Thinking Tools

Everybody I guess sometimes ponders questions like "what is it I want to do?", "where do I want to stand in five years?", "what exactly are my capabilities and will I be able to use them in the next project?". This is especially so in an environment where what you actually do is quite abstract, and the competences you bring into the project probably even more so.

Anyway, as I see me employing myself some time these are the kind of questions to answer to decide what this self-employed me should bring to the market. Yesterday I met for lunch with my former employer, with whom I keep in regular contact, and it turned out that between us we know a lot more people that want to answer the same questions from their respective professional perspectives.

This leads me to the idea to spent a few sessions with these people to play around with these questions using a handful of philosophical thinking schemes. I have tried this a few times before and it always yielded answers and new questions I hadn't thought of before. With thinking schemes like deconstruction, transcendentalism, phenomenology, dialectics and hermeneutics we might get a foot in the door of these questions.

A book in Dutch on this was written by Paul Wouters, director of the International School of Philosophy in Leusden, ISVW.

Later this month I will give our junior researchers a course in these thinking methods, to boost their competences in assessing the research questions put to us by customers.