Usefulness is everything (and how wrong I’ve been)

How wrong I have been and for so long. I’d lost sight of the single most important question: “how is this useful”? Or put more directly “so what”?

In recent times I have become increasingly involved with academics. Particularly academics involved in business, leadership, management, philosophy, and psychology. I have been wallowing in my ability to engage with them on an equal footing… or so I thought. I had failed to understand that academic existence is a never-ending game of pointless intellectual one-upmanship. It’s the same as the corporate world, but less well paid.

This realization has become ever starker as I’ve observed academic who have been cast out into the ‘real world’, deprived of the fevered anxiety over the need for extravagant name-dropping, hyper-complexity, and incessant wind bagging.

WHAT, the actual F is its use? How do we use it, practically, as simply as possible, and what’s it going to achieve? Why is that important, and exactly how is it going to help? You’ve got 1 paragraph of writing or no longer than 2 minutes to explain it. Go.

The answer might well be that ‘it’s actually really complicated’, fine, find a simple way of saying that and say how it’s going to be simplified!

I know why I’ve been getting this wrong. I’ve been trying to gain recognition from academics to plug the hole that was my fragmented and severely interrupted schooling as an army kid. I’ve always been bright, but 9 different schools between the ages of 5 and 11 and missing about a year of school time, and never having a coherent curriculum left me unexaminable in a fair way. The system couldn’t accommodate that, and I was considered a bit stupid. Because I was aware that I was smart academically but was never trained to fit in with the system that ultimately judged me, I’ve been a ball of anger over it since and determined to ‘prove them wrong’. I’m still doing it.

I recently got awarded a research Master’s degree in psychology, but that was a struggle too. MAN what a struggle! The methodology and method I used, although sound, isn’t trendy. I didn’t produce another pointless robotic formula written thesis and I didn’t blow smoke up the right, or enough… places smoke shouldn’t be. It took over 8 months to mark and it should have taken 6 weeks. What I produced was original, novel, new, and useful. The academics involved were FAR more interested, in fact, obsessed with the minutiae of academic style of writing to the point that the pettiness became mentally and creatively stifling.

I know things need to be ‘right’, and I have spent countless hours trying to make sure that is the case. I did OK.

Anyway…

I’ve realised that if there is ever going to be any point to my enormous brain and towering intellect (irony… self-deprecation right…) it needs to be of use in real situations. ‘Sounds simple, but honestly, you can get so far up your own a..e that the only extraordinary thing about you is that you are mostly just a massive a..e.

I’m good at simplifying horrendously complex things into digestible, useable messages and actions. That’s useful. I recently wrote a summary of my 42,000 word thesis here on LinkedIn and in conversation yesterday I heard myself saying “nah, don’t bother with downloading the full thing, it’s horrendously complicated, the summary is all you need”… and that’s true! In contrast, I’ve had academics read the full thing and immediately, gleefully, set about telling me what they think I could have done better… not the ideas and the content, not the contribution, the usefulness… just the writing style.

There was an incident, recently, when I was engaged in a great ‘pontification’ (my newly minted collective noun for a group of academics), pontificating upon the ways in which leaders must be willing to stand up and put right things in systems that were not working or detrimental. An opportunity arose during this pontification for this to actually happen, so I took it. Mistake! The correct response it seems was to gaze at one’s shoelaces, shuffle one’s feet, and pretend nothing is happening… and then get on with trying to outshine each other by conjuring up references and concepts that were so obscure and clever-sounding people might feel a bit stupid if they didn’t appear to ‘get’ it. It was a turning point, a Damascene (I know…) burning bush kind of moment.

So, this is a public self a..e kicking and a statement of intent. I invite any affronted academics to reflect on this and have as their theme “what use am I that is not impressing other academics”. If that doesn’t work, maybe try “why should anyone other than a university pay me”?

I might take a little while to get this mantra to stick, but I’m going to try.

Getting a PhD has been everything to me for a long time. I’d still like to do this. I have been interested in re-analysing “imposter syndrome”, but maybe I’ll stay on that boat and change tack a bit. What about writing a thesis about the pointlessness of over-engineering academic complexity in real-world situations? Hmmm… “that’ll put the wind up the clergy” (Blackadder, 1983) … good grief, I actually looked that up to make sure I referenced the correct year!