Wednesday, 8.18pm
Sheffield, U.K.
I grew up on Harvard Square and I watched 50-year old men walking around with green book bags slung over their shoulders going for their fourth PhD, never having left the world of academia to alleged reality. – Orson Bean
I’ve just paid for my next year of study and realised, with some surprise, that I’m in the fourth year of working towards a PhD. This level of study isn’t like previous levels, where there are set courses and requirements. I’m doing this because I want to, and the value is in what happens over time, not the degree itself.
A strange thing happens when you look at a thing over a number of years. At first it seems simple. Then it gets more and more complex the more you look at it. And then, it gets simple again, but in a different way. In a more fundamental, visceral way.
Let me try and explain this.
I used to think I was a good writer. I could write better than the people around me. I could create words quickly. I used to write a lot of proposals for business – 20, 30,000 words of material, fat 70-page documents. People seemed pleased. Clearly this stuff was valuable. Half an inch of paper – clearly we were solid, experienced people.
A few years later we met some lawyers. They talked to us and then sent us a four page proposal. The first page was a letter thanking us for asking for a proposal. The second page was a bulleted list of what they would do. The third and fourth pages had prices and some terms and conditions. And that was it.
Here I was decimating a small forest each time I had to write something and here were these lawyers sending in a four-page note. Clearly one of us was more efficient, and I decided from that day on to write short-form proposals all the time.
Of course, not everyone around you will think that is a good idea. If they happen to be your boss, then you will be told it’s a bad idea and that you need to get on and write the big proposal. So you will.
Now, you spend time doing big proposals and feeling resentful, and doing short ones and winning business, and overall you’ve still got a lot of work to do. But over time you realise that winning feels good, and winning gets noticed, and people see the connection between the time spent on a short, focused proposal versus a rambling one that doesn’t get the business and then after a few years, you’re exclusively doing what works.
So the journey goes from learning how to get good at writing words to learning how to get good at selling with words. The same thing, but different.
Research is something like that. I watched the final lecture by Peter Checkland, the academic giant in my research field, and I was struck by the simplicity of his message. He spent his career working in that area of real-world situations that people consider problematical, and thought about ways in which people could work together to improve that situation. It’s hard to think of a more common use case in daily life, or a more important one. Given the challenges we face in society, what could be more relevant than coming up with better ways to work together to address them? This is more than product development, more than selling, more than capital allocation. It is about making good choices.
When I started my programme of research, I was interested in making good choices.
I still am.
Cheers,
Karthik Suresh
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