Friday, 9.56pm
Sheffield, U.K.
There’s a big tendency to gravitate toward a closed and proprietary approach too easily. – Jimmy Wales
Every once in a while I’ll see someone come out with a thing they’ve made.
That’s great.
Then they name the thing and tell us what it is.
And that always makes me wince a little – because it’s a slippery slope from there.
Giving something a name is often a sign that you OWN it.
Once upon a time, when people owned others, one of the ways they enforced their claim was by giving their property new names.
It’s a way of jostling for position, for using sharp elbows and strategic stomping to get a place on the floor.
And it’s a really tempting thing to do.
For example, I’ve lost count of the documents where I’ve seen the words “our proprietary method”.
Very few methods are truly proprietary.
Usually, they’re some half-arsed combination of stuff published in journals a while back that have been borrowed and changed a little to create a new “framework”, or “methodology”.
In the field that I’m interested in – visual thinking – this leads to a particular problem.
You have methods that everyone knows – like brainstorming and mind maps – with the latter in particular associated with Tony Buzan.
There are ones that fewer people have heard about – like cognitive maps or thinking maps – search Novak for the first one and Hyerle for the second.
What I see with methods that are created by practitioners is that they start of with something simple, usually inspired by something that has descended from a research practice.
Writing, after all, is a codified form of drawing, so we trace our methods back a few millenia – or a few hundreds of millenia if you include cave art.
So if you take something simple – like using words and pictures to make sense of a situation – and give it many names what happens next?
The meaning that underpins each name needs to be distinguished from other names – which often leads to complicating the simple thing that made sense in the first place so that it looks different enough.
Practically, it’s like taking an invention and then tacking on a few others things so it looks like something new enough to warrant a patent.
I don’t want to call out specific methods – a paper I’m working on will do this more thoroughly – but I have made a thing and called it something – and I’m hoping my reasoning is different.
In OR, Peter Checkland suggested that what we should do is try and understand situations so that we can figure out what action to take to improve them.
A way to do this is to draw pictures of the situation – represent it diagrammatically to help with the discussion and debate.
He called this thing a rich picture. A picture that helped you get a rich understanding.
Now, I created what I thought were rich pictures but I did a lot more writing and a lot less drawing so what it ended up looking like were notes rather than pictures.
It’s different enough that calling it the same thing confuses the issue, so I’m calling this thing a rich note. So what you’ll do if you do something the way I do it is take rich notes.
See – I named a thing and now I own it.
But here’s the difference – and what I hope will come out in the paper.
The reason why I’m using a new name is that existing names don’t describe what this thing is.
And that’s the only good reason, I think, to create a new name – to be more precise about something that exists and is different to other things.
It comes down to intention.
It’s brilliant that people create things.
It’s less brilliant that people try and create the illusion that they’ve created something so that they can try and sell it to you.
Or when they change the name because they want to claim ownership over it.
And it’s not always easy to tell the difference.
That’s why names matter.
Cheers,
Karthik Suresh
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