I believe that blogs are most appealing when they offer a greater transparency into an organization and its people. Blogs go well beyond what is formal and more toward a conversation you would have over a cup of coffee or a beer depending on your personal preference. In the spirit of this transparency, I’d like to share with you something personal to me.

I recently turned 41 years of age; I could not help but reflect on all the things I have learned and how much more there is to know. This obsession with learning has always been a part of who I am but only recently have I started to understand why my ways may be not so… conventional.

Since March of 2001, I have been the CTO for nCircle. Prior to that I was with Cisco, Morgan Stanley, and Broderbund Software. But before this career in technology, I was a professional musician, and before that, an auto-mechanic. My point is that early in my life, I had a strong addiction to learn and found what I needed in music, science, auto-mechanics, amateur radio, and so on and so on. You might be thinking: Wow, with all of this drive for learning, TK must have done well in school. What is TK’s educational background? It used to be that I would shy away from this topic because in my role as CTO, people with PhD’s and very impressive academic accomplishments surround me. While I have a deep respect and admiration for their academic degrees, I no longer shy away from this topic and let everyone know that I never attended college, dropped out of high school at age 16, took my GED exam and got on with my life. Right or wrong, I never regret it for one second. Free from the rigid structure of our educational processes, I have been able to develop a transdisciplinary way of learning and viewing the world.

The term interdisciplinary has been overused but it does describe the additive use of knowledge from several disciplines to confront a problem or to form a new understanding. Transdiciplinary is a meta level above interdisciplinary and is best described as a way to find the patterns and the differences that make a difference by taking the epistemologies from each discipline to drive inquiry. I know that is a mouthful and for this conversation, it does not matter that you understand the details. It is important that you understand how one might fall in to the trap of “fitting in” at the expense of true learning. Your genuine interest and inquiry in to something that does not map well to an academic program or discipline does not invalidate the subject matter.

My father must have seen this in me at a young age because I got the talk that went something like this: “Son, if you continue to be interested in everything, you will grow up to be the ‘jack of all trades and the master of none’.” I was confused because in my mind I could not understand how you could be the master of any discipline unless you had the context and understanding of all the other disciplines. For me to understand the music, I needed a better understanding of biology or math. The list goes on and on.

While I do understand that the disciplinary fragmentation is the result of increasing specialization, I will never understand why people think that problems can be solved within the same discipline that it was created. Just because the content is new and up-to-date does not mean that the presuppositions or premises of thought upon which all our teaching is based is current. Essentially, the reductive and disjunctive way of thinking brought to us by Descartes and others will not serve us well as we try and “solve” problems in complex systems. This I assert is why we cannot go about the information security problem of the large enterprise in a reductionist manner.

I will conclude with a few crazy statements. The answer to renewable energy may exist in the mind of the rain forest; the answer to an enterprise architecture may exist in the ecosystem of the coral reef; and the answer to information security may exist in philosophy and anthropology. Even if it doesn’t, in our exploration, we will be learning and that makes me look forward to many more birthdays. Here’s to growing old, having less hair, and being transdiciplinary.