Following up on John Warfield's comments, in LO3502:
"The language that we normally use for expression is prose. People who
are familiar with the concept of "structural thinking" (not to be
described in two or three lines) know the following:
o Prose is inherently linear
o Prose is also inherently parallel
o Prose is incompetent to portray nonlinear logic structures (the type
required to understand patterns of complexity"
I take exception to the last point (In general, actually, I'm not sure
that "prose" without an agent is inherently one thing of the other or is
capable or incapable of anything. However...): Prose as written by James
Joyce or Virginia Woolf or Garcia Marquez or William Burroughs is quite
"capable" of anything, not the least of which is the portrayal of
nonlinear logic structures.
This brings up a related issue: I think it would be worthwhile to
reconsider many of our assumptions as to what constitutes
"appropriateness" in the context of collaboration, analysis, learning,
innovation. McMaster was talking earlier about the "language of an
organization" as "what amplifies or dampens various messages and signals
and the intelligence -- and learning -- are facilitated by the language
(including its patterns and structures) and constituted by the language."
I believe we are overlooking the flexibility that our language (and I'm
speaking about English, for better or worse; I simply don't know enough
about other languages) presents to us -- a flexibility that need not
necessarily be the sole domain of Joyce, et al.: Can something like Garcia
Marquez's magic realism or Burroughs' aleatory methods indeed amplify an
organization's language and learning? It's interesting to me that, in the
responses recently to requests for a "mind-expanding reading list," I
believe I encountered exactly one example of what I would call
non-didactic fiction (cf. "Ishmael"). (Okay, I guess I'm on the line now:
my own suggestions would include "Catch-22," "Moby Dick," "The White
Hotel.")
Anyway, it may be worth thinking about whether we unnecessarily hem
ourselves in by working off models of language and discourse that were
given an organizational imprimatur ages ago and that no one ever thought
to question.
-- Ron Mallis ron2785@eworld.com