“the power of language in creating or re-shaping organisations”

As with “design”, we find ourselves talking about age–old topics as though they are new. In this case, the power to…

this much love

this

muc

h po

wer

?

!

to create

hover

use

this much love

this

muc

h po

wer

?

!

hover

use

SPEAK

The way humans create is in the act of speaking….

?

!

generate

use

scope

build

What will meet our

want?

How do we make

it?

Usually our large speech acts have distinguishable phases over time

?

!

generate

use

scope

build

These are not straight line processes, but “conversation spaces” – or even conversation systems

!use

build

generate

scope

When these conversations are sustained in a viable system, there are feedarounds

So WHAT? • Acknowledge there is a difference in these conversation terrains

• Acknowledge we have few skills outside the Build/Use habitats

B-24 Liberator mass production  in 1944 through Henry Ford’s 1.6km long Willow Run facility - peak production at one B-24 per hour

“An age…in which our ways of interpreting and appraising experience tend to be influenced more and more by the streamlined methods and glittering results of technology – encourages us to think in certain ways and inhibits or dissuades us from thinking in other ways.”

Phillip Wheelwright The Burning Fountain 1982 p.4

Massively successful…at a price…

“The critical movement, which seems to be nearing the end of its course today, was perhaps the most fruitful effort ever sustained by the human mind. The past four or five centuries, which have gradually destroyed or overshadowed the whole mediaeval cosmos, have enriched us mentally and morally to an extent unrivalled by any period of similar duration. But its incandescence had fed on the combustion of the Christian heritage in the oxygen of Greek rationalism, and when this fuel was exhausted the critical framework itself burnt away.”

Michael Polanyi Personal Knowledge p 265

!use

build

So the old success has burnt away, and we are left with some rebuilding to do.

Our skill in conversation has shrunk

Conversation has shrunk to:

Command and control genres

Siloed technical vocabularies

Concepts coded into disciplinary specialisms

And we place undue weight on text

Put things into law

On a Sear's hairdryer: "Do not use while sleeping.”

On packaging for a Rowenta iron: "Do not iron clothes on body.“

On Boot's Children Cough Medicine: "Do not drive a car or operate machinery after taking this medication.“

On Nytol Sleep Aid: "Warning: May cause drowsiness."

And we place undue weight on text

Professionals write for status, not praxis (Wheelwright – steno-language)

Methodology substitutes for knowing (the rise of disciplines)

Writing substitutes for dialog(Hoskin et al – grammatocentrism in strategy)

Put things into law

Try to exhaustively specify work

So we’ve sealed ourselves in a box…

Confusion of goals

and perfection of means

seems, in my opinion, to characterize our age. 

Albert Einstein

Our conversation competencies are low in:

Cross-functionality Complexity Concept sharing Co-creation Collaboration Creativity itself – the felt experiences of

provisionality, emergence, uncertainty Language itself – the “coordination of

coordination's” (Maturana)

Managers in this situation tend to blame forces beyond their control: “How could we have ever predicted such a change?” In some sense they are absolutely right. They had no way at all of predicting change. Their core conception – “If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t count” – precludes them from demonstrating to themselves that the future will be anything but an extrapolation of the past. Note however, that it is a prison they have built for themselves. They build it, lock themselves in a cell, throw away the key; and then complain about being unfairly locked in a prison cell.

Roger Martin, “Management by Innovation”

The ISO9000 golfer

“You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both.

Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions.

If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must un-humanize them. 

All the energy of their spirits must be given to make cogs and compasses of themselves.

and so soul and sight be worn away, and the whole human being be lost at last—a heap of sawdust, so far as its intellectual work in the world is concerned.…

John Ruskin The Stones of Venice (1853).

Ruskin continues:

“Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once. Out come all his roughness, all his dullness, all his incapability; shame upon shame, failure upon failure, pause after pause: but out comes the whole majesty of him also…”

John Ruskin The Stones of Venice (1853).

!use

build

generate

scope

The problem we have when our preferred mode fails us is not only that we are out of our comfort zone, but we are now drawing upon a skill set that we rarely exercise – that we are not fluent or practiced with – so we increase our error rate.

 ”Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas any more…..”

“We need a new map of the territory, and a heuristic system that is strong enough to allow the diagnosis, distinctions, and design of conversations for collaborative human enterprise”

David Jones