Every once in a while, my brain stumbles upon something resembling an epiphany - the profundity is entirely personal. Much like flatulence it strikes at the most inopportune and public occasions and I feel slightly awkward being around people when they happen.
In this case, it is an important refinement in what I hope is a lengthier field of study. I keep asking myself, regularly, the question “What are you going to do after school?” This is a pertinent question primarily because I want to avoid doing what I did BEFORE I went to school so the answer I give has to be concrete and satisfactory to the extent that it keeps me going, motivates me to stick to the books and not jump ship and becoming a nerdy programmer all over again.
I’ve been trying to reconcile the various dimensions of interest and abilities that I possess that I don’t want to see “wasted.” More importantly, I don’t want to pick a field that presses too hard on my weaknesses - “Go with your strengths.” That aphorism, along with “Do what you love,” as clichéd as they are imply some tough heuristics, tough enough that nothing has bubbled up until today.
Essentially I wanted to figure out a job/field/career that touched on the following politics, security(human AND hard), technology,business & commerce,systems design,UX (information design/architecture, usability, graphic design etc),game design, cognitive science,intelligence and strategy. BIG LIST! So given those, which area of endeavour would maximize my vector-volume in 11 dimensions?
Organizational Cognition with a domain specialization of political agents.
The name, which I thought must already be a title for the field, is apparently novel. However the basic concepts behind it are not. Organizations like many different complex systems, behave much like an biological organism. John Boyd articulated this basic idea in his OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide and Act) loop theory for the military. Technology plays a key role - being the medium of information exchange - the synapse between the nerve cells of the organization if you will.
So how does the combination of organizational structure and technological architecture affect operational strategy? The missing link between those two is intelligence, the organization must know its surroundings before it can make decisions.
But, you say, organizational intelligence (or business intelligence) is an established field, how does org cognition distinguish itself? There is an important interplay between what information is collected, how that information is perceived and its effects on organizational action. Cognition, loosely defined, is not necessarily the study of neurology - it is the study of the affects of perception ON action. Organizations, especially governments, are under ever growing pressure to understand their environment quickly and accurately and provide quality decisions on this information in an ethical, responsible and accountable action.
Organizational cognition studies the interfaces between intelligence, strategy and action and will (hopefully) provide analysis as to how the various components can be improved - likely through the construction and deployment of technological tools.
Cognitive studies researches the ways human beings perceive and understand the world around them. It looks to how people sense, how those sense are interpreted, and how this perception leads to understanding and knowledge. Applications for it extend into computer science, philosophy, neurology, and psychology. I hope to expand that repertoire into strategy and organizational studies with direct applications to tools development.
The end-goal I have will allow me to use my understanding of the problem space (international (human) security problems) as a spring board into a position where I provide an interface between domain experts (political analysts, decision makers, etc) and solution providers (technology vendors) in a novel fashion, and can provide services to both independently.
Everyone needs their niche - this is mine!