a start-up enterprise. Furthermore, the key points of the group thematic field could be summarized as follow:

- How to make people concern/aware of environmental issues?

- Enterprise metaphor as a tool to transport the idea of environmental concern.

Mission and Visions

Based on the thematic field, a common “mission” and "visions" of the field was identified also.

- Mission:

We manage the Earth.

- Visions:

- Enterprise the Earth ( to make the earth a successful enterprise),

- Create an “Earth Inc”.

And finally regarding observation strategy, the group made a list of possible resourses of data collection and decided upon a draft observation strategy as bellow:

Observation Strategy: To look at the Earth as an enterprise.

Observation tacticts:

- Interviews

- Questionnaires

- Brainstorming

- Market study

- Literature Review

- Nature observation

- Simulation (sales situation, CSR, management meeting, talking to our kids and so on).

As my learning outcome from this part, I would like to mention that it was a bit confusing to find a common goal and vision at first steps, but when we continued and did more brainstorming, little by little we were able to get into the same and clear understanding of the field of the KCT. well, the topic is so intersting to me but still a bit complicated and fuzzy though.

M.M

B1- Identifying emerging thematic fields and co-initiating

In this phase the individual questions that everyone has made were more discussed and elaborated as follow:

A- Several small groups were made in order to discuss questions/topics that matter,

B- Everyone in the group was supposed to briefly present his/her individual question, while other members of the group were silent and listening. After this short presentation," Core Beliefs" and "Assumptions/Base concepts" regarding the presented questions were made by everyone separately, and at the end everyone in the group was supposed to prioritizes his/her core-belief cards  according to the most interesting one to the least interesting one,

C- All the separated groups gathered together and put the interesting questions/topics with the respectively core beliefs and assumptions cards on a big table and a "semantic map" was created.  Then semantically related concepts were expressed by closeness. And finally, through negotiation and discussion, thematic fields were created,

D- Reduction of the thematic fields to the desired number of “knowledge creation teams” (KCTs). At this phase, each participant assigns him-/herself to a thematic field. Four topics and respectively four knowledge creation groups were created as follow:

KCT 1: Predicting
KCT 2: Environment
KCT 3: Homoeconomicus
KCT 4: Hierarchy

 At the beginning of the session, I was in the group with four other students and the questions within the group were regarding homoeconomicus, ethics in organizational behaviour, future predicting, social awareness activities and environmental issues, which was actually my question. It was very interesting to think about the core beliefs behind any specific questions, it lead me to think more thoroughly about the presented topics and when we entered the phase C, my question of interest was selected as one of the thematic fields , so I made my KCT with three  other people to work on an environment topic.

 M.M

B0- Questions that matter.

The part A of the course is completed by now and the second part of the course, which is the "knowledge creation" part, would be started.

At the first phase of part B, which is called B₀, Each of the students was asked to think individually about the topic that matters to him/her and create a question regarding that topic. The question could have been in any field, like a scientific question or a social or even a personal question. The goal of this phase was to create a basis for establishing common emergent thematic fields.

My question was about environmental issues. That is my question:

"What environmental effects would the development of alternative energies in the future cause, especially considering the growing use of electric power within the car industry?"

The reasoning behind the importance of this topic to me could be summarized as follow:

Pollution is a very hot topic at the moment all around the world. The destruction of the nature has effects on everybody. In some topics, just international solutions are possible, as e.g. air pollution does not stop at borders between nations. The air pollution through the car and goods vehicle industry is rather large, because almost everyone has a car and lots of goods are transported by duty vehicles. Therefore, every litre of gasoline that is saved with a new model of car helps to prevent tons of CO2 and other dangerous substances. The hybrid car technology and the full electronic drive systems are a promising step to the right direction. It substitutes gasoline by electricity, which does not exhaust harmful substances. If this technology can get dominant in the market, then it has good effects on the situation of the nature.

M.M

A2- Group Work

As I mentioned in the previous post, we made a group to work on a small project in the field of foundations of science. The aim of this project was to explore the foundations of science in order to get an insight for the next project, which would be in the field of creating knowledge.

The topic that we chose to work on was called:” Scientific knowledge and reality, from reality to theory (and back) “. The material that we were supposed to read is as follow:

- Chalmers, A.F. (1999). What is this thing called science? (Third Ed.). Berkshire, GB: Open University Press. (Chapters 2-3)

- Popper, K.R. (1959). The logic of scientific discovery. London: Hutchinson.

- Chalmers, A.F. (1999). What is this thing called science? (Third ed.). Berkshire, GB: Open University Press.(Chapters 5-6 (7))

- Okasha, S. (2002). Philosophy of science. Oxford: Oxford University Press.(Chapter 4)

- Godfrey-Smith, P. (2003). Theory and reality. An introduction to the philosophy of science. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press. (pp 155-162)

- Kolb, D.A. (1984). Experiential learning: experience as the source of learning and development. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. (pp 20-38)

These papers are about observation, experiment, Popper & falsification, realism & antirealism, theory-ladenness of observation and finally learning, experience, knowledge, and science. The group prepared a presentation on this topic with the main focus on the role of experiment in learning.

My learning points from this project:

1. First of all I would like to emphasize the important role of group discussion and brainstorming that lead us to achieve a reasonable result at the end. So group work, where everyone is willing to discuss and brainstorm would definitely create great results.

2. Experimental learning is a holistic perspective that combines experience, perception, cognition and behavior. Three models of experimental learning are available out there, which all consider learning as continues process that is grounded in experience. And finally learning is a process of creating knowledge. We can say that Knowledge is the result of the transaction between social knowledge and personal knowledge, and by ”Social Knowledge” means objective accumulation of previous human culture, while the ”Personal Knowledge” means subjective life experiences.

3. The theory-ladenness of observation argument presents a contradictory point of view to the empiricists arguing that observations are biased by theoretical assumptions.

4. Anti-realism tells us to be careful in making theories about the unobservable world and their empirical success.

5. Falsification: A theory can never be said to be true only that it is the best available. For the principle of falsification, a hypothesis must be falsifiable, meaning that there exists a possible observation statement or set of observation statements that are inconsistent with it.Hypotheses that cannot be falsified are therefore not considered as scientific problems. Popper calls them non- or pseudo science. Even for “proven” or obvious hypotheses such as Newton’s gravitation theory or the rise of the sun tomorrow morning there may be observations that would reject them.

M.M

A1- Introduction Session.

On March 1, 2010 I had the first lecture of the course "Philosophy of Science" by Prof. Peschl at the University of Vienna. The session started with an introduction on the contents of the course, course design, learning outcomes, grading system and finally ended up by project group formation.

My first impression after the first session was, that it would be very interesting to learn the process of creating knowledge step by step and professionally. The professor mentioned that some aims of this course would be to explore what science is, what its goals are, what it does, how it works, what its limits are, and what are its basic assumptions about knowledge, methods, the world, etc. As a PhD candidate, who is just at the beginning of her PhD studying, I strongly looking forward to gain a lot of new thoughts and inputs during this course sessions, which could help me to broaden my view on the process of writting my dissertation.

So these are the four main points that came to my mind after the first session:

1.Get crystal clear on my goals of writing a PhD thesis-As I consider myself a new scientist, who is at the very beginning steps of her mission, it is important to exactly know what is my role and how could I create knowledge through familiarity with methods of knowledge creation.

2.Ask myself broad but direct question-What are the questions that matter to me? What do I really want to achieve in writting a dissertation? What is important to me about that?

3.Getting familiar with research methodology techniques-Observations, experiments, generative interview and appreciative interview.

4.Give myself a space to reflect-Reflection process, group discussion and brain storming.

M.M