Finding Your Voice

The imperative to find your voice and to exercise independence in thinking is demonstrative of mature, adult thinking. While browsing through Steven Covey's excellent The Eighth Habit I was reminded of so much that has happened in my humble career and even more so by that which has not come to pass for others. Since my early childhood education until now I have never understood why some people choose to excel and others not to. To borrow from Covey, some of my peers have found their own voices but others have not. As a result, those who have not done so continue to miss out on the opportunity to achieve their potential.

My wife reminds me that as a teacher it is part of her role, if not her primary task, to help her students each find his or her individual voice in the classroom. Teaching primary school is the place to build the foundation for a lifetime of learning. Every subject demands an understanding of the material and of the student the ability to express the knowledge through demonstration of skills in, for example, reading and writing, spelling and grammar, arithmetic, and algebra, spatial perception and geometry, geography and map reading, and so on.

In any school it is important, perhaps even more so in the multicultural school where she teaches, for the students to be able to speak of and among themselves, to their peers beyond the classroom, to their parents, their teachers and as budding members of the greater community. In other words, to discover themselves and their place in society and to find their voice.

Almost without fail I believe the ultimate reason many individuals fail to capitalise on their opportunities in the workplace is that the organisations where they begin their careers and the managers for whom they work have failed in their duty to mentor their young employees. The very same organisations suffer through lack of initiative and the absence of pervasive and courageous risk taking because the managers have failed to be leaders and their charges within the organisation have not found their voices.

The pedagogical conundrum whereby an approach using direct instruction based on B. F. Skinner may evaporate the curiosity of the young student or an alternative of Maria Montessori, where children are considered competent users of auto-didactic materials, similar to the child-centred constructivism of Jean Piaget, where the failure to offer clear guidance for his little philosophers may be like the absence of a guide stick for a growing plant. It is necessary but not sufficient to provide intellectual nourishment to those who are learning.

Teachers in the classroom and mentors in the workplace are facilitators of learning. The removal of barriers, the provision of resources and opening the eyes of their respective charges to opportunity requires leadership borne of confidence and self knowledge. Half-hearted reticence, ill-considered ideas and knowledge only half known by the teacher or manager is a recipe to dissuade the enjoyment and pursuit of learning, achievement and scholarship.

One of the proximate causes of the failure to provide leadership is the axiomatic condemnation in some quarters of the socratic method, for example, whereby questions are asked in order to challenge the other. The notion that self-worth is determined not be correctness, self awareness and knowledge but some arbitrary sense of self esteem is the antithesis of learning and itself condemns many students to lifetimes of mediocrity.

Steve Fuller in Kuhn versus Popper: the Struggle for the Soul of Science speaks of the Kierkegaardian concept that Karl Jaspers terms anxiety towards the unknown that a child feels during the learning process of growing up. In my experience this is akin to the uncertainty that young adults feel when moving from their first role or job and onto the next.

The first software package, the first accounting system, the first theory of management sticks as the preferred one even if better alternative are found by later experience, in a strange twist on imprinting, described by Konrad Lorentz to David Attenborough and related in Life on Air, as the attachment that young nestling retain for their parents when fully fledged. Whereas a young fledgling bird could be fooled into imprinting to a cameraman in place of its actual parents it seems that young software engineers can be fooled into tacit acceptance of certain technologies or platforms in place of apparently superior approaches.

This approach-imprinting seems to apply in most fields and is reinforced by the acceptance that to succeed in the workplace it is easier to go with the flow and the accept the status quo rather than to propose alternative, superior view points. It is easier to accede to the extant practices and to do as one is told rather than to intelligently and respectfully question habits that are ingrained. The courage and conviction to speak out and go against the grain takes more than just the knowledge but also the voice to do so.

I have always immersed myself in reading and bookshops provide me with a ready supply of material to support my habit. I was standing in the book shop, browsing, reading of science, mathematics, architecture and other random subjects when I picked up Steven Covey's recent book. In my cursory reading of Covey's The Eighth Habit, I had an epiphany that crystallised my own musings about the path to be traversed personally and professionally in order to step out of a mindset of success and into a reality of excellence. The negative mindset is typified by a story that goes something like this:

When ever she cooks a pot roast the lady of the house always cuts a slice of meat from the end of the piece of meat and throws it away. Eventually my curiosity got the better of me so I asked about the significance of the practice. "I don't know but my mother always did it so I do too." Of course this only piqued my curiosity further so I contacted the lady's mother and asked why she cuts the meat this way. Slightly embarrassed she asked the grandmother to be rewarded with the reply that "It's the only way it fits into my pot."

A colleague recalls a similar story of his one-time workplace. This company works in high technology and has a brace of highly-qualified, experienced and technically competent software engineers. He suggested to the software engineers that they should amend one specific practice and change the design for reasons that he gives clearly and reasonably in technical and common terms they can easily understand.

The others decline with the reason that the process says to do this and that and they proceed to defend the current practice with vigour. He explained to them that the reasons he himself personally introduced the practice, and indeed wrote the long-past dated document, no longer apply. My colleague has found his voice but some of the others only parrot what they hear rather than speak with their own voices.

Find your voice and help others to find theirs.