The great literary and social theorist, Kenneth Burke, would often describe himself as a Neo-Aristotelian because of the way he saw the forms of human understanding as patterns derived from nature. All of our ways of mapping the world begin with the way it is presented to our senses and our experiential associations. The moral differentiation between light of good, and the dark of evil, he might say, was based on our fear of night and the our ability to better protect ourselves when the sun is out and better see predators and enemies. Most written languages developed in the northern hemisphere tend to proceed from left to right, just as the sun and moon move across the sky throughout the day, or tend to fall vertically, as objects do. Months are roughly the measure of moon cycles. There are innumerable patterns that have become implicit in literary form, but also in our general forms of mapping and activity making. These are shapes that we have evolved with, that are in essence a big part of who we are as biological and social creatures.
Poetic and musical forms have derived in part from the aural and physiological sensations of language, which in turn have derived from aural sensations of the natural world, and common things we experienced every day, for instance the rhythm of walking, and hence we have what is called the “walking bass” of jazz. At one point poetic and musical forms were established more as ways of storing and communicating information than as modes of self-expression. What we now call ancient “religious texts,” things like the earliest books of the Bible (the Torah), the Vedas and so forth, were records of the complete known universe of the people who composed them, were originally composed in verse and were often sung or chanted, long before they were written documents.
It’s no surprise, therefore, that our project management methodologies are named things like Waterfall, and what we call our spiral methodologies, such as Agile turn out to be modeled on moon cycles. After all, we don’t really have anything else. In the same way, the GAANT charts and timelines we use move from left to right, as the sun and moon do across the sky, and fall downward on the page like gravity moves water downstream.
So, you may ask, we have things we’ve encoded in patterns derived from natural processes, and so forth, but what significance does that have to for me now? And my answer to that question is that I’m not sure, but I believe if you can loop back into that understanding, and draw upon a much larger world, you are liable to have a far greater set of resources to draw from, to provide solutions and adapt with. The MBA and certification programs will give you some very basic structures to work from, but those structures are such a finite set of the overall patterns available to us. One may argue that they are the accumulated best practices up to the present time, and that may be so, but as we’ve seen, many of those structures become mind-numbingly habitual, and that real progress happens when people are not weighed down by an accumulated hodgepodge of so-called practical wisdom, just as has benefitted us to go beyond the explanations and directives provided in those original religious texts.
Because I have been a musician, poet and martial artist the majority of my life, literally decades, I’ve had plenty of opportunity to ponder and compare the forms of each, to synthesize connections among them, and use each as a backdrop and source of inspiration for the others. For instance, a Kung Fu form or Karate Kata, is a compact encyclopedia of movements one cycles through regularly in order to learn, not only fighting strategies, but body dynamics and mental states that one begins to draw on at will, just as poetic and musical forms serve as templates of investigation from which one begins to improvise new variations of experience. A piece of music I compose may end up as sort of a tai chi form or kata for the guitar, while a poem may be a condensation of specific types of information and ideas that I want to remember and exercise my way through to gain fluency with a particular style or mode of thinking. This process can also to help me to break out of my current mental models and to learn and create new models and directions to take for solution generation.
A project or analysis methodology is in some ways a similar type of animal, at bottom a compositional model one uses to document and proceed with producing a finished product or process. It will help engender recognizable patterns, and therefore consistency and a way of measuring results. At bottom, a methodology is another form, or cluster of forms we have fused together, similar to the kata or harmonic/melodic structure of a jazz piece, which we adapt to the occasion, breaking them down into pieces and arranging them in variations, improvising when we need to. With an eye toward experimentation, and with the understanding of these methodologies in their greater context, the approach we take when applying them can help us to produce our own micro learning organizations, and spaces of innovation.