Ossorio: Okay, this one says "Do you think that the three components of SDP (technical, clinical and organizational) can work together on projects of interest in DP?" Let me just get a show of hands. How many of you have that question?

Audience: Could you repeat it please?

Ossorio: Yes. "Can the three components of Descriptive or the Society, namely technical, clinical and organizational, work together on projects of interest in Descriptive Psychology?" The question is, how many people would raise that question? [Laughter]

Audience: How about the four components, including spirituality?

Audience: Under what circumstances did the question arise?

Audience: Why don’t you give us three minutes on it?

Ossorio: The question arises because of the lack of overlap in subject matter, the lack of overlap in expertise. If you think of the history of interdisciplinary research, it’s not very good. Somehow, throwing together people from different disciplines has not generally resulted in what people hoped would result, namely, something that took advantage of multiple frameworks and points of view. So I take it that that’s the basis for the qualms.

One of the things that occurred to me is you’re not stuck with your expertise. Just because you are an Organizational Psychologist doesn’t mean that that’s all you know. So one of the ways that people from these three groups can work together is if you don’t lean too heavily on your expertise, and just take a common approach to a problem that isn’t clearly one of these. So, in effect, don’t let your choice of problem be determined by your area of expertise. Just ask yourself, "Is it an important problem?" and if it is, just go to it. You will probably get more cooperation that way, under those circumstances, than if you deliberately try to select people for their expertise and address the problem that way.

When I try to think, "Well, haven’t we already done this?" I have to admit, it’s limited. We have done it, but not to the extent that you’d feel real proud of it.

Audience: My experience is that it’s hard to do in academia, but it’s not hard to do it in an organization with a mission. I’ve worked in a setting with researchers from typically five or six fields, and we worked interchangeably. If somebody was too busy for the project, someone else would just pick it up and do it. If you needed to find out something special, you just asked, and that worked fine.

Ossorio: That’s what would happen if you weren’t just operating within your special expertise.

Audience: There is kind of a pattern here, though, which seems to be that the non-clinical people can have useful things to say about the clinical stuff, while most of us clinical people don’t seem to have enough to say, or much knowledge base, about the other stuff. There’s a sort of interesting phenomenon: Which language provides the greater access? Joe Jeffrey can always say something intelligible about anything that I say up there. There’s not a damn thing that I have to say intelligible about any of the technical stuff.

Audience: Joe Jeffery that is not a good example. [Laughter]

Audience: But there are a lot of people who cut across. I do organization work, and I am really interested in the spiritual realm. The technical stuff I want to keep with, even though I am not going to be a "techie", because I do things that require it, and I want to have that contact. And on the clinical stuff, I’ve done it, and I’ve worked with people who do it all of the time, so I am in tune to that. I don’t think that I am at all unique.

Audience: It seems to me that the organization/community overlaps both of them to a considerable degree, because all technology happens in organizations, and you always have organizational challenges to actually implementing technology successfully. And almost all clinical work happens to some degree, or at least people come to it with some kind of organizational understanding. They’re in communities; they’re in work life, etc. It makes sense to them. Community is the common factor.

Ossorio: My inclination is to guess that the clinical part is too close to the basic formulations. And the basic formulations are what you carry into these other realms. Since the clinical is so close to it, you carry the general formulations, not the specifically clinical ones which aren’t all that different. For example, just the concept of a Person is one that you are using all over the place. You don’t think of it as clinical, but in a sense that’s where it came from. It came from some clinical insights.

Audience: I don’t notice a real threshold from thinking clinically to thinking organizationally. To me it’s a continuum. Because the same basic stuff underlies both, you have the potential to unify the clinical and the business, which are hopelessly fragmented. You can create something that has the seeds of logic for both under one meta-framework. I don’t think it would be that difficult to collaborate over that particular one.

Audience: It seems to me that for the technical stuff, you need to learn baseball talk.

Ossorio: You need to learn baseball too. [Laughter]

Audience: That’s true!

Audience: [inaudible]

Ossorio: I don’t think there is an easy way.

Audience: I always thought that the State of Affairs system should do that job but, there is so much baseball talk to get translated that in my professional life I don’t have time to make the translation, I just do the baseball talk. To make the translation, the barriers would be so high.

Audience: It’s the competence though; it’s not just the talk.

Audience: Yeah, I was only half-serious.

Audience: I’ve been sticking my nose in technical things in the last few months, and I’ve found that as long as I keep to the higher levels of significance (the "What are you doing by doing that?"), I can have conversations with IS people that are remarkably tight. When it goes down a couple of steps, then I am out of business because I don’t have either the talk or the competence. But if we keep the discourse at the higher level, then I can talk to a head of IS in a very meaningful way. It’s meaningful conversation. I don’t feel left out going from organizational to technical if it’s at that high level.

Audience: Yeah, that’s very good. There’s a fear for people that are not used to that lower technical level. They don’t even want to get into that higher technical level, where they could converse, as you are discovering perfectly well, because they think it’s all based on this below, and it’s mystical art. That’s a problem for organizations.

Audience: I just work closely with a "techie" in a big organization and I was the information person. They call themselves information systems, but they aren’t. They don’t know what information is most often. They’re very good at what they do, but they don’t know information very well. I work with them all of the time and we have a nice working relationship.