Living in the space between ideas
A blog about writing-to-think, but not as I thought it to be. In true collaboration we are writing-to-think together, and shared meaning needs common language to be found to make that so.
Eureka! If I shouted that to myself I did not hear. However, such moments are few and far between on any personal journey and merit this evening’s reflection. I had such a moment yesterday, in the company of my supervisors. Not that they would see it as such, more likely, “ah! and now finally he gets it!” Although, that too may yet be a conclusion to win from them both.
My Achilles heal in progressing in my capability as an academic remains my ability to communicate with academic clarity. I feel somewhat stranded, or perhaps held back by this now and it has started to dent my confidence. I am in purgatory, in the sense that I am wanting to win favour to move through the next gate, but still atoning for sins I did not even know I had made. That may now be about to change because of a realisation I came to yesterday. It seems so obvious as to be embarrassing to have not found out by now. Namely, that if I am writing-to-think it is thinking being done with my supervisors rather than telling them what I have now resolved.
For wider context, I am still wrestling with a problem with my methodology. It seems a simple enough problem to solve but it has really absorbed most of my second year so far. In crude terms, I am undertaking research that I now know will eventually involve interviewing individuals. The subject matter of interest sits at a much grander scale: relating conflict in projects involving differently orientated organisations to the governance managing that relationship. The scaling challenge really comes down to what is being generalised from the interviews, and how can that be evidenced meaningfully towards wider claim. I have taken a quite remarkably elaborate path towards answering that question. I am very happy with what I now see differently because of that intricate, or knotty, or perhaps frivolously convoluted route to bring me back to where I have now arrived. It is however a journey I have taken largely on my own, because I just have not found the words to explain what I have been doing.
The time taken to unsnarl that knotty problem (it may yet amount to six months) was largely the unpicking and re-stitching of my research design. As has been said several times to me now, “you’ve done a very deep dive into philosophy, much deeper than many PhD researchers do”. In unpicking and re-stitching what I now know to have been a research design problem I needed to satisfy myself that my eventual unit of analysis and levels of analysis aligned with my research problem, generalisation goals, and philosophical positioning (Strang 2015 taught me that). The justification for adopting hermeneutics and phenomenology seemed obvious to me, but it has been a devil to find the means to explain it. I had actually began this research wanting to work within a psychological framework but in time it became obvious to me that it did not fit the problem as an exploration. However, I have felt compelled to draw back the veil of the underlying philosophy to then understand the methodology, and then have my reasoning for why psychology did not fit. Much easier, but less satisfactory to my exploratory aims, would have been to keep the psychology and change the philosophical positioning to something more objectively amenable (pragmatism or critical realism for example). I have ultimately needed to rethread the philosophical and methodological ties with better understanding of both, and then reject the psychological ideas as too overtly positivist. The comment “you’ve made your work quite a bit harder for yourself” is certainly also true.
A month on since these comments, and yesterday’s fortnightly discussion with my supervisors was partly a reprimand and partly therapy. It was actually one of the best discussions I have had, simply because it drew something to the surface that I have been blind to until now. The revelation has three levels of insight. Firstly, I have been reticent to send progress to my supervisors of late. My reasoning was because I have deemed my thinking still to be thought-in-progress. Secondly (more deeply hidden) I am actually not so much still thinking through this problem now, but actually fatigued by the constant criticism of my writing style. Thirdly (more deeply still) my perspective on what writing-to-think can be is now found to be framed to the wrong set of possibilities. The result has been a growing sense of being judged, however that increasingly raw feeling is a criticism I have really been placing upon myself. If I had worked that out sooner, I would not have had to think the rest out on my own.
Once I moved beyond the self-pity yesterday -i.e., insight levels one and two above – this third level of insight became the focus of discussion. Writing continues to be my Achilles heal, but for reasons other than I had thought them to be. I am inclined to write, re-write, and write once again. I will take on new perspective, write that into what was said before, and then write it all over again. That might sound tedious, but it is apparently pretty common in academic terms. It is just writing-to-think. But, here is the kicker – only toward the end of my writing is what I eventually come to understand differently being structured to be understood by others. In this context, the writing to be understood is only arriving once the research is done. This is only half the story. The first-half however is not just writing-to-think for me. It can be, and has been but that is not the resting place of that ability, not if I want to be an academic and a collaborative member of an academic team. Once the full power of academic thought is being unleashed, the writing-to-think is itself a collaborative text. The written thinking as a process becomes necessarily downloaded into a text in a common language that can be readily understood by all involved. That was the light-bulb moment for me – Eureka!
The point here is that if everyone is writing-to-think, and if everyone is naturally inclined to think differently – and different is good – the collective thinking is useful and productive. However, the iterative process of collaborative thinking necessitates all can find means to converse through those thoughts, not after the thoughts are complete. Thinking in written form is therefore not just for the writer, but for all involved in developing that original thought. Taking that further, this probably means that no one person would have had some of these thoughts at all. In the project management field (which I aspire to call home), the relatively small scholarship community are a community of collaborators. That collaborative focus is part and parcel of the thinking process. I am fortunate to be supervised by editorial experience, and by extension to now be on the fringes of that community. I am getting to meet some of those names I read constantly. In Project Management journals the academic papers are hardly ever a solo affair, and the collaborators are spread across the globe. Where collaborative endeavour is the established norm, writing-to-think is therefore also necessarily learning to think in iterative steps with fellow thinkers. In other words, not just learning to think like these people, but learning to think with them.
Somewhere along the way of my PhD journey I have grown weary of the constant pointing to what I am not expressing with clarity – i.e., because it is still being thought out. However, I now see I had the wrong end of a very heavy stick. I was feeling embarrassment, fatigue, annoyance even, that my thinking was just not moving into the difficult and interesting discussions I crave – I just seemed to be constantly the recipient of judgement upon a writing style. That reflects the mood of my part in discussion yesterday. My supervisors grabbed that quite skilfully, “We are not judging you!”. After some newly offered explanation that fog began to clear. I am being nudged toward a way of communicating with my peers, in a language they too have had to learn. It seems like everyday language, but the context is code based on what all already know. By the time I am defending my research I am expected to know what others can be expected to know. My supervisors are my guides towards those final discussions at the end of this circa three years. Thereafter, if I am lucky and find the favour of those differently minded peers, I may get to move out of purgatory and onto new shared thoughts. New sharing, based upon or moving against already shared ideas.
…to be continued
Strang, K.D. 2015. The Palgrave Handbook of Research Design in Business and Management 1st ed. (K. D. Strang, ed.). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.