Changing Words to Change Reality

Words interest me. They don’t exist in the real world. They’re the names, and descriptions we give to the items and events we notice in our environment. A classic on how well this works is Blind Men and the Elephant. It’s a short read, I’ll...

The Art of Problem Solving

A puzzle is a problem that one cannot solve because of a self-imposed constraint. Creativity is shackled by self-imposed constraints. Therefore, the key to freeing it lies in developing an ability to identify such constraints and deliberately removing them. Russell...

How Do You Know?

How do you know what you know? More importantly, how do you know what other people know? Mind reading happens when we “know” what someone else thinks. In business and personal relationships this occurs all the time. “The boss is mad at John.”...

Different But Useful

A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness. -Alfred Korzybski Recently I spent two weeks in Berkeley CA helping a client upgrade one of their control systems. I wasn’t...

Intake: Abstracting and Represenational Systems

We take in information from our environment in discrete steps. We abstract from the continuous data streams (aka “The Real World”) in the following order: Something happens (Event) We sense what happens (Object) We recognize what happens (Description) We...