on managers reasoning with Analogies, and making ideas bulletproof.

 

Wordsmiths with their lexical juggling and long narratives inspire an appreciation for linguistic acrobatics among men. Speech throughout history has proven itself to be the greatest of differentiators and as such fiercer than the mighty pen. The written word dwarves to the power of crafty speech, even more so today because of the limited attention that listening in general demands.

A well-articulating man assumes authority within the crowd by default. The ability to convey a complex thought effectively is something that all men seem predisposed to desire. Not being able to communicate a thought clearly and completely grants the listener the right to assume disingenuity on your part, even if there wasn’t any. What is not explicitly stated leaves room for interpretation and hence misinterpretation.

We draw parallels to the world in our communication to fill in the holes of our argument. The conversation is an open-ended matter of the human state on any given day. We make it a manageable close-ended concept by drawing parallels and hoping to associate our argument with the same values as that of the parallel that we drew.

A sage sermoning you to be like a mountain says so because unwavering is the value that is being hopefully attached to your character. On a different day, you are asked to be like a river, adjusting your flow to the world while still being intense enough to cut through a mountain. Whether the parallel is drawn to the mountain or the river, it is hoped that the best value associations of those are implicitly communicated to you within the tone of the conversation.

Making your point go across to the other person thus becomes easier through such parallels. Where the exact specifications of thought may not always be communicated, but at least the general idea of it is. Sometimes though it holds poetic value in calling an old man a wise oak instead of experienced, knowledgeable, wise, capable, hardened, worldly, astute, judicious, discerning, perspicacious, sophic, or insightful.

In managing teams however, I have always found it better for one to be explicit in their dialogue. The practice should also not be limited to this singular aspect of life as it is inevitable that at the very least our thought systems will bleed across into different areas of our lives. I am yet to meet a person with such defined mental boundaries that not just Standards of Practices, but his thought systems stay in their assigned buckets.

Unwavering trust among peers is built not by always adhering to the same principles among those peers. It is built by being predictable in your actions and opinions on the other side of whatever black box interpersonal dynamics there may exist. When they are not surprised by your stand on something you know you have achieved understanding among peers. To that extent, communication demands completeness and preciseness from you.

Such degree of specificity cannot be achieved by drawing a parallel with something else. For two things can be same only in a general way and never in every way. Even the same thing is not the same as itself on two different days. A statement cannot be bulletproof if at all supported by analogies. At best it will make dialogue inspiring and at worst confusing. A state of trust however will remain to be achieved.

Reasoning with parallels also provides men ability to switch paths while reasoning. The path of absolute truth will be circumnavigated over the path that confirms and conforms to previously laid groundwork. Validation is sweet after all. Past miscalculations are kept hidden as a bonus.

A deer likes eating grass. A deer is an animal. Animals like eating grass. Grass is food for the animal and my cat is an animal. Is my cat a thing? well yes, it is. A thing is an object and an object likes eating food. But I need food for myself; so here I stand protecting my food from a doorknob. A doorknob that happens to be an object. We all believe ourselves immune to such insane degree of nonsense reasoning. Perhaps we are. Complacency in thought however finds its way within such lines of reasoning when the leaps in logic become a longer series of much smaller leaps but spread over an extended period of time.

The sin however is not the act of making assumptions. It is natural that assumptions will be made in any line of thought. It is very exhausting to work with someone where every statement has to be tested as a truth and validated against some criteria which will not cover all the edge cases anyway. I’ll take someone who is a bit more fun than always right any day. A good intuition with decent history is more than enough on that account, even desirable.

The standard of being always right is not what I deem essential in someone whose vision I’ll be wanting to follow. Nor is it the elegant wordsmithing that is often nothing more than hair-splitting of semantics anyway. Not being precise and complete enough in communication is the sin for which one should be watchful. For trust among peers built in such a way that does not surprise the other will always be admirable.