Zhuangzi, Hundun and communities

For the last few years, I have been learning about The Zhuangzi.   It is traditionally regarded as a seminal text from the Daoist tradition alongside the Tao Te Ching. 

The Zhuangzi is is a historical text that was possibly written by Zhuangzi himself around 400 B.C.  It has been commented or interpreted by others through time.  

My interest in Zhuangzi started when exploring the rise of the profilicity phenomena which has been identified and proposed by the authors Hans Moeller and Daniel D'Ambrosio (2021), and which I included in my book about ritual and systems thinking.  

I became interested in the idea that, in our modern societies, we have to develop and maintain profiles in our different interactions with people.  This was contrary to what I thought up to that point: that we need to have a consistent identity, something to do with our inner values.  

During my writing of the book about ritual and systems thinking, I started realising that I had been driven too much by my own upbringing.  To have a sincere, authentic identity.  To be consistent with a set of values, and try my best to live up to them.  It has also taken me several years to identify which values I had maintained.  One of them for example is loyalty.  In the ritual book, I reflect it when I talk about my rituals to ensure that I belonged to a team of very competent individuals.  

Hans Moeller himself had written about Daoism before (2004), identifying allegories in both The Zhangzi and Tao Te King texts that they consider very important to help us deal with our complex world.  Moeller has joined efforts with D'Ambrosio and later on (2017) where they study and explain in more detail the art of "genuine pretending", an attitude of acceptance, spontaneity, and easiness to help us with our dealings. They also use the Zhuanzi's translations and included commentaries from Zyporyn (2009) in their work.   

As an attitude (am sure there are better terms for it), genuine pretending embeds humour and satirism in both the allegories that Moeller and D'Ambrosio bring forth from the Zhuangzi (and others).  In a nutshell, it is about not commiting oneself too much to fixed identities in situation, or if doing so, accepting that these identities are contingent and temporary.  So ironically we are to try our best when assuming such identities (or roles), knowing that we are to move on from them.  

In my rituals book, I narrate how I showed my loyalty during meetings and when interacting with technology vendors and users.  I upheld the strategy of our organization.  I also did not put colleagues on the spot.  But through time, something changed in my projects.  I was the one on the spot.  Some colleagues challenged (sometimes with good reason) my competence in public.  This made me rethink how I needed to approach work.  I then fought back.  I spoke out more often and loudly.  And then I left after a while, seeking other career prospects.  

Perhaps I stopped pretending.  Am very thankful though to people I worked with.  I learned a bit about what happens in work meetings.  

Hans Moeller has found strong similarities between genuine pretenting and the work of the systems author Niklas Luhmann.  Although Luhmann would regard human agency as the wrong essential component of social systems (it is more about communication than agency), genuine pretending can lead us to acknowledge that our identities are (not) determined to some extent by the communication demands of such systems (for example the economy, law, the market).  We are, if possible then to engage in communications by treating them as second order observations, in other words observing and being aware of how others observe (us).  

The market for example is based on what others say about it. The law continusly decides what is legal or not based on what others (judges, rulings, previous laws) have observed.  Nowadays, our social media profiles communications are composed by what other people say about them (i.e. comments, likes).  Therefore, our identities, our profiles can and need to be regarded as being formed by observations.  They are constituted when we engaged in communications with 'peers' (other and usually more visible, powerful or influential profiles).  

We are, somehow to detach ourselves from what we think we 'are' in our dealings with communities.  This is because, according to Daoism and the Zhuangzi, we will never fully aprehend what goes on, and it does not matter!.  There is no point in staying attached to identities that somehow we think are part of such reality.  We are just to assume identities temporarily.  And protect ourselves from what they ask of us if they ask us for too much.  

Hundun

Genuine pretending can embrace many of the allegories of the Zhuangzi to help us humurously recognise issues about our identities in situations.  Moeller (2004) and Moeller and D'Ambrosio (2021) bring forth several of these allegories.  They range from short paragraphs to more extensive ones, from long narratives to phrases that end with a 'pun' or unexpected twist.  

In allegories, the characters are named intentionally to resemble identities that Confucionism regarded as venerable, with (powerful) roles that establish distance between participants.  The narratives then provide conversations and interactions that challenge the prevailing tatus quo or the norms whilst still operating within them.  

One of my favourite allegories/ narrative is that of Hundun (Zhuangzi, chapter 7).  In it, and according to Moeller (2015), a powerful 'emperor' dies after being identified by others as very benevolent.  A brief text is as follows:  

The emperor of the South Sea was called Shu [Brief]; the emperor of the North Sea was called Hu [Sudden]; and the emperor of the central region was called Hundun [Chaos]. From time to time, Shu and Hu came together for a meeting in the territory of Hundun, and Hundun treated them very generously. Shu and Hu discussed how they could repay his kindness. “All men,” they said, “have seven openings so they can see, hear, eat, and breathe. But Hundun alone doesn’t have any. Let’s trying boring him some!”

Every day they bored another hole, and on the seventh day Hundun died.

For Moeller (2015), this short passage confirms the dangers of overidentifying oneself with a role, an identity or a way of thinking and acting. Through time, the 'emperor' Hundun fails to protect 'itself' from such an overidentification. Those that contribute to 'kill him' (the other emperors) think that they are helping him become more 'human', in other words someone with a clear and dependable identity.

'Hundun' is not an emperor per se.  It represents also the 'Dao' that which cannot be named, the force that moves everything. Why should we then 'tame' it, instead of letting it flow through us? In other words, why we should tame ourselves to fixed, 'humanly' recognised identities?  Why should we stay so 'loyal' to them?  

Community work

Back to the present.  After recently finishing two of my 'research' projects (you can read about them in previous blog posts) I have attempted to continue them.  And somehow I have begun to succeed.  

I am in contact with community managers at my university and beyond.  I have also begun to involve some of my students from my course on creativity and problem solving (2025-2026).  We have had several meetings and are trying to better understand a complex situation.  I keep showing up, offering ideas and support. All of this is voluntary work. 

What has transpired so far is that at times I find challenging myself about why I want to continue.  I experience frustration or dissatisfaction, as things take time to get off the ground, other people do not show up for meetings or them and I are simply too busy. 

With the Zhuanzi in mind, am now trying to be more careful about my loyalty and commitment.  I have asked myself: 

• Is this project or idea what is needed? 
• Why?  
• What do I want to achieve? 

And perhaps more importantly: 

• What is my identity here, is it too fixed?

On this last question, perhaps I am becoming one of the 'emperors' that is trying to help Hundun, by identifying myself with this identity,  and by also 'forcing' things, trying be loyal, and grateful.  

Zhuangzi and Hundun would remind us that at the end, we are not who we think we are, at least not in the eyes of others.  We observe and are being observed, things often move quickly, and we also move on.  With the best of intentions, we can only smile about how things pan out. 

Before I forget the last two years

 My workplace is moving on as you may have gathered from previous posts.  At a meeting this week I did not recognise half of the people attending.  Most of them joined in the last two years.  And if felt strange in many ways.

As if I was now one of the oldest people who have been away for two years.  Years of rushing to prepare online material in the midst of hot summer and with a view of a pool in the garden, tempting me to jump in and stay and forget about lock downs.

Years of teaching with a mask, almost choking in my first session, not sure how far I could be from the audience and aiming to put a smile.  Quantitative methods teaching with a mask, a challenge, also because it was the first time being in the big auditorium as a lecturer.  And as time went by, I felt more confident.  Letting colleagues carry on.  

Years of being at home and delivering sessions where it felt I was on a radio program.  Not seeing people's faces and assuming they were there.  Struggling to get a response and when it came, feeling elated if not scared.  People were there.  

Years of juggling, children at home and with home work, one of the least pleasant experiences.  How could we replicate their classroom, their teaching methods, whilst attending to other things?  Perhaps I did not have what Mary Catherine Bateson calls peripheral vision, this communicative capacity to jointly improvise and adapt to situations that has at its core the idea that we are fluid selves.  Perhaps as a result I was not self-compassionate enough to lower standards, or if I did, I felt frustration.  

Years of asking if I was or am in the right career.  Reading Sir Ken Robinson's finding your element helped me realise I am good at connecting people with learning opportunities, and having as well as developing original ideas in my teaching as well as in my writing.  

I can, but not fully enjoy writing journal articles, unless I can see how they reflect what I am: someone that likes to promote coexistence even if it often affects me negatively.  Someone that enjoys being alone as well as in the company of just a few.  

And someone that still fears disappointing others.  But I am better at managing this.  The last two years taught me that I can be absent and the world is not going to crumble.  

So before I forget: There is no need to be too worried about what comes next.  Let us keep the worries in check.  And people are there, even if we do not see them.  

A test for other viruses

This new year brings more testing, and not necessarily for COVID-19.

Having lived through several lockdowns and uncertainties, it might be time for us to test ourselves on how well aligned are our values to what we do at work and elsewhere.

It might be that our self-defensive habits have taken over, leading us to strongly protect some imaginaries like our own images of ourselves or others.  

Or our 'nostalgic' pictures of what the world was or needs to become ('normal' again?).   

And in the process, we might have adopted thoughts or behaviours that keep us ‘safe’ from the scrutiny of others and the world in general.  We could also have developed other habits or adopted thoughts which we considered very alien, and are now part of who we think we are.  

Myself, I considered that I am now more of a facilitator of learning than a traditional lecturer, although I still keep some habits in and outside the classroom.  My values of dedication and commitment remain, for good or bad. I have adopted my teaching material to suit more shorter events and also use of other online resources from publishers.  And I still aim to propose creative assignments to my students, teaching face-to-face whenever required.  

So I do not think I have been afraid of change, only that I have somehow changed at my own pace (not too fast, not too slow). There are costs. I feel drained at the end of the week.  Maybe I have tried to hard to instil enthusiasm in myself and my students. Perfection, again. 

Perfection, an old habit, and also, I have adopted some unhelpful thoughts:  “There is no body else that can do what I do; If I don’t do this the world comes to an end.  I am here to right all the wrongs encountered; everyone should be committed to help students, and if not I must intervene. It is the pandemic “. 

Some of these thoughts align with my values of dedication and commitment.  But others don’t.  I appointed myself to be a saviour, when colleagues are also paid to do their job.  I value time with family and time for thinking too.  I cannot right all the wrongs or help everyone that comes my way.  It is really not possible.  

What else do I value?  

• Contact with nature
• Health
• Self-care
• Collegiate support
• Curiosity
• Simplicity
• Reflection 
• Honesty
• Time to do nothing.  

Time to reshuffle priorities, and test myself again, with compassion.  

And what about you? Is your job misaligning with your values, creating fake thoughts or unhelpful habits?  

Forthcoming Book: Creativity in Management Education - A Systemic Rediscovery

I have pleasure to announce my new book which is due to be published by September 2020, and which I talked about previously in this blog.  

(Click on the image to go to the publisher's website)

The book is the result of critical analyses of management education and myself as a student and currently an educator.  I venture to explore a number of ideas to help us all rediscover ourselves and regain a sense of creativity and transcendence, for our own benefit and for the benefit of those people around us.

Educational institutions are now being challenged to offer new forms of delivery, and with it a rethink of their roles in societies.  In this regard, this book could offer insights on what to do and where to start.  Among other things, I speak about compassionate and technology mediated interactions, which could help us keep ‘soft’ educational tyrannies at bay, and enable us (re) discover different roles and practices to redress power imbalances generated by such tyrannies.  

So if you want to know more about educational tyrannies, myself, my experiences of nurturing creativity in and out of the classroom (the good and the bad, the ethical), buy the book or recommend it to your librarians or sponsors.  

There will be an electronic version available by August 2020 😁😁.

Further links: 

Link to Springer (has PDF promotional flyers)

Link to Amazon’s website (has bit more of detail)

Creativity and the planet:Bike recycling

During the last academic term, me and students of one of my courses had the opportunity to visit the Surrey Bike Project, a social enterprise whose main remit is the recycling of bicycles.  It is a very interesting organisation that gathers many volunteers as well as youngsters around the topic of repairing, servicing and selling recycled bikes.  

Royal Holloway Students with John Thurlow, Project Manager

My students were asked to observe what goes on there, ask questions,and then select one specific process that they could improve, all of this using creativity ideas and techniques.

They did a great job coming up with solutions.    Some proposed a generic process of attracting more customers or enhancing the visibility of this organisation, whereas others focused on improving the diagnosis, repair and quality check activities and even suggesting new processes (i.e. making wallets out of tire rubber tubes).  

In the UK, the bike industry is economically strong, and within it repairs/recycling contribute a good deal.  The Surrey Bike Project provides education to youngsters who have left traditional education for whatever reason.  This is a great human aspect of the organisation. Other organisations around the country are also providing education through recycling in what appears to be an emerging, hybrid model of operation.   

This visit made me think that many of us, in our own ways, are doing something for the planet.   For creativity to emerge we need to set up spaces for different minds to come together and explore a common problem.   In her book "Peripheral Visions", Mary Catherine Bateson talks about the importance of setting up such spaces so that people can join in, learn and be allowed to make mistakes.   Like learning a language.   That is what the Surrey Bike Project does, ensuring a very high standard of quality as well.

I am sure my students learned a lot from this visit and the work that followed. I am also sure that John, Jim and colleagues from the project benefited from having different perspectives about their organisation.   We hope to continue our conversations and learn from each other.    

Creativity and our digital selves

I am grateful to have the opportunity to continue exchanging ideas with IMT Business School staff and students. 

This time, masters students from there visited Royal Holloway and I could give them a bit of a tour guide as well as continue encouraging to pursue their creativity.  I would like to thank my collaborators Maria Alejandra, Diego Martinez-Castro and Xiaouyu Zhang (Kevin), with whom we ran a very engaging workshop for these students.

It was challenging to pitch a session for an audience who combines studying and working on a weekly basis.  Creativity offers though the possibility of reflecting how work offers opportunities for self -realization, and how challenges and skills need to be carefully managed by ourselves and our bosses at work to keep creativity alive and flourishing. 

To achieve this requires courage, as our systemic thinker Russ Ackoff always said. Courage to ask for what we need, and to place ourselves in appropriate and supportive working environments.  Courage to acknowledge our skills and limitations, and seek challenges appropriate to our current situation and values. And courage to keep trying, to stand up for what we believe, and follow our own path even if that is not what our loved ones want for us.   

After we touched on the individual and work dimensions of creativity, we ventured in proposing to our students a number of challenges related to what we called 'our digital selves'.  Increasingly, we as individuals are nudged to present and manage our online identities and other footprints of our lives, often to our dislike.  Under the idea that this could help us improve our opportunities in life, we are now part of many online outlets.  

Diverging in formulating several possibilities before deciding

I then proposed to students to form groups and address one of three challenges: a) supporting university students having mental health problems (a worrying trend in the UK), b) protecting households data from unwanted use by utility service providers (related to Kevin's research), and c) helping marginalised communities preserve their memories through digital (potentially related to Diego's research).  They were to draw a storyboard explaining their solution. 

For a variety of reasons, students chose to address the first of the above challenge.  It might have been that they felt a degree of connection to it, or that they considered the other two 'too technical'.  In their choice there was discussion.   We then asked students to elaborate a storyboard of a digital solution which they thought could help them address the challenge.  And I encouraged them to think not only in an app as an innovation. 

A combined app and device

Students came up with very sensitive and thoughtful proposals.   As seen in this picture on the left, someone with a mental health condition could be supported by a digital innovation (app and device called buddy) that records her moods and provides options for sharing / not sharing this information with relevant others, also depending on circumstances. It was also interesting to see that the device might not be a mobile phone.  

IMT students presenting their work

Through the presentations and short discussion afterwards, I noticed that these students were very open in considering either/or possibilities.  With this exercise, many of them valued the  opportunity to reflect on their own careers, as well as finding bit more about what the world of work or research has to offer in the near future.   A key insight that could be drawn for me is that we could use our creativity to better shape the ways in which we want to see our selves in the digital world and work with others in doing so.

It seems that with the right learning environment and activities, we can encourage our students to be thoughtful and creative.   Thank you for visiting us and for venturing to explore your own creativity!

Student Elise Deffain from IMT

My Creativity Book Tour - Second Stop: Paris, France

Sahid and Imed from IMT, Myself and Ines from Royal Holloway

It was a pleasure to accept the invitation from the Information Systems Department of IMT (Institut Mines-Télécom) Business School to visit them in Paris, and use it to present my book on Managing Creativity.  I was also fortunate to take one of my undergraduate Royal Holloway management students, Ines Boussofara,  to be part of the conversations and activities during this visit. 

IMT staff were very kind, making sure I was looked after at all times. That also included helping us move hotels when reservations for our second night there were missing!.

At my book presentation, it was great to see how my colleague educators and researchers wanted to make something workable and usable of the book ideas. Something to guide information systems researchers or company managers. Perhaps something that could be publishable in a journal article.

Staff members from IMT Business School, Ines and Myself

My answer to this was that the book is an attempt ( a risky one considering pressures to publish journal articles) to bridge gaps between disciplines (creativity, systems thinking).  I added that my proposal to use the systems idea as an inquiring device to help me make sense of my own creativity (which then became two creativities) could be of some use.  I had to say though, and referring to my own research, that in the field or discipline of information systems we have become good at using some ideas as 'front ends' of systems implementation or adoption processes.  In this regard, I wished we could talk to students and to other researchers less about success and more about failure and anti-innovation.  

At IMT creativity means innovation, making ideas happen, making them commercially successful. Students are continuously challenged to work with others from different disciplines, to learn how to do things on the go, to present ideas, to elaborate business plans. This is a valuable form of creativity, one which in management education has taken center stage. It might be useful to see it as a form that could be further enhanced by linking it to creators' inner motivations, a form that if it fails, should not take down creators with them. 

IMT Incubator Hall of Fame

Me talking during the seminar (I was just getting started!) 

During the presentation, it was rightly pointed out by the audience that the ideas of the book, in a way which I did not fully intend, could help us reflect on creativity, its manifestations, how it unfolds in contexts like universities, and how it could become a mere instrument of economic power if we do not pause and reflect.


Another question related to this latter aspect of creativity was about how we could enthuse our management students to think of big ethical questions. This is not only relevant for students in information systems but in all other areas of management. Perhaps by consciously developing our creativity, we could then use systems ideas as tools to help us talk about ethical values and do something about them.


To make this happen, it might be that we need to acknowledge that we as educators and our students pursue limited forms of creativity, those which help us secure employment or give us economic and social benefits in the short term. It was good to know that at IMT they also value mindfulness as an alternative to living our lives in pilot modes.  This commonality, together with possibilities to entice students to think of using their ideas to deal with pressing issues in our societies (i.e. recycling), could help us positively shape the role of education in helping us all to save our planet. 

Ines and myself at the IMT business/technology incubator. Be mindful of the alien!  

Ines made great contributions at the seminar by giving her own examples of how the use of some creativity tools (i.e. de Bono's six hats) and working on 'real' problems (i.e. student ideas for recycling at residences) have enabled her to identify and appreciate different perspectives, and think of new ways of using information technologies to deal with emerging problems.  During our visit, she taught me a lot about her use of social media and mobile technologies.  I could see that she belongs to a new generation of people who make technology part of their daily lives, as perhaps I did many years ago! Maybe it is time for me to learn new things.

I was left curious by other questions related to how some social structures or institutions shape our creativity.  My book has a framework to help make sense of some of these when it comes to collaborate between academics and social organisations.  This idea that the use of systems thinking might not show these structures or institutions keeps popping up when I talk with other academics.  I would still like to think that we have some degree of freedom when deciding to include or marginalize these structures in our creativity efforts.  

Thank you IMT for having me, hope to be there again soon! 

My Creativity Book Tour - First Stop: Tarragona, Catalonia, Spain

So off I went with my newly published book on Managing Creativity to show it to dear colleagues and students. First stop in 2019 has been at Universitat Rovira I Virgili (URV), in Tarragona, Catalonia, Spain.

Near Tarragona with Teresa

My colleague Teresa Torres kindly hosted me, and the presentation of the book was intertwined with a fantastic experiential learning situation where we got to practice some ideas on creativity with curios and engaged students.

At the seminar, I got a warm feeling that I was among people who want to be creative and like myself, find several institutional challenges and constraints to make it happen. Paradoxically, creativity is being institutionalised as a way of bringing more students to our universities, something that we did not see it coming but that we now need to manage and do so creatively!

Our students in Tarragona value experiential learning. They like to see how to use ideas in practice, they would like to have hands on experience, perhaps by working in projects. This idea of project or problem-based learning seems to be a common trend in other countries including the UK and France. URV has great connections with local industry, which gives students unique possibilities to learn in a job whilst studying.

We as academics still think that alongside, we need to infuse a critical spirit in our educational activities, so that people have a chance to become aware and act to save our planet. This call inevitably links to our own local contexts, where we also need to sensitise our management students to what goes on, what is in front of us and we cannot just dismiss.  If we think of creativity as inquiring system as I propose in my book, reflecting on our values could help us connect them with the activities we do, both as educators and as human beings in general.

Students and staff at URV

In Tarragona, creativity as a combination of experiential learning and critique is developed by enabling students with learning difficulties have the opportunity of attending university and gaining skills if not a community of friends to help them gain or regain employment. To me this is a worthy goal towards which creativity could be directed.

 The hope is that my book’s ideas inspire students and educators to think of their values and linking those with their activities, be them in education or elsewhere. We also need to rescue our curiosity, that which we held dearly as children, and which could also help us deal with the complex challenges that we face.

Digital Innovation Laboratories for Management Education

As an management educator, and despite my ego telling me to be at the forefront of the action, I have come to accept that I am too old or too wise to be part of the group that makes decisions when it comes to innovate in management education. However the corridor chat, a coffee with a a dear friend and the apparently innocuous email gave me some insights about what is going on.

There is to be a new digital innovation laboratory at work.

Yes.

Yes, an attempt to catch up with what goes on in industry, a test bed for ideas to be incorporated in the classroom. Something that has happened, is to happen.

Yes, bit more of the same, a mechanism of isomorphic behavior so that we are seen as doing what others are doing.

No, I am not trying to be cynical, just to be me, which means I am supporting it. However, in the past, I have seen new labs being set up, some of their metamorphoses to make them more appealing, some intended and unexpected uses of it, some people taking charge when it matters, others being taken charge of when it does not, and finally, some noise being turned off.

So this is my take on it:

Inevitable, necessary, something that needs to be done, something to live with, something that some people have decided, and some others will have to justify so as to face corporate face. Something that in a few months hopes not to be forgotten.

There is still, some room for action.

If I was to be included in this, which I have some hope for, this is what I would do to rediscover creativity using this lab:

• Instill some playfulness. So that we have some fun exercises and gradually find our way into it.
• Instill curiosity, so that those teaching and learning find ourselves as not knowing everything, in a good environment of trying and failing. 
• Instill some safe failure, so that we try to break the lab by rearranging it, by inviting unexpected guests (my children, your children, my inner child, yours maybe?), by switching it on and off.

Let the fun begin!

Rediscovering creativity in management education - some initial thoughts

After publishing "Managing Creativity", I was left with some energy and motivation to continue exploring the field of creativity and its surroundings. 

Since September 2018 I began thinking about the importance of creativity in education, and how we as educators might be contributing to kill it. 

This might sound like a radical comment, but I strongly feel that due to lots of institutional pressures, management educators like myself find it difficult to instill curiosity and imagination in our courses.
Many of my current management students (mostly undergraduate) have also pressures.  They want to graduate as soon as possible and get jobs to validate their long standing education.  Like me, these guys have been in educational systems for most of their lives.  At their early twenties, they find that finally they are to be rewarded by spending long hours in classrooms, taking tests and surviving in often hostile environments to their personalities.  

In this climate where time is precious and debts grow, there could be little room for creativity. in education  Novel ideas might be valued but even if they are, implementing them into monetized products or services could take longer than expected.  The competition for marks at universities is replaced by competitions about funding and success.  A competition that seems not to have an end in social media.  

I am not sure if even claiming that "the problem of management education is the lack of practice" will solve our creativity drought.  Putting students in work placements or making available more entrepreneurship opportunities is to me a way of transferring educational responsibility to other places.  

For some students this sort of opportunities helps them to be more attentive to the world around them and to gain problem-solving skills to tackle complex challenges.  But they might not be a preferred option for others.  

Fostering curiosity, imagination and somehow a re-encounter to that inner self that makes us happy (perhaps that child that we still have within us) might not be part of an employer's agenda.   As educators, we could encourage our students to be honest and reflect on what they really enjoy doing (not only what they think management education is to give them or what their parents think they should be doing).  

We could open up other types of experiential opportunities to students. Management could be about art, spirituality, community, family. 

Our students need to know that failing is OK, not because celebrities say so, but because we are human.   We all have the right to change our minds and our hearts. 

We might need encourage to go and find that which is mysterious, magic, that which we do not fully comprehend, that which like a new tree, animal, park or friend, we enjoyed venturing to find when we were children. 

On Creativity at Universities: Thinking Locally, Operating Globally, Caring Humanely

Universities are systems, not marketplaces. They are also part of bigger systems.

The now media-highlighted declining part-time student situation of the UK Open University, and the proposed bill for colleges of the University of London to become universities on their own, seem to go contrary to their systemic nature.

Letting universities to operate in global markets without considering that not every type of student can afford attending a course or a programme, could continue creating unexpected ripple effects in universities and their communities. It could result in less local, part-time or single-courses students attending as the Open University knows it too well.

Many universities in the UK and elsewhere have heavily invested in revamping their facilities to attract more students. The communities around them could be better involved in using them. New libraries, theatres or medical schools could also be put to the service of the elderly, the mentally and physically disabled and the unemployed.

University technology parks could be also directed to host social enterprises. And university students could be encouraged to work in community projects as part of their courses or their final dissertations.

Many other universities around the world have to cope with the pressure of getting accredited nationally and internationally whilst operating in very unique environments. For them, there might not be a need to build big infrastructure projects just to ‘catch-up’. The evidence could come from the small or only slight increases in student satisfaction obtained by those that have embarked in such types of projects.

With this evidence, and the worrying situation of staff and students in relation to our mental health, universities could then focus their attention in caring for people. An impressive building or laboratory is only as good as the people who work in them. Investing in people has never been a bad idea neither for universities nor for any other type of organisation. Perhaps the returns on this sort of investment cannot be clearly identified. I wonder, can those investments in infrastructure be?

We have now learned lessons from having priorities about globalisation, localisation and caring in the wrong order.

What else do we need to be convinced that universities are systems?

Meet the future IT hackers: Are they Creative?

Some of my undergraduate students are passionate about technology.  They can tell you about examples of how technology transforms companies and relationships with customers and suppliers.

One student has a very clear idea of how blogs can add value to virtual games companies by enabling communication and knowledge exchange with customers.  

Another student this term impressed me with what he knows about Watson, the brain machine of IBM.  It can process millions of data and undertake millions of calculations in just seconds.

My students are not necessarily worried about, or perhaps aware of how technology is constructed or assembled. Their minds seem not to care too much about how technology works.  

As long as it works.

Still, knowing how technology works is important.  Specially if you think of hacking it! 

So I attempted to bring my own examples of how neural networks are used to build gaming competitors that can beat humans.  And of robots that can now stand hard duties.  

My aim was to raise awareness about possibilities and dilemmas raised this year (2016), the year of Artificial Intelligence as has been called by some.

Am not sure about how my examples were received.  Or if they generated the desired effects.  

Still wondering...

To me the future hackers would encounter not only operational issues but ethical ones in relation to how technology would operate.  

More than now, they will have to make decisions not only about themselves, but about human kind as a whole.

So we had better prepare ourselves and them to face up to the task.  

Open government, love and care, and Greece

Many of us have been guilty as academics or practitioners of believing that the key to achieve better government is by ensuring free flow of information and with it public participation in government affairs.

This belief is like a nice story, but needs love and care if we are going to live it in the real world.

I have become convinced that information is the result of and not the precondition for action.  For open government, free flow of information requires opening up discussions on the meaning of terms like 

development, democracy, transparency, accountability and the like.  

The problem is, we don't like fuzzy terms like these.  When they show up, we are quick to jump to the typical answer that one thing is governance, and the other is whatever we think we do with information systems.  We limit ourselves to say that we create conditions for anything to emerge.  And we leave others (politicians, policy makers, aid agencies) the responsibility to define these terms.   We let them do whatever they like to do with these.   For us, the important thing is the information system, the technology, the new and quirky stuff like architectures, repositories, big data analytics, interoperability between systems, federations of systems, affordances of systems, user satisfaction, systems success, technology transfer, etc. 

Separating the technology from its surroundings is a typical, elegant, off the hook answer that I keep getting from academics and practitioners.  For the sake of being practical, and delivering systems on time and within budget.  

Open government is as much as making data available as building or rebuilding systems to make this happen.  A deeper discussion on the meaning for instance of transparency can lead us to ask ourselves tricky questions: whose transparency are we talking about? 

We could end up with discussions about why we really need IT investments, or why international aid agencies have to decide on what counts as a project to be implemented.  

Those parties that we delegated to define fuzzy terms could explain bit more what they want to do.  They could also explain better how is that they are trying to help governments.  

Open government in Greece has apparently gone very well according to official reports from the open partnership and from initiatives focusing on monitoring government decisions.  So the flow of information seems to have improved.  And the government is still committed to build more efficiency, participation, transparency and accountability in their affairs.  

But the country is once again in a very difficult situation, and there seems to be little hope in promoting more IT investments and with them better inter-operability, information quality or social media use.  

Living the story of open government requires money, but there is little of it.  

Open government has some bearing of responsibility in having lost an audience who does not seem to believe anymore in what has been promoted.  

The audience needs less of technicalities and more love and care, it needs to be listened to, not just being treated like an online channel.  

So where is the camera and who owns it?

Am currently hooked on watching "breaking bad" TV series.  End of fourth season and the main characters have execute an almost perfect plot.

It is almost perfect, except they forget they have been recorded on camera.  And they need to get rid of the evidence that implicates them.

Modern and post modern life is instantly recorded.  Or at least we should assume so.  The mobile conversations, the emails, the video footage, we leave our trail.  Something I already mentioned when I talked about our digital footprint in a previous blog post. 

Together with this trend about recording life, we are now assuming that everything needs evidence.  Before we argue for something, or we defend ourselves.  And this evidence is somehow a combination of digital footprint and other stuff.  So the writing in the napkin and the DNA in it still has some value and that can also be on the increase.

We, the humans, are not that perfect.  Our human camera, our memory, our word, our trust lies continuously in tatters.   We need to back it up.   

Bit of sad news to have to become mediators, prosecutors, detectives, lawyers and defendants.  In my academic world that is increasingly the case.  We cannot just assume students did all their work by themselves.  We have to check it with a plagiarism detection software.  Students on the other hand have their own devices to get information quickly.  Good for the good ones, and good for the not so good.  And we have to be careful with how we deal with important content (exams).  We have to be careful with allowing people to film our lectures.  

Why? Because we need to avoid fraud, foul play.  

And because in case of any dispute parties have to recur to evidence.  So we need to have it whilst others should not.  

It is a game of who owns the camera and who uses it and for what purposes.

I wonder if the same happens in other organisations where they do not have academics but employees, and they do not have students but customers.  I wonder if we have become trapped by this game of evidence and pressure.  

Who is to win this game? Is this a daily game, a minute by minute one? What purposes does it suit? 

Maybe the good news is that like Foucaultvian power, we have bit of freedom to protect ourselves and be savvy.  We still need good friends who know how to win disputes. And we also need good cameras.  

And we can be ethical in this game, whatever this means to us and whatever this happens to mean in a given moment and time.  

It is a nice story, but that is all!

Have been marking exam papers these last few days.  The preferred question chosen by students of this particular exam is that of Michael Porter's model of five forces to gain advantage through the use of information systems and technologies (IS).

Students now write about how IS helps gain competitive advantage.  They know famous examples about companies that reduced costs or increased their intimacy with customers.  All by using IS.  

They also know that social media is really important.  And that it can help companies gain knowledge about customers.

So these are parts of a same story that now has a story beginning in the 1980s and cruising through the 90s and the year 2000 to come today...

It is a nice one, it appeals, it is simple yet powerful.  Like good stories tend to be. 

But it is only a story.  It is one version of reality.  What I call the official version.  

The one that offers hope to students that someday they will get their dream job by carefully aligning their knowledge with what a company needs, and in the process using some technology to help themselves and others. The one saying that if you do what it says in the tin, you will succeed.  

The official version is of course plausible and possible.  

And we all like to believe in cause and effect, as children. If you eat your cereal you will grow strong.  

What the Porter story does not say though is that in reality we do not fully control what happens with technology, we are not the only group of people that contribute to what goes on.  Even if we like to think we do.  There are many forces, many of which are hidden, sudden.  Decisions happen almost by chance.  And so outcomes.

Am personally trying to better understand how as an individual I use this story to convince myself I can be someone and so can my students.  Someone with a purpose in life.  Someone with causes and effects

As if life had only one story to tell.  Or as if our lives depended on it.  

Difficult to write other histories when everyone likes the official version.  

But anyhow, we can produce our own stories.  Mine at the moment is about letting go of causes and effects.

So if you are reading this because you are / were one of my students, friends or relatives let me say this: technology can help, but do not put your life and your mind, even your happiness, to depend on it.  Do what you want with or without IT in the best possible ways. And remember there is always something to learn from success or failure.