words matter
“For the past few years, I have had to ask myself a question I never asked before in my life: What should we call the era we’re living in today?” our columnist Thomas Friedman asks. There’s no consensus as of now: It has been referred to as the Anthropocene, the Information Age, the Artificial Intelligence Age, the Return of Geopolitics. “But none... See more
instagram.comExformation (Tor Nørretranders): the hidden background of experience, associations, memories, culture, bodily knowledge that makes meaning possible. "We think we're communicating with words, but we're really communicating our entire worlds." When society loses shared stories, loses shared exformation — words no longer rest on same ground.
Just a moment...
What is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one’s country? Is it hate of ones un-country? (LeGuin, 1969, p. 104)
Nora Bateson, Combining
The menu is an abstraction of the food. It is about the food—but it is not the food. Eating the menu makes for a flat and papery meal. The meal, by contrast, is interlocked within the vegetable garden, the culture of the chef, the conversation at the table, the nature of the occasion, the farmer's children, and the health of the prior and coming
... See moreTo address a food crisis is to address the relational, recursive density the food is contingent upon. It is to nourish the coming together of intergenerational farming, cooking, healing, holidays, ceremonies, culture, seasons and markets — not to package nutrition bars.
Words are not the things we are speaking about.
Nora Bateson, Combining
While words often help us see, they also deceive us and perpetuate illusions that keep the tautologies taut. Words tie us into knots, guide our thoughts words also crack, open the "thought knots". Without understanding how the tautologies are fastening themselves, each attempt at loosening twists makes them worse.
Nora Bateson, Combining
regenerative metaphors
If we want organizations that can thrive in perpetual upheaval, we need metaphors drawn from ecology. Living systems adapt. They cycle. They compost. They regenerate. They respond to stress not with collapse but with reorganization.
A living systems lens reframes organizations not as linear machines, but as ecosystems—relational, interdependent, and... See more
A living systems lens reframes organizations not as linear machines, but as ecosystems—relational, interdependent, and... See more
Robin Beers • What Story Is Your Organization Becoming?
Language doesn’t just describe neutrally. Language creates reality. It is a world-building force