Preparing for an academic job interview

I came across an informative post on the OCIS doctoral student blog providing some helpful suggestions for preparing for job interviews. The photo included in the post alone (duplicated here, image source: rickz on flickr) was worth the link.

I think I’ll dedicate a future post or two to answering the sample questions included in the post.

Constrained by our own myth-conceptions

I read an article in the New York Times this evening summarizing a position paper by a physiologist arguing that reticence about exercising in cold weather is largely a product of 1) misconceptions about the safety of exercising in the cold and 2) inappropriate dress–driven by misunderstanding the nature of our physiological response to cold–for cold-weather exercise. The author of the paper argues that exercising in the cold can be safe as long as you keep moving, you are sufficiently covered but not overdressed so much that you sweat, and you don’t overstress yourself by being paranoid of the cold.

This reminded me of a book I read recently by Ellen Langer entitled Mindfulness.  In this practitioner-oriented book, Langer summarizes over fifty social psychology studies that demonstrate how people live up to and within constraints that are frequently artificial and that are either placed on them by others or self-imposed. Langer cites the example of the paradigm shift that occurred when an athlete disproved the widely held belief that it was physically impossible for a human to run a mile in less than four minutes. Once it was accomplished, multiple athletes have accomplished similar feats over 100 times.

So whether its exercising in cold whether or running a mile in less than four minutes, it seems we (rather than the physical world) often define what is possible and what is impossible. I wonder if someday, we’re going to learn that humans really can hold more than 7 +/- 2 pieces of information in working memory at a time, or that it is possible to read several thousand words per minute.

In my own scholarship, perhaps I can look at applying this principle by setting incremental goals (i.e., to write 1,000 words per day for a month, 2,000 words per day for the following month, etc.). Obviously, quantity and verbosity doesn’t equate to quality and simplicity, but such an exercise would give  me more practice in my writing and allow me to exercise this aspect of my scholarship more.

Group awareness in a digital world.

After I finished teaching class one day, I walked in late to a presentation. Almost immediately, I could tell things weren’t going well for the speaker. There was an uneasy tension in the room. The facial expressions of the attendees were masked or furrowed, and the questioning was not very energetic. Regardless of the ultimate outcome of the presentation, I am amazed at how readily apparent the group feeling was to me.

Thinking about this experience has lead me to question whether I would have had the same experience had the interaction occurred in a virtual environment. Recent psychological research (Oberman and Ramachandran 2007) indicates that our brains are especially effective at simulating the observed behaviors and intentions of others within ourselves. When we see an acrobat walking a tight-rope we naturally tense as if we were on the line ourselves. In my situation, I was able to enter the room and see and hear my colleagues. My mind simulated their expressions, body language, and words and mapped the feelings and intentions I would have had had I made those same actions. To some small degree, I became one with my colleagues and was able to experience empathy for them.

When these empathetic simulations are occurring reciprocally among group members, I believe this could be described as a group-level instantiation of the organizational construct of the collective mind (Weick and Roberts 1993). Unlike its organizational counterpart, the group collective mind hinges on empathy rather than on interrelated specialization. Both require synchronized interaction. But the development of a group collective mind allows the group members to achieve this synchronization through psychological and behavioral alignment (Pickering and Garrod 2004), whereas the organizational collective mind facilitates synchronization through identified expertise within the organization and through coordination among specialists (Weick and Sutcliffe 2001).

With regards to the development of the group collective mind, I’m wondering how well we could mentally simulate the actions of others in a computer-mediated context. Perhaps a better question would be under what conditions do different media enable the development of a collective mind (i.e., empathetic alignment)  among group members? I this regard, I don’t think text is consistently inferior to speech. Rather, I think it’s the forms of communication that facilitate or inhibit the development of a collective mind. A well constructed narrative of a tragic event can bring me to tears whether it’s written in print or displayed on a movie screen. But does this process of developing the collective mind work differently when groups use different tools to communicate electronically?

When picking tools, less is often more.

I had to put together some instructions for our secretary to enter a considerable amount of data into a series of web-based forms.  My first impulse was to create a series of screen shots, dump them into Microsoft OneNote and annotate the screen shots with the instructions. (I’ve done that in the past for a similar type of task.)

However, I caught myself, picked up a pencil and some scratch paper, scribbled out the instructions, and wrote the date at the bottom of the page. I took the paper upstairs to our secretary, and she was able to follow the instructions perfectly.  The tech-heavy solution would have generated some glamorous pictures. But it would have used up a lot more time and paper to accomplish the same job. It would likely have been more difficult to follow as the instructions would have been spread across several pages as well. I’m finally learning that, particularly when delegating, it’s important to keep things as simple as possible.

Accomplished artists plod through work like the rest of us.

I just read a summary of an interview with an accomplished artist that illustrates my last post. It appears that Chuck Close attributes his genius to consistent hard work. He also describes how he is able to structure his work so that it is achievable in discrete chunks. I think there’s something to be said for studying the work and living habits of people who have accomplished great things.

It all comes down to exercise.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to be more productive in my scholarship lately.  A  challenge and a blessing I’ve found in the Ph.D. program is that there is always something to do.  The challenge becomes learning to select which of the many opportunities to take advantage of.  I think I found a key to answering this question in a conversation I had with some colleagues on the bus today. One of my colleagues commented that you have to get to a point that you enjoy doing your work for its own sake.

I have pondered this evening how I can get to a point of enjoying scholarship for its own sake to such an extent that I can enjoy it every day. Paradoxically, I believe the solution lies in working at it every day. Just as I can’t expect to expect to comfortably bicycle a mile after a long period of sedentary living. I need to consistently exercise my scholarship every day. Gradually, it will become easier and less mechanical, just as running, playing sports, and dancing become easier to us.

I am reminded of a sermon I heard once relating how a young man was consistently teased by his peers for being unable to throw a baseball between two bases.  He resolved to win the championship of the territory. After purchasing a baseball, this young man practiced for hours, throwing the ball at his neighbor’s barn until his arm was sore.  He kept at it and eventually played on the team that won the territorial championship.

It’s like Ralph Waldo Emerson stated, “That which we persist in doing becomes easier for us to do; not that the nature of the thing itself is changed, but that our power to do is increased.”

As I face the end of the hiring season without an academic position, I feel like that young man who was left out of the ball game, because he couldn’t throw straight enough and far enough. I need to be like him and hunker down and start practicing. I need to set daily goals that are simple enough to do every day, and just exercise until I get strong enough to succeed.

Rainwater Harvesting and Information Processing

I came across a book at my university library entitled “Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands.” Having lived in drought-stricken states (California and Utah), I was naturally attracted to the book. Thumbing through it’s pages I came across a figure illustrating two residential landscapes (pg. 4). The first landscape illustrates a “landscape draining resources” with arrows depicting runoff flows as water is drawn off the roof, away from the house, and into the street. This design makes perfect sense for anyone who has had to deal with a flooded basement after a heavy rain. The second landscape features  a series of contours, cisterns, drain spouts, and vegetation designed to collect / harvest the rainwater–still drawing water away from the basement, but storing / utilizing it rather than simply discarding it into the municipal sewer.

The book seems to illustrate two approaches to water management: 1) irrigation and 2) rainwater harvesting. Irrigation involves the artificial transportation of surface and groundwater for agricultural, residential and commercial applications. Rainwater harvesting is the collection and application of rainwater for agricultural, residential and commercial purposes. Although these two methods of water management need not be exclusive, our contemporary society seems to favor irrigation. As the author, Gary Nabhan, of the book states,

“Surface water and groundwater–secondary sources in the hydrologic cycle–appeared to be more convenient, profitable, and dependable than rain–the primary source. Surface water and groundwater became the “primary” water resources in our modern water management system. Waste became more common than conservation. We came to see rain as a source of flooding that needed to be drained away.

Although the environmental implications of this book appear tremendous, this afternoon, my mind is on my dissertation and on helping team members effectively share and process information. If we think for a moment of information as water, can we draw some parallels between information management and water management? What would be considered as primary vs. secondary sources of information? Which of these sources of information are we most reliant on? Do we tend to view primary information as “a source of flooding that needs to be drained away”? Are we spending so much time creating tubes and pumps to push secondary information around, that we’re overutilizing our informational aquaphors? Are we focused on the consumption and waste of information, or are we also doing our part to put new information back into the cycle?

A spiritual parallel may help guide our thinking. Here’s a quote I came across by Elder Richard G. Scott, an apostle of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints:

“There is an irrigation analogy normally used in the Church of ‘getting the water to the end of the row.’ However, at stake and ward levels [local congregations], it would be far better for you priesthood leaders and auxiliary officers to simply ‘let it rain’ from heaven. Your sacred callings give you the divine right to inspiration. Confidently seek it. Wherever you live in the world, in the smallest branch or the largest ward, a struggling district or a fully organized stake, you have the right to be guided in fulfilling your inspired assignment to best meet the needs of those you serve” (“The Doctrinal Foundation of the Auxiliaries,” Ensign, Aug. 2005, 67).

The primary source of information concerning spiritual matters may be easily identified, but applying these principles in business or in academia is a little more difficult. In these latter cases, individuals may serve as the primary source of information when they are creating new knowledge / information. When they are simply restating what they learned from others, they are serving as secondary sources of information. Both sources of information are important, but which of these two are receiving most of the focus in our information systems applications? How can we take a more balanced approach to information management in our organizations and in our personal lives?

Running away

I was reading in the book Professors as Writers the other day about the reasons professors have a hard time writing diligently and productively. Robert Boice, the author, outlines a number of reasons based on years of research and consulting, and you can read the book for the specifics. As I see it, a lot of it boils down to fear; people are afraid of looking like an idiot, or–perhaps worse–they’re afraid that they’ll discover for themselves that they’re really not as talented as they thought. We’re afraid, so we run away. We find other things to occupy our time and make us feel busy and justify our inactivity. “I have to read some more about this topic first.” … “I need to do some more preparations for class.” … “I have to respond to this email.” “I have to get ready for that meeting.” The list goes on and on.

One problem with running away is that, when we fail to practice  because we’re afraid, our skill atrophies, and we become even more afraid. Fear and inactivity in writing lead into a downward spiral. We gain nothing from running away. Boice’s basic recommendations: set goals, practice writing consistently (every day or every other day), and practice showing your work to others before you think you’re ready.

What comes after Facebook? The Human Network.

Social Networking provider Facebook has definitely garnered attention with its recent media announcement. Bloggers such as Paul Allen are predicting the day when Facebook will be the largest social network in the world. The Wall Street Journal ran a front page article on how members of Barack Obama’s campaign are using Facebook to raise funds and coordinate activities among supporters. Social networks, such as Facebook certainly have tremendous potential for providing platforms to facilitate coordination, communication, and other forms of collective activity, but if we’re really going to leverage collective activity, I think we need to look beyond the social network platform provider paradigm.

I believe the greatest collaborative technologies are the most transparent. Technologies like the telephone systems (landline, cellular, VOIP, etc.), radio, and e-mail are killer applications for collaboration, because they are largely transparent to the user. Furthermore, these are technologies that can sustain themselves without large inversions of ad revenue. I recognize that millions of people rely on hosted email that is funded by ad revenue, and that centralized Internet services such as Google, Yahoo, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, etc. will likely have a hay day of prosperity in the coming years. But beyond that horizon, I believe that social networks will evolve along the same path the telephone networks did–from a collection of closed networks of subscribers to a specific provider to an interconnected network based on standard protocols. Instant messaging applications are gradually moving in that direction.

I’m picturing a future of collaboration with cellphone / handheld computing devices playing a more central role. I’m thinking about billions of people in Africa, Asia, and Latin America who do not have the luxury of spending hours at work streaming videos and clicking on targeted ads through their employer’s broadband connection. I’m thinking of power-crunched and war-torn economies trying to utilize network technology despite intermittent access to Internet Service Providers. I think mobile ad hoc networking will play a prominent role among collaborators in both devleoped and developing nations. And hopefully, in such an environment, interaction will surpass broadcasting as the favored mode of online communication. In such an environment, I can imagine viral networking taking on a new meaning. What if each person in the world had an addressed electronic device with wireless connectivity that served as a router on the Internet? Individual social networks would function as address lookup tables to route messages from one individual to another. Such a network would be more redundant than the backbone & hub modeled Internet we currently rely on, but it would also be more capable of self-healing. In such a day, I think Cisco would finally have a legitimate reason to rename the Internet into the Human Network.  

 I’m not suggesting the demise of the fantastic broadband capabilities enabled by miles of fiber-optic cable, sattelite connectivity, etc. I think ad-hoc peer-to-peer networks will complement such infrastructure in ways we can’t currently imagine. But with such emerging, disruptive technologies, I can envision a day when social networking will not be carried out in these online gated communities. 

As an information systems scholar, I think it’s important to understand the phenomena associated with social networking communities. We will likely spend years analyzing social capital, migration among online communities, and technology infrastructures and revenue models for hosted services like Google Apps and Facebook. But I believe the best technologies have a way of becoming transparent over time, and that as information sytems scholars, we are not just trying to understand individual interaction with information stored on a dispassionate hard drive. We are trying to support collaboration through human-to-human interaction mediated by technology.

Why I love working in academia

Today was one of those mornings I tell myself, “This is why I love working in academia!” In short, it’s the people. I caught the same bus to campus this morning as a friend of mine who is doing graduate studies in instructional design.  As we road into town and walked across campus together, we talked about my dissertation research and I learned some interesting insights from my friend’s perspective, some things I hadn’t thought about before. I was able to share something with him he said he might be able to use in his teaching.

It’s this cross fertilization of ideas with people that’s one of my favorite parts of my work. I’ve had similar experiences talking with fellow scholars in public policy, economics, and latin american studies, as well as within the business school with friends in entrepreneurship, accounting, and information systems. I had a friend during my masters program who was interested in getting a PhD, but shied away from it because he wants to interact with people too much. I admit there’s a lot of isolated work in scholarship. But there’s a tremendous amount of opportunity for productive interaction with others. We are members of an academic community and participation in the research process is more than just advancing my personal agenda. If managed correctly, research and teaching are ways to connect with others and to work together in a positive productive way.