When a white horse is not a horse
By Gregory Ronczewski, Director of Product Design at Ibbaka. See his skill profile.
"Can it be that a white horse is not a horse? It can. How? ‘Horse’ is that by means of which one names the shape. ‘White’ is that by means of which one names the colour. What names the colour is not what names the shape. Hence, I say that a white horse is not a horse"
Thus wrote Gongsun Long, a Chinese philosopher born in 325 BC. He was a member of Mijgjia, the School of Names and his play with the words—written or spoken—started what millennials later, philosophers still struggle with. Gongsun Long's logic continues to say …
"Horses certainly have colour. Hence, there are white horses. If it were the case that horses had no colour, there would simply be horses, and then how could one select a white horse?"
I found the above discourse in The Information, a History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick. It is a fascinating book containing many ideas worth considering. For sure, the analogies pop up on almost every page. However, there is another book with a very different writing style. The reader is invited to dive into the world of analogies - Surfaces and Essences, Analogy as the fuel and fire of thinking by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander. Interestingly, the book was written simultaneously in French and English, which, according to authors, allowed them to "sharpen their thoughts" so the "other party" would better understand their ideas. That is so cool, especially since we are working on a series of projects with French-speaking clients. The question is, will we be able to take advantage of this situation in the same way as Sander and Hofstadter did? We shall see.
Back to the "white horse." We take for granted the idea of writing. Everyone writes these days. If not a book, then at least a few emails, memos or even Texts, or SMSs, as they call it, in Europe and some people are still on Twitter. But the idea of writing and converting what was only available in speech into something visual was challenging to for people to wrap their heads around. Early writings often confused this new medium with speech, and many official documents and enactments from 1500s ended with a simple "goodbye." How else would you end your speech?
Writing is a very different thing. It is speaking to an invisible audience. Or, "the dead speak to the living. The living speak to the unborn," as Gleick points out. So, if letters are shapes identifying voices, what are the skills needed?
Can we use these as proxies for illustrating other concepts? Writing, no matter how brilliant, has limitations. The larger the number of senses involved in transmitting an idea or a notion, the bigger the chances of succeeding in the process. Speech can engage many senses apart from hearing. Gestures, facial expressions, voice intonation, the whole posture, and the speed at which the story is told. Everything matters. With writing, there are only letters to look at. Pretty limiting without the context. Think of a word. Any word? What comes to mind are not the letters but the actual objects. If I think of the word "apple," I do not see a-p-p-l-e. I see a round, red shape. I can almost taste it, smell it, in a way, experience the apple.
“Acoustic space is organic and integral. Perceived through the simultaneous interplay of all the senses; whereas ‘rational’ or pictorial [writing] space is uniform, sequential and continuous and creates a closed world with none of the rich resonace of the tribal echoland.”
What about a skill? Any skill? Let's say "Project Management." I do not see seventeen letters. It's a concept. So first, it is converted to the letter form, but at the end, it is an idea of "managing a project" is conveyed. What does it mean to manage something? And above all, what is the context? Project Management in the mining industry will look very different from software development. Still, it is the same skill. Or is it? Perhaps it is similar to what can be experienced when one compares writing with speaking. The context makes the difference - the context and the accompanying descriptors. A woman wearing a hard hat stands on top of a heavy machine delivering expressive speech to the workers standing around. Or, it is the same person in formal clothing speaking at a board meeting. The event can be captured in text form by a skilled writer who would describe the setting and the actual words in the speech. But, it will still fall short of the in-person experience.
Skills are no different. The in-person experience is the key. That is why Ibbaka Talio offers project-based peer ratings. A project, in this case, is the context. The ability to observe the application of skill makes it more realistic. Especially for a very abstract concept - skill is an abstract concept. It doesn't exist in the physical world. It's a proxy. We went one step further, allowing different versions of the skill with the same name to live on the platform. So we have several versions of Project Management, depending on the context. Since writing about it has its limitations, why don't you Request a Demo of Ibbaka Talio to experience it firsthand? Fill in the form, name, email and the rest of the usual things and hit submit. This is the procedure.
PS I found in The Information by James Gleick that the Sumerians always closed what was written in the cuneiform on the clay tablets with this sentence: "This is the procedure."
“Goodbye”
