DISCOVERY THROUGH INVENTING WAYS OF SPEAKING

I have been briefly involved in many major meetings and conferences and board level conversations where there has been a strong and authentic desire to change. Some of these have been with the world's largest corporations who have been many months into major change initiatives. Very little of consequence has happened at these events and each has included reports on the lack of results, lack of action and lack of commitment from past meetings. One predominant occurrence at these meetings has been the ordinariness of the language. The group who is meeting uses language that would have been completely familiar to earlier generations of executives in those corporations. Most of the language in one company would be completely familiar, comfortable and acceptable to the other companies. Few exhibit any change in language and, therefor not suprisingly, little change in thinking. While some may eventually win their struggle, many will be unable to question the very language and thinking that is the source of their being stuck.

New things are being discovered all the time. Using our long-held way of speaking, we would say that what was discovered was already there and that we had not yet seen it. When we approach the process of discovery using complexity, we would say that what was discovered did not in fact exist until we invented a way of speaking about it. To say that we've invented a way of speaking about something means that we've found a way to integrate what is being discovered with a linguistic representation of it. This can all happen within an individual in a way that cannot be shared with others but rather, retained by that individual and worked with privately. The discovery occurs for others only when it can be spoken about in the language of the day.

Out of a unique structure of interpretation, created by Frederick Taylor, about people and their relationship to production, arose Ford Motor Company. Taylor distinguished physical attributes of people according to their different sizes and weights and then designed equipment and processes to optimise productivity. By organising work flows in relationship to the physical possibilities of different human beings he increased the complexity of production. Breakthroughs in productivity were created when Taylor distinguished in new ways what was already there .

As computers increase in power, the software takes advantage of this and becomes increasingly more complex. For example, software that assists in project management has become increasingly more complex to make it simpler for the user, while at the same time, it allows the user to accomplish more. As more is accomplished, the software begins to increase even more in complexity and the cycle continues.

Dovre International, a Norwegian company, created a breakthrough in project planning and management software by recombining the algorithms that were dropped (in the past when computing power increased) with the new levels of computing power currently available. This new level of complexity allows all users the simplification of being more direct in their project planning and management rather than routing everything through another planning department. This is similar to companies discovering new, profitable mines by finding through research those mines that closed in earlier times for reasons of uneconomic production.