Time to Think: The route to excellence

Hi! This week I'd like to talk about thinking, the thinking that happens before you begin written work such as your assignments, your dissertation or any other writing project. I'm sure, at some other time, you've read about about using outlines as a tool to plan your work or brainstorming as another tool to examine any possible ideas before you even start your research. Yet, how often do we simply consider the time it takes to think and put together ideas inside your mind. How often do we give ourselves permission to take time to think?

In doing research for an assignment or for a dissertation students expect to go from reading journal articles and papers about their chosen topic to actually choosing the topic without further delay. No time is expected to be given to the process of thinking at all. Yet, thinking is the most important step in discovering what we know about a given topic. This is where many students have difficulty in class where the case method of teaching is used. Why?

When we read three different business cases on, for example, organizations in relation to radical technological change, the end purpose is not the memorization of details about these cases. Even though those details can support a viewpoint we develop from each case, what is crucial here is what we actually think about those cases. The importance of a case study is simply this - what is the case really about? Students frequently focus on the details -- and I say this as someone who really enjoys detail -- yet ignore the wider implications of the work that they are reading. The teaching opportunity of the case study is thus lost and the student gets mired down in a morass of details, instead of focusing on the major issues.

The same thing is true of an assignment or when reading for a dissertation. Reading widely on a topic of interest doesn't immediately give us a good understanding of the subject. We need to think about the topic, understand its underlying theories and ideas and then we can find out how the material we have read relates to those underlying ideas and theories. In fact, it will take many journal articles to understand a given idea or theory from the literature. Taking time to think reveals underlying theories and their importance. Let me give you an example from my field.

A friend of mine used to get annoyed with his English teacher, insisting that the teacher's discussion of "The Great Gatsby" was useless. How was it, he'd ask me, that Daisy - the love interest of the main character Jay Gatsby, could really be symbolized by the green light that Gatsby would use to identify the location of the dock at her house. Of what value was this observation? Of course, his teacher failed to explain why this symbolism was important to the novel. He failed to consider the content of the novel in relation to this symbol.

In the novel, Daisy, whom Gatsby loves, lets him down in the end, sells him out for stolid domestic life with her idle, rich husband because Jay is a bootlegger and not a member of the respectable upper-class society to which she belongs. The romantic vision of Daisy, as a beautiful green light, is not what Daisy is about at all. The elusive and beautiful Daisy is hardly worth Gatsby's time. In the end, she is complicit in his death, a death that happens because of a murder she herself committed. Daisy, ultimately, is anti-romantic and cruelly self-interested.

So, the symbolism of the green light is has very little to do with Daisy. In fact, it is simply a tool that the the writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald uses to show the society of 1920's as a place of social decadence and a growing anti-romanticism. This is something that my friend's English teacher clearly failed to convey. Great works of literature clearly require more thought than the simple realization of "Ah yes, here we have a symbol - a green light." A symbol is unimportant without considering the meaning of the novel, and the novel's attitudes toward more important issues such as social change, love or social class.

The same thing is true of business articles. They too, are reflections of their underlying theories on business practices as part of the greater society. In reading articles, we begin to see, for example, the theories that guide them on organizational behaviour, organizational change, leadership or decision-making. Yet, we must think past the details into the theory to understand what the writers are trying to say. This takes time. We need to allow ourselves to take this time before we expect to either chose a topic or write about a topic. Time to think and reflect.

If we take the time to think, it does not make us weak students. After all, if we already knew the subject material, why would we need to reflect and study and what would we gain from it? Nothing. Only a student who thinks can be an active learner and excellent student.