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"A mind once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimension. "
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
Sounds great and inspiring, doesn't it? Except for one problem: stretching one's mind to take in new ideas is really hard!
When I studied German, my class found itself fighting a very difficult mental battle. No, we weren't reading Goethe or anything amazingly advanced. We had the worst trouble learning one of the most basic parts of German: the different noun forms.
Doesn't sound too complicated, right? Except that German uses a completely different system than English does. The German nouns have unique endings depending on their function in the sentence:
Genitive Nouns show possession. (G)
Dative Nouns are for the indirect object. (D)
Accusative Nouns are for the indirect object. (A)
Raise your hand, native English speakers, if what I just wrote is basically all Greek to you!
(Actually, be glad it wasn't Greek! That language is even worse, with 24 distinctly different ways to say the word 'the'. I know this because I somehow thought it would be "fun" to learn ancient Greek! I was wrong.)
Back to my grammatical torture. Don't worry, there is a point to this.
For example:
Der Freund (N) gibt den Freund (A) des Freundes (G) dem Freund (D).
Those d words I italicized up there, they all mean "the" in German, by the way. And that's only if the friend is male, and there's only one of him. Change the gender, and it gets even worse.
Does your head hurt yet? Good! That's the entire goal for my evil grammar lesson.
In other words, I was torturing you to make a point!
It's extremely tough for native English speakers to get our minds around such a completely different grammatical structure at first.
What makes it worse is that the Germans have absolutely no problem with it. (A point that irks the hell out of me when a 2 year old speaks much better German than I do.)
When we try to force our minds to understand, they immediately start screaming at us: "What do you mean there is more than one way to say 'the'???"
And then we experience the painful process of staring blankly at a piece of paper, completely clueless about what "the" to use in our simple sentence.
(At least I do. You could easily be smarter than me.)
The reason this is interesting for creative enthusiasts is that this is a very similar process to accepting new ideas.
When someone comes up with a radically new concept, our minds automatically jump into "that won't work" mode. It doesn't fit with our current way of thinking and we have a hard time seeing how it can be possible.
That's why it was so hard for people to accept that the world was round. That's why they couldn't believe that the earth actually moved around the sun, instead of vise versa.
Everything they knew told them that those new concepts were impossible.
Throughout history, there have been a lot of impossible things that were proved wrong. And, each time, after the initial surge of rejection, those new ideas seeped their way into people's realities until they became accepted.
Each time, people's minds were forced (uncomfortably) to stretch far beyond their original dimensions. And each time, those minds grew and expanded beyond what they had been before.
And eventually, a new idea became easy to think about, and easy to accept.
Just like I'm hoping my brain will eventually expand enough to accept the German language.
Great post. This is why its so important to not just have ideas but to actually do them. Many people will laugh at your ideas or ignore them along the way. The only way to prove to them that it was great idea is to actually implement it and show them first hand.
Posted by: Jared O'Toole | January 25, 2009 at 11:12 AM
Katie, your blog entry brought together for me the experiences of trying to learn a different language (and the the differences in assumptions and expectations involved) with the "change management" challenges of transforming an organization (and its culture) from the current to a "new" way of doing things -- "better" for the change agents, and "worse" for those who are the ones being "changed". Understanding the differing assumptions and expectations can make it clearer (if not "easier") that the "new" way is not so much "better" or "worse", but primarily "different". Then it becomes a matter of discovering and communicating how the "different" makes sense once you've actually arrived into the "new and different" experience.... At the end of the day, if we want the 2-year-old to understand our German, we need to get past the "new and different" and see it the way a 2-year-old who is already immersed in this way of doing things that seems "new and different" us, but "normal and expected" to them. If we want our business process to be "best practice" or our small church to become a large congregation, then we need to leave behind our old ways of doing things and act like the person (or organization) we want to become...
Thanks for the insight ...
Sam
Posted by: Sam Wee | January 25, 2009 at 06:18 PM
Hi, Katie.
You raise some great points.
Biologically, our brains are amazing systems. They are marvelously adaptive and self optimizing. This makes us very capable in many ways, but also can make thinking outside our comfort zone challenging at times because preferred pathways push us toward mental inertia. This is why good structured approaches to innovation and creativity are highly valuable. They force us to break past those barriers and consider the road untaken.
Another interesting point is the language barrier. On another blog, I recently read someone asking about the need to convince management that innovation is a good thing. Very often, people that express this frustration fail to consider that they may simply not be speaking the right language. Many innovators are close to the product or service they work with, but not so close to the business context. Managers are often in precisely the opposite alignment. Thus, the innovator speaks in the tongue of technical innovation, but the manager is wired to process information in the language of value creation and delivery. While these languages may share common roots, they are not the same. Successful innovators are bilingual.
BTW, don't feel badly about the difficulty with German. It is actually one of the most linguistically complex languages. When my research team built our German semantic engine, we cataloged over 160 distinct parts of speech for the language.
Cheers,
Jim
Posted by: James Todhunter | January 30, 2009 at 07:48 AM
Cool blog - I found it while searching the interweb for other people who posted about Andy Nulman's book giveaway.
This post in particular caught my eye, and made me think about how much of our perception & understanding is driven by the language we speak... and how much our awareness and understanding of the world expands as we learn new languages. And that got me thinking about a book you might enjoy, titled "Metaphors We Live By," (by Lackoff and Johnson).
Their basic idea is that metaphors are the fundamental building blocks of thought and understanding. The problem is, metaphors not only reveal aspects of the world around us, by describing one thing in terms of another, but also conceal some aspects. The book kind of blew my mind - I highly recommend it.
You might also like a little article I wrote titled "Metaphors are Mindfunnels," - sort of the 4-page cliff's notes version of their book. You can find it here: http://www.dau.mil/pubs/dam/2008_11_12/ward_nd08.pdf
Posted by: The Dan Ward | February 23, 2009 at 06:28 PM