Nice distinctions from Norman Blaikie:

• Logic in use: practical thinking used while action is in progress
• Reconstructed logic: articulate interpretation of past action
• Logic of anticipation: thinking out future action

I am training myself in three intellectual habits:

1. Set context! — Never launch into talking about an idea without setting context first. If the thought has a purpose or possible application, give that first. Maybe provide a little back-story on the genesis of the problem.
2. Provide examples! — Any abstract concept must be accompanies with concrete applications, preferably presented narratively. The main purpose of examples is not to establish the validity of the concept, but to establish its very meaning (a.k.a. give people a hint of what the hell you’re even going on about.)
3. Name concepts! — A concept only becomes fully real when it has been named. Until that point it is only an analogy or worse a tacit perspective. Naming things makes them real to people. It makes ideas into objects that can be thought about.

“Let’s agree to disagree” can mean more than one thing. Perhaps no statement has a broader span of consequential meanings. Here’s a few:

1. Alienation: “Let’s agree to abstain from all encounters.” This means living in complete intellectual isolation from other individuals. Through destruction of communication – through taboos, unclear habits of speech, favoring forms of etiquette that undermine dialectical exchange, and reforming/deforming forums where true encounters might occur and replacing them with counterfeit forms of parallel talk – people become unable to disagree with one another enough to feel  the presence of a mind that is different from one’s own.
2. War: “Let’s agree to settle this on the battlefield.” This means closing the embassies, sending the diplomats home, and ending attempts at mutual agreement. Each side makes an all-out attempt to forcibly impose their own perspective on the other. Rarely does this form of disagreement announce its intentions. In fact, nearly invariably, it marches in waving both the flag of peace and of unyielding principle – as if it can serve both these causes.
3. Competition: “Let’s settle this on the playing field.” This appears to be an agreement to disagree, but in fact it is making a far deeper agreement — an agreement on rules of engagement in cases of disagreement. This, in turn, is founded on an even deeper agreement: that local principles to which we are loyal should be tempered by a higher order of principles that preserve a kind of unity and order within the profoundest diversity. Nietzsche observed that competition (agon) was the kernel of Helenic values, which is hardly surprising considering the structure of Greek religion, where each individual, and each polis maintained its allegiance to one or two gods, but even deeper loyalty to the Olympian order. The Greeks maintained this deep order of local conflict against barbarism, which knew no order above the either-or of violence and isolation.

It should be kept in mind that coming to agreement on valid principles of competition is not an easy matter. The task goes far deeper than merely formulating rules of competition. Of course, precisely for this reason the majority of people will want to cut directly to mere formulation of rules as if the principles are a self-evident matter of nature – if they even get as far as thinking in terms of rules. Most will prefer to limit disagreement to matters of fact. The expectation is that facts, once established, will “speak for themselves” and will dictate to us, in clear and unambiguous language, the entire rulebook of reality.

Competition is not a silver bullet solution, and to choose it as a way out is simply to acknowledge the true scope and depth of the problem of rising above the barbarism of alienation or war.

Reading up on Theodor Adorno in Wikipedia I saw this:

“What I mean by reified consciousness, I can illustrate – without elaborate philosophical contemplation – most simply with an American experience. Among the frequently changing colleagues which the Princeton Project provided me with, was a young lady. After a few days, she had gained confidence in me, and asked most kindly: “Dr Adorno, would you mind a personal question?”. I said, “It depends on the question, but just go ahead”, and she went on: “Please tell me: are you an extrovert or an introvert?”. It was as if she, as a living being, already thought according to the model of multi-choice questions in questionnaires.”

A nice passage from Crotty’s Foundations of Social Research (emphasis is mine):

A first way to approach texts might be described as empathic. This is an approach characterised by openness and receptivity. Here we do more than extract useful information from our reading. The author is speaking to us and we are listening. We try to enter into the mind and personage of the author, seeking to see things from the author’s perspective. We attempt to understand the author’s standpoint. It may not be our standpoint; yet we are curious to know how the author arrived at it and what forms its basis.

There can also be an interactive approach to texts. Now we are not just listening to the author. We are conversing. We have a kind of running conversation with the author in which our responses engage with what the author has to say. Dialogue of this kind can have a most formative and growthful impact on ideas we brought to the interchange. Here, in fact, our reading can become quite critical. It can be reading ‘against the grain’.

Then there is the transactional mode of reading. What happens in this mode is much more than refinement, enhancement or enlargement of what we bring to our engagement with the text. Out of the engagement comes something quite new. The insights that emerge were never in the mind of the author. They are not in the author’s text. They were not with us as we picked up the text to read it. They have come into being in and out of our engagement with it.

These are all possible ways of reading. There are others beside. And we are free to engage in any or all of them. These various modes prove suggestive and evocative as we recognise research data as text — and, even before that, as we take human situations and interactions as text. In this hermeneutical setting, ways of reading are transfigured as ways of researching.

I see this book as a natural continuation of Richard J. Bernstein’s excellent Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. The biblio-fetishist in me wants to shelve them together.

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One more nice bit from this chapter, a quote from Stanley Straw:

In contrast to conceptualizations of reading built on the communication model, transactional models suggest that reading is a more generative act than the receipt or processing of information or communication. From the transactional view, meaning is not a representation of the intent of the author; it is not present in the text; rather, it is constructed by the reader during the act of reading. The reader draws on a number of knowledge sources in order to create or construct meaning.

This is the goal of generative research: not to understand “the user” (as UCDers think) in order to provide what is needed and desired in the most convenient and comprehensible form possible, and even less, to use an understanding of “the customer” (as ad folks think) in order to manipulate perceptions and behavior — but rather to use divergence of perspective as material for dialectical synthesis of entirely new opportunities for offering-mediated relationships between organization and customer.

Critics who call for readers to engage the text and freely construct their own meanings independent of authorial intent have inspired me to read their works as calls to pursue the author’s intent, to respect the content of the text as a means to extend the reach of what I can construct. And despite what they would say, I am pretty sure they agree with me.

Seeking courageous, imaginative, practical, intensely dissatisfied optimists.

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Just as all music from an unfamiliar genre sound alike until the crude unfamiliarity gives way to subtle but crucially important distinctions, to profane ears all religions seem to strive after the same thing.

This is simply not true: there may be a transcendent unity of religious truth, but that unity is not necessarily unity of purpose. But this difference in purpose is eclipsed by the outlandishness of the realities above and below what we mistake for the mundane. Until this transcendent reality becomes familiar, its unfamiliarity is its overwhelming feature. Once that unfamiliarity subsides — and not many religious souls try to understand it from an angle that encourages familiarity — deep conflicts in purpose become evident.

And the same thing is true of post-positivist thinking (not to mention post-positivist existence). It is 100% possible to believe in the realities the heroes of post-modernism work in, but to utterly reject their romantic egalitarian ideals. One could employ the same insights to elitist and tyrannical ends, which is in fact what the Neo-Conservative movement seeks to do. And it is possible to transcend an egalitarian vs elitist framing of the conflict as well.

It seems many of the postmodernists of the 70s and 80s were unaware that their insights were not essentially and necessarily attached to an ethic, and this is because they were newcomers to an unfamiliar sphere of reality and their ears were still filled with the mud of exoticism.

By the way, this is why we should be nervous when we generalize about realities in which we have not immersed. You will absolutely fail to see the most important distinctions, and you’ll understand it all only in relation to yourself in your own uninitiated ignorance. There’s myriad classical sub-genres, Christianities and postmodernisms, and hidden beneath these categories are deeply consequential conflicts.

Never underestimate the difference between 1) intuiting a way a problem can be brought to resolution, 2) having developed a mental image of the resolution of a problem, 3) intuiting a way a problem domain might be radically reframed and re-understood, and 4) having found a radical new way to frame and understand a problem domain.

To people who have shifted their perspective on reality — which is the true meaning of vision — the truth revealed through the shift is so charged with significance that it often overwhelms the apparently lesser truth of facts.

The shift overturns and reorders the entire field of factuality, in a way that is hard to describe to people who have never experienced such a thing (and who remain naive realists).

The vision is experienced as a superior order of truth. Facts seem like petty little accidents that might have been otherwise, so why not just let them be otherwise for the higher purpose of effecting the shift?

What this means, unfortunately, is that men in the grip of a vision are all-too-willing to fudge or falsify facts, out of contemptuous disregard.

This willingness to steamroll “mere facts” or to tell “noble lies” has an unfortunate effect on those around them.

Why? Because the falsification appears to be an essential part of the vision. To a naive realist, who sees truth as the faithful reflection of an exterior world that just is, the reality-defying alternative perspective of the visionary and whatever lies he casually spouts are all of one piece: they’re all roughly contrary to what is real. In a way, the outright lies are comfortingly accessible compared to the weird intuitive promptings that really drive the visionary toward who knows what.

It is all “reality distortion field”.

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A more mature approach to vision would honor facts — noting those facts that remain constant through shifts (“obligatory passage points”) — as well as the stratum of truth capable of shifting and reordering facts — because this opens yet another stratum of truth: a perspective on perspectives. This stratum of truth reveals the importance of all kinds of truth as essential to having authentic relationships with other people.

When we are scrupulous with truth at all levels, we make it possible for others to share a higher sense of truth, to teach and learn and to open up more and more of life’s potential, and to create clean reality transformation fields.

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There is no difference whatsoever between respecting reality in its fullest sense and respecting one’s neighbor. They are alike.

Teaching is a kind of gift-giving.

As with all gift-giving, teaching is not a simple transfer of property from one party to another.

Nobody gives a gift to another detached individual: authentic gifts are given to a relationship.

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There is an art to giving and receiving gifts — a sense of good form — and much of this art is bound up with knowing how to fully belong to a relationship as one gives a gift, and how to accept a gift on behalf of a relationship.

To fail at the former is to become a kind of loan shark — or, even worse, a philanthropist. To fail at the latter is to become a thief of gifts.

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People who generate original ideas understand why the dedications and footnotes of books are full of expressions of gratitude and indebtedness. These are not grudging acknowledgments. They are celebrations of friendships, communities and traditions — and of the capacity to participate in the highest kind of exchange.

A collaborative group must have a clear problem to solve — a challenge to focus on and pit itself against — or the members of the group will pit themselves against each other and the group itself will become its problem.

The job of a planner is to provide a group with a productive problem to divert it from destructive internecine warring.

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The most common form of idiocy in the business world is trying to solve problems before the problems have been articulated. Problem-finding and problem-shaping is a thousand times harder and more painful than problem-solving, which is why doers like to skip to the doing.

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The best innovation research concentrates on problem-finding and problem-forming. Marketing research is best for informing problem-solving, where the questions and possible answers are already known. The roads are already laid and paved, and the question is “which route should we take?”

When we question knowledge — something we think we know — we are not only asking that knowledge to re-answer the questions it has already been asked.

We require the knowledge to answer questions it has not yet considered, from one or multiple additional angles of inquiry.

This requires a sort of intellectual getting up and walking around, looking at a matter from many sides, that feels deeply unnatural to many minds who have grown accustomed to looking at life from one point, one angle, framed in one perspective. This is how I like to understand the term “peripatetic” thinking.

To look at a matter from many angles creates a view on the matter qualitatively different from any one particular angle. It is analogous to common sense, the 6th sense of reality that arises from the convergence of the 5 senses. Looking at it from the angle of multiple angles peripatesis would be the 7th sense.

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Why listen to someone else? Because that’s our best access to peripatesis.

Is everyone equally worth listening to? No. Some people are intellectual couch potatoes, and their opinions are garbled echos of whatever words have bounced into their ears. This is very painful to admit. I would love to believe everyone has something to teach. This is likely true in a sense, but triage has little patience for such sentiments.

The people most worth listening to are the ones who have strained their 7th sense, and consequently have something to teach.

Teachers are learners.

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Teachers walk. Echos talk.

A listener who is considers his listening a gift is a shitty listener.

Listening is only a gift if it is a genuine acceptance of a valuable gift.

But, what if the gift of what is said really is not valuable? When a speaker ignores the listener and just talks about whatever it is that he wants to talk about, he is a shitty speaker. To listen to such talk is an act of charity, and there is no non-shitty way to listen. This is analogous to someone giving a gift he actually only bought for himself, forcing the receiver to feign gratitude.

But — to say to someone what they will want to hear is also bad gift-giving. It is the gift certificate of the conversation world.

And then there’s the careful tit-for-tat symmetry of listening and speaking, where in the end the conversation is measured on the scale of fairness. The gift exchange is analyzed on a spreadsheet.

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Good conversation requires someone eager to hear what is being said — by someone vitally concerned with what the listener gains. Then there is real exchange, regardless of whether the speaking and listening.

A person can ask: “For what will I suffer?” and he can also can also ask “How can I end suffering?” How a person answers these two question is important. Even more important, however, is the relationship between the two questions. Does one dominate the other?

“Knowing what you are doing” does not mean “knowing what you are about to do”.

It is possible to see anything either in terms of what one already comprehends about it or in terms of what resists comprehension. It is all a matter of emphasis and de-emphasis, and consequent pursuit and neglect of various aspects of the problem.

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If we focus on the comprehensible aspects of a problem — which means to emphasize as relevant that which is readily understandable and to ignore as irrelevant that which defies understanding — we are able perceive that problem as the recurrence of a familiar problem, a problem we recognize as like one we have confronted before, and have resolved before with a repertoire of tools and techniques.

However, this reduction to familiar recurring concepts and familiar practices tends to produce results that are also recurrences of things we’ve already seen.

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Expertise has real advantages:

1. Foreseeability: the outcome of the expert’s method can be shown ahead of time because the both the process and the outcome are reproductions of earlier processes and outcomes.
2. Efficiency: The process is is composed of steps toward a goal, all of which have been refined and mastered.
3. Sureness: Experts execute processes with assuredness, because the problematic elements of the process have been worked out, which is reassuring to people who are made anxious by the unknown.

However, these advantages do come at a cost.

To the degree expertise is “leveraged” (as experts like to put it), the outcome will be like one someone else has already achieved.

In other words, if expertise is applied in every step of a process, innovation will not occur.

But a process with no expertise will result in pure chaos.

Innovation requires judicious use of anti-expertise.

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Innovation is making something new and unprecedented.

An expertise in innovation will not be expertise in the normal sense.

“Expertise” in innovation involves the following skills, which are the mirror opposite of conventional expertise:

1. Intuitability (or “Possibilability”): The goal of innovation is to discover-create something unprecedented. What is pursued is a possibility that can barely be imagined, but is intuited in a characteristically unnervingly vague way. And the pursuit moves along unmarked paths guided largely by intuition. Anyone who needs a picture of where they’re going before they’ll consent to going cannot go to undiscovered places and be a pioneer. They’ll have to settle for being a settler.
2. Resourcefulness: Where expert the expert sees “the tried and true” best practices, the innovator sees the “tired and true”. An innovator seeks the untried new. Different ends demand different means, and so the best practice for innovation is: Wherever one aspires to innovate, avoid all best practices. It helps to know the best practices, so one can navigate around them and avoid shipwreck on some safe harbor.
3. Faith: Innovation requires high spirits, energy and optimism in the face of complete absence of concrete evidence that everything will work out. Such conditions always create anxiety, which is normal, healthy and unavoidable. In fact, anxiety is one of the most reliable signs innovation is happening. But an innovator must resist sliding into despair, which attacks the imagination and will. Recognizing anxiety and its effects and learning to not only tolerate it, but to embrace it and use it is the single most important skill of an innovator.

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An expert has his swagger of having already seen it all. His confidence rests on his belief that he already knows what is going on, and that he already knows how to respond to the situation.

An innovator has his swagger of knowing that there are always other ways to know. He knows from experience that he can hold his shit together in the face of the unexpected, and that he can even hold other people’s shit together for them when they lose it. He doesn’t need to already know, and doesn’t want to. Let the experts toil redundantly.

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One more comment: Ingenuity and talent don’t automatically produce innovation. If the most talented artist works according to the understandings and methods of his fellow artists, he will produce more refined versions of the kind of art people have learned to expect. (Picasso said “I do it first, others do it pretty.”) If an ingenious engineer follows standard engineering processes, he will solve the problems he is given to solve, and those are invariably problems of degree: more of this, less of that.

It is only when a practitioner turns his attention to his practice and begins to question the how and why of his work that innovation deepens from expected quantitative progress to unexpected qualitative shifts that change how people perceive and live.

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It is important to note, however, that a little bit of innovation goes a long, long way.

In 99+% of what we do, expertise is the only sensible course of action. But in those rare cases where we need the anti-expertise of innovation, we really need it.