Think

Think

Think was apparently at one time the watch word within IBM when that company was the dominant force in the IT world. I don’t know how well that worked for the company but I believe it should be the watch word for everybody today.

I recently had an article published in a reputable English IT journal but had difficulty trying to access the published article. There had been recurring problems, the journal admitted, over access for new subscribers (not financial, subscription is free). I took a look and the soution became immediately clear and my problem was resolved. I passed the problem resolution on to the journal. So, no problem?

Well, my background is in IT and when I retired many ears ago one of the great benefits I felt was that I no longer had to try to keep up to date with new software releases. It used to take me at least half a day a week to do that when I was working. So I am well out of date on new software and quite generally on new developments in IT. Yet I easily found the problem with this website when their own IT personnel, who must have been much more up to date than I was and much more familiar with their website , apparently couldn’t. How can that happen?

I believe it’s to do with thinking, not rocket science, just ordinary but rigourous thinking. The article I wrote focussed on the importance of what I knew as the ELSE clause, part of a logical construction used in programs of my day: IF, THEN, ELSE. IF (whatever) occurred/applied, THEN all possible reactions, ELSE because you are not God and may have overlooked some possibilities. As I understood it, even if you were totally, absolutely sure you had covered all possibilities in your THEN clause, thinking as hard as you could, you still had to include an ELSE. And it’s the ELSE clause that is so often missing today.

Why? Is it because people (and specifically IT employeees today) are not encouraged to think for themselves? That’s a possibility, though a damning one if it is true.

The other more general possibility lies in education. If you want to judge levels of education by numbers, as governments increasingly seem to want to do, geerally for political purposes, you use tick boxes. They are easy to mark, right or wrong and you can count the numbers. Tick boxes force a limited number of possible responses. So how can anyone think outside the (tick) box?

If you are not allowed/educated to do so you don’t. So how do we bring up people to think independently, out of the box?

There’s an awful corollary. Could it be that governments don’t want people to think out of the box but only within the constraints that they have decided? If that is true we need revolutionaries as never before.