Chris Dalton's Personal Development Blog

Someone posed the question the other day, as people do, as to what my PhD research question is all about. Nudged into action after what I realised was yet another disappointingly long period of inactivity, I sent them a short abstract. Their question, having read it, was something along the lines of:

“If the research is on intuition-driven personal development influenced by early socialization, are you going to say that we are passing some kind of programming in our families and that then unconsciously “makes” us be more or less successful in our lives?”

That made me think and I’ve had to spend some time formulating a response. The area of exploration in my research is (I hope) at a level of abstraction from either the organizational system (i.e. work and career) or the family system. My curiosity is in ‘throwing some light’ on the philosophical debate about what we mean when we talk about learning.

That does presuppose a number of things which are derive from the epistemological position I am adopting. It means, for instance:

• that the world, as far as we can be aware of it, is activated by ‘difference’ (between ‘things as they are’ and ‘things as we can perceive them’)
• that systems are self-corrective and recursive (i.e. that they contain causal links which are circular and tend toward stability)
• that ‘information’ is news of a difference that makes a difference,
• and that learning, like many other things, is recursive and subject to hierarchical typing of logical levels of abstraction

Using the narratives of learners, and asking them as a research project, to explore patterns in particular systems, is a means to an end.  If there is personal benefit to be gained from the exploration, then great, but the goal is another one.

As such, I’m not saying that family life makes us more of less successful, though that may form a hypothesis for questioning during the research; ‘success’ is measurable only in relation with ‘not success’, and that is governed by the same epistemology. It’s not defining success that I’m interested in so much as a changed holistic view that might emerge from doing the comparing.

If this makes sense to anyone, I’d be very interested to hear from you! 🙂