With the first semester now over, I thought I would reflect upon the non-academic part of the Doctor of Management experience. I had come into the program not knowing exactly how the transition from work to academia would take. Everything I read and everyone I talked with provided me with knowledge but since I did not have the experience of a doctorate program under my belt, there was no ability for me to absorb what I was reading and hearing prior to the start of the program. This phenomenon is called “absorptive capacity,” the ability a person has of internalizing something new is dependent upon prior experience that lets one grab the newness and make it concrete. I would say that our cohort had little to no absorptive capacity as to accurately predicting and planning for the nature and extent of the workload. My comment is not limited to the quantity of the workload, no, what I am saying is the lack of an initial absorptive capacity to accommodate the shift in orientation from a practitioner to a scholar.
For me, the first semester was mostly adapting to the workload and the shift in orientation. What I had not initially focused on, but later in the semester did, was finding the time and the desire to get to know my cohort peers.
It is amazing how stereotyping or quick, initial assessments get in the way of how we see people. That limitation really hit home for me during the semester. But I learned a lot about many of my cohort peers and now see them in a human way, much more tactile and dynamic than at the start. I guess that is a natural enough evolution one goes through in personal relationships but in a group, that progression often takes a long time. In the cohort, opportunities for understanding each other are sped up and my eyes have really been awakened.
One of my favorite Star Trek – The Next Generation episodes is when Picard and an alien (a commander of a ship like Picard) are unwillingly placed on a deserted planet by an “advanced” civilization to test these two individuals. They spoke different languages, of course, but haven’t you always seen an entertainment show where everyone speaks and converses on the same language (either English or subtitled to a language)? This episode attempted to be more realistic. Meaning was transmitted back and forth between Picard and the alien in English (so the audience could understand the words) but the structure of the words spoken by the alien was like a Thomas Pynchon novel. The alien spoke in metaphors from the history of his world. These metaphors produced inferences for the alien about what he and Picard should or should not do but Picard had no idea about how the inferences connected to reality. This created a tremendous amount of a different type of phenomenon, “uncertainty absorption” for Picard, he had no idea what the alien meant through the stories told because the alien did not provide the data at the level Picard needed to understand. Picard therefore had to fill in, or absorb, a lack of understanding with guesses.
The alien kept telling Picard that “your eyes are not wide open” meaning Picard did not understand. Eventually through experimentation in interpretation, Picard eventually built a small vocabulary to understand the metaphors; he discovered the primer that allowed him to understand meaning. Finally, Picard’s “eyes were wide open,” as the alien said to Picard, like my eyes have become.
Adrian “Zeke” Wolfberg, DM Class of 2013
