Re: Organizational integration LO992

Jim Michmerhuizen (jamzen@world.std.com)
Sun, 30 Apr 1995 14:07:45 +0059 (EDT)

Replying to LO953 --

On Wed, 26 Apr 1995, Michael wrote:
> Replying to LO932 --
[ ...snip down to what I'm commenting on... ]
>
> The difficulty may be that the language used (for thinking and
> speaking) is just a reflection of the metanarratives of business and
> that the whole way of framing above is the source of lack of ability
> to access the problem. For example, "vertical", "horizontal",
> "divisions" and even "organisation's mission" and the causal and
> behavioural elements implied may already preclude any approach that
> has creative possibility.
>
> It may be that the "difficulty of horizontal communication" is _only_
> in the existing langauge and system. I don't know that it exists in
> any other reality.

This is what my earlier response today to Jack H.'s conundrum about
defining "development", "training", and "education" was trying to
recommend. If this business of stripping old dead metaphors out of our
language - so dead they're not commonly recognized as metaphors - is what
you mean by "deconstruction" -- I'm all for it.

It's not so much that we have to do without: we can't, anyway. It's that
periodically we have to review it all and see how the world looks from
inside (as you suggest) a sports vocabulary, or biological, or whatever,
as long as it's a contrasting language.

To put it bluntly: the solution you'll find to the "problem" is almost
always predetermined in the language you choose for formulating the
"problem". And if that's the case, it's prudent to _very_ careful about
saying exactly what the problem is.

In fact, one thing I do that helps avoid some of this is: keep my
language fluid and volatile, keep multiple parallel formulations of the
problem active in discussion, avoid the presumption that our task is to
reduce the problem to a "single" proposition or set of propositions based
on a single model of the situation. This sort of thing usually cannot
itself be verbally articulated -- it has to govern the way the whole
thing is conducted. I've found that within an hour or so of
beginning a discussion conducted like this, participants' conversation
opens up remarkably.

Regards
Jim Michmerhuizen
jamzen@world.std.com
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