Cognitive fit - shared perceptions and linguistic domain are important for dialogue and world view
“…if employees and management can think about such concepts as fitness landscapes and opportunity frontiers and local optima, they can strategize along similar lines […] if there is no vocabulary used by management to perceive these metaphors, then the complexity issues will fall into the realm of “missing information” and be heavily and negatively discounted
The patterns created in the process become objects in a consensus reality, created by agreement. This “reality” did not exist before the discussion started.
The discussion alters the world for the participants, since the perception of the world is partially filtered through the words and metaphors in the new vocabulary.
The longer people work at developing a vocabulary to speak of the complexity they observe, the deeper the patterns, the words, and the metaphors are embedded in their minds. The new metaphors become intuitively “true” representations of reality for the people involved.
The new vocabulary becomes a shared linguistic domain, not just because of the language, but because the set of shared perceptions created about how the world works.
Wittgenstein to wit, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
Complexity research has developed a descriptive language which can help to shape the world around us. By use of the vocabulary of complexity, managers view the world in a different light. Meanings and metaphors matter. The meanings that we give to ourselves, our products, our competitors, our customers, and all the relevant others in our world determine the space of our possible actions — and, to a large extent, how we act. Complexity metaphors — fitness landscapes, simulated annealing, local maxima, patches, generative relationships, increasing returns — when accepted within the vocabulary of an organization can change both the way mangers manage and the problems they choose to manage. Once these metaphors are accepted, it becomes reasonable to divide the organization by recognizing some pieces as “traditional” businesses and others as “knowledge based” businesses. By applying lowest cost margin approaches only to the traditional businesses, allowing simulated annealing approaches such as patches and the careful cultivation of “noise,” and focusing on “search strategies” for the knowledge-based businesses, managers can have their cake and eat it too.”
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