Wrong vocabulary?

Yesterday Elmine and I spend a beautiful day in London,
visiting among other things the Tate Modern Gallery,
where at least the sun was coming up (or going down, we're not sure).
At the end of the afternoon we met up in HaHa, a pub off Charing Cross Station,
with John Moore and Tim Kitchin.

Over beers we had some conversation, looking back on the NGO Workshop last Wednesday in Brussels,
where Verna Allee emphasized the importance of social innovation.
Tim correctly remarked that social change is not something you can plan,
or can set goals in and then work towards them.
However, as John said, being able to gain understanding of current social issues
and conventions in an organisation may well be the first step in working towards
(evolutionary) change.

Thinking over this conversation, Tim's remark about how social change cannot be designed
or engineered, sparked off a few thoughts.
The first thing is that the combination of design and social change implicitly contains
the wish to make social change a controlleable process. The point to me however would be
that there is no such control, nor is it needed.
We can work towards change, but we'll never be sure of the outcome.
It is such with technological change, and organisational change, in much the same way,
we merely adopt the attitude that this would be within our grasp of control.
So, to me it increasingly sounds like we're trying to work with the wrong vocabulary here.

It reminds me of American pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty who stated that
it is not possible to argue the pragmatist case with the vocabulary of
Platonian dichotomies, the very thing it aims to replace.
The Platonian vocabulary simply is not fitted out for this.

Something Verna Allee said last Wednesday reflects this as well. During a coffeebreak
I talked to her about how a lot of organisations pay lip service to being knowledge-aware,
working with intangibles and supporting the knowledge worker.
But how they in the end shrink back from really changing themselves to the core.
Verna Allee then said "I just don't put any energy into those organisations anymore.
I only work with those who 'get it', and devote my energy to them."
If only I had that luxury.
(John Moore had a lovely picture for this change that we require of organisations and they resist:
it's as if you're walking on the stairs, holding the rail, and say "I'm prepared to let go of
this rail as soon as I see the other rail on the other side of the stairs, but not before."
Where the leap of faith to be taken is to let go of the rails in your left hand on the
assumption you will find the other rail before you fall down the stairs.)

What Verna is saying here amounts to saying that she'll only work with companies who don't
expect her to defend her position in the terms of the industrial era command and control
organisational models.
That's an uphill battle she just isn't going to waste energy on.
She works with those who don't ask her to defend herself, but who will be looking at the results
of trying something new.
Winning the uphill battle would merely amount to showing how the 'new' fits in with the 'old'.
The thing is: it doesn't, and it does not at all have to either.

Which leaves us with the question what the new vocabulary would be?
(Also read Ian Glendinning)

Another case of wrong vocabulary, but then funny, was the show we attended at the Cambridge Theatre, called Jerry Springer the Opera.
Hilarious, and great entertainment, with Jerry Springer's guests hurling verbal abuse at each other in the form of singing aria's.
Great show, but hard to put into words! Read John Moore's account, or the reviews at the shows website.

Permalink
(posted by Ton Zijlstra at November 4, 2003 08:26 PM)