How To Interpret Your Knowledge To Solve Societal Needs

Dr Dayo Olakulehin carrying his invention, the D-Box, a portable battery operated ventilator. Olakulehin got the idea to design and build a portable, battery-powered ventilator specifically to assist unconscious patients breathe while on night duty at the Olikoye Ransome Kuti Children Emergency Ward, Lagos University Teaching Hospital, LUTH, Idi Araba, Lagos.

By Kenneth Nwachinemelu David-Okafor

I can understand why certain people despise knowledge as pointless and thus devalue education and other sources of knowledge. For education, read informal, formal, training and all other kinds of education.

And let’s face it, it is rather true, isn’t it. Unapplied knowledge seems pointless and rather pretentious; people would better appreciate the value of knowledge as it resolves definable societal snags!

You can see why the seeming Nigerian obsession with paper qualifications and certificates is an unhelpful predilection. Knowledge is even further deprecated under such regime.

Personally, I vote for the removal all pointless knowledge, whether codified, formalized or informal.

If then knowledge must become an essential commodity and an object with utility value the onus falls on the possessor of useful knowledge to validate and rightfully interpret the importance of the held knowledge. The best way to do this: interpret the held knowledge to solve societal needs.

I will use a simple illustration here to depict what kind of held knowledge could help solve snags.

When I was in secondary school, during my biology classes, one of the most "amusing" lessons (at least in my own understanding at the time) I learned was the economic importance of cockroaches. Economic importance of what? Cockroaches? Of course, I did not find it funny. I thought that cockroaches were some of the most destructive insects ever. Because my father’s work in those years was connected with paper preservation, two pests which they fought against when managing stored documents in the National Archives were the silverfish and the cockroach. At home cockroaches eat our food, books, and other possessions, poop all over the place, they smell awful. So why would anybody be talking about the economic importance of cockroaches and teaching teenagers about it in biology class?

Then the relevance of the information became clearer with the wisdom that comes with learning. The cockroach as an insect with specific characteristics and habits is an economic factor in terms of the fact that it eats food, books, and other possessions and all other kinds of household items because it is omnivorous. Yet in a very positive sense the cockroach help to breakdown organic matter!

Nonetheless with my knowledge of the economic importance and the lifecycle of the cockroaches I can invent a method to control cockroaches and minimize the damage the pest can cause.

Of course, there are more complex illustrations.

When I first learned algorithm, I wandered what was the point. Now I understand that algorithm is among other things the basis of cryptography or cryptology. The encyclopaedia (2016) defines cryptography or cryptology as: "…the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties called adversaries. More generally, cryptography is about constructing and analyzing protocols that prevent third parties or the public from reading private messages; various aspects in information security such as data confidentiality, data integrity, authentication, and non-repudiation are central to modern cryptography. Modern cryptography exists at the intersection of the disciplines of mathematics, computer science, and electrical engineering. Applications of cryptography include ATM cards, computer passwords, and electronic commerce."

The one who correctly and vitally interprets knowledge to solve a specific societal need may be called an inventor or an innovator.

Yet evidence weighs heavily on the side of tacit knowledge as the best convertible form, because of the personalized nature of it.

According to the Online Business Dictionary, tacit knowledge is the "unwritten, unspoken, and hidden vast storehouse of knowledge held by practically every normal human being, based on his or her emotions, experiences, insights, intuition, observations and internalized information. Tacit knowledge is integral to the entirety of a person's consciousness, is acquired largely through association with other people, and requires joint or shared activities to be imparted from on to another. Like the submerged part of an iceberg it constitutes the bulk of what one knows, and forms the underlying framework that makes explicit knowledge possible. Concept of tacit knowledge was introduced by the Hungarian philosopher-chemist Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) in his 1966 book 'The Tacit Dimension.' "

A prime example of intuitive tacit knowledge for this blog post would be drawn from my father’s childhood experience. I first shared this story my father told with me that reveals a good case of intuition in my book Exploding Potential: exploiting the fullness of your creative potential.

One day, my father and a couple of his friends, as young boys, had gone to weed a cassava farm. As they uprooted grasses, one of them who had preferred using a machete to bare hands inadvertently cut his hand. By the blood spurt, the others realized it was a deep cut. When he cried out in agony, panic broke out amongst them. The untested boys were unprepared to give first aid to a wounded mate!

When the wave of fright passed, they searched what to do to staunch the blood flow. It was at this time a clear thought came into my father’s head to uproot a tuber of cassava, peel the back, scrap off bits of the cassava flesh and cover the wound. When my father disclosed the idea to the group, nobody had objections. When my father applied the scrapping to the open skin, to everyone’s surprise, the bleeding quickly ceased.

Years later, I would learn in biochemistry lessons that raw cassava contain a chemical compound with vaso-constriction properties (able to constrict blood vessels). Specifically cyanide which is present in cassava in low concentrations can tighten damaged blood vessel walls, to stem bleeding. Back then, my father and his friends did not know this detail, but the Maker and Lord of everything shared this knowing when a set of boys got stuck in a dire situation.

A successful interpretation and conversion of tacit knowledge to solve specific societal needs usually involves the use of imaginative thinking and creative behavior (creativity).

However what research has established is that these are not necessarily natural inclinations in every human being. On the one hand, imaginative thinking requires learned cognitive behavior application change while creative behavior, even if an endowment, is at different levels for different people and range from low to exceptional.

In the pure form, this is creative problem-solving. The encyclopeadia (2016) defines creative problem-solving as "a type of problem solving, is the mental process of searching for a new and novel creative solution to a problem, a solution which is novel, original and not obvious."

From a review of literature, although creative problem solving has been around as long as humans have been thinking creatively and solving problems, it was first formalized as a process by two American scholars, Alex Osborn and Sidney Parnes. Osborn is supposed to have invented traditional brainstorming. Osborn’s and Parnes’s Creative Problem Solving Process (CPSP) has been taught at the International Centre for Studies in Creativity at Buffalo College in Buffalo, New York since the 1950s.

There are however different approaches to CPS of which this writer has preference for Jeffrey Baumgartner’s which involves seven straightforward steps:

Creative Problem Solving Steps

o  Clarify and identify the problem

o  Research the problem

o  Formulate creative challenges

o  Generate ideas

o  Combine and evaluate the ideas

o  Draw up an action plan

o  Do it! (implement the ideas)

You may not use as many as seven distinct steps; it is not necessary. However if you can go through the whole gamut as you work your way through then you would surely have a much more rewarding experience and perhaps come up with better thought-through outcomes.

You can see that Nigeria is a rich, problem field: so many snags which need solving. For your trial run though, I would advise you go for low-hanging fruits. Tackle straightforward assignments first. At least until you acquire some mastery.

I hope you will take immediate steps to help Nigeria and Nigerians appreciate the utility value of knowledge.

It would be a worthy cause!