Category: Philosophy

The first thing we have to do is define what the question actually is! Seems obvious, but I meet so many people in the industry who are happily analyzing stuff, but without really knowing what the question is that they are trying to answer.  We really must help peopl to clearly define the questions and the […]

Geoscience education and training, like most education, focuses on teaching what to think, not how to think. Learning what to think only arms you to solve specific problems, but learning fundamental principles and concepts and how to apply them enables you to solve a much wider range of problems.

Seems obvious doesn’t it?  However, few of us have been taught “how to learn”.  In school you either knew and passed your exams, or you didn’t, and you failed!

As scientists, we spend too much time deconstructing and analysing in great detail, and we soon become isolated specialists, working in our silos, with our own specialist language that fewer and fewer people understand.

When we are faced with a geoscientific problem, we typically bring in the experts to collect more data and look in more and more detail.  But so often, so much detail is established that we can no longer see the big picture.

The best way to test your thinking and find out if your ideas are organised in your mind  is to teach.  You cannot stand in front of a group of people and tell them something if it is not clear in your mind!

One of the key elements of the Geolumina approach will be story telling.  We tell “stories” in geoscience all the time, for example, basin (hi)story, depositional (hi)story, burial (hi)story, diagenetic (hi)story and many more.