Three laws of nonsense. I just had yum-cha to celebrate a cousin’s birthday. The food was good, but much better were the discussions I had with my uncle, Noel Thompson. He has been working for many years in large organisations (such as BHP and… [Column Two]
A profound way to grasp much of what I see inside organizations. These are the laws that Robertson quotes:
- The source of nonsense is that for every piece of nonsense there exists an irrelevant frame of reference in which the item is sensible.
- The persistance of nonsense comes from rigorous arguments from inapplicable assumptions.
- The diffusion of nonsense results from the fact that people are more specialist than problems.
Robertson offers them as a way to better understand knowledge management. I see them as more broadly applicable to most of what I run into inside organizations.